"Serf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a noble in medival society it was, in general, necessary to be the holder of land for which only such services were due as were considered honorable, and none of those which it was customary for the peasant or serf to perform. The noble must, moreover, be a free man and have at least sufficient income to maintain himself and his horse without any sort of labor. The nobles enjoyed certain privileges which set them off from the non-noble classes. Many of these ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... true serf among our animals; he belongs to the soil, and savors of it. He is of the earth, earthy. There is generally a decided odor about his dens and lurking-places, but it is not at all disagreeable in the clover-scented air; and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Shatov, who became one of our circle during the last years of this period. Shatov had been a student and had been expelled from the university after some disturbance. In his childhood he had been a student of Stepan Trofimovitch's and was by birth a serf of Varvara Petrovna's, the son of a former valet of hers, Pavel Fyodoritch, and was greatly indebted to her bounty. She disliked him for his pride and ingratitude and could never forgive him for not having come straight to her on his expulsion ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... country the common man toiled a serf without wages, for his master; while in Paris itself, the centre of gayety and fashion, the fruit of his toil was expended by the aristocrats in ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... when the former lord of Borreby was laid in the earth to rest! Oh, everything has an end, even misery. Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant. That was the hardest trial that befell our father, that the husband of a daughter of his should be a miserable serf, whom the proprietor could mount on the wooden horse for punishment! I suppose he is under the ground now. And thou, Ida? Alas, alas! it is not ended yet, wretch that I am! Grant me that ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... living, was born in 1889, the daughter of a Russian fisherman, who was originally a serf. He was too poor to buy a wagon to market his fish, and was compelled to sell them at less than the market price to traveling pedlers. Her mother did manual labor for twelve hours a day to earn five cents. Starvation was constantly at the door, and the father was ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... in a delirium of felicity. She invited the King, and made sumptuous preparations to receive him, but—he didn't come. He was simply a serf at that time, and La Tremouille was his master. Master and serf were visiting together at ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of 'post and pair.' ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... trade of the particular ancestor of the old valet who passed from a state of serfdom to one of burgher dignity, until some unknown misfortune had again reduced his present descendant to the condition of a serf, with the addition of wages. The whole history of Flanders and its linen-trade was epitomized in this old man, often called, by way of euphony, Mulquinier. He was not without originality, either of character or appearance. His face ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... venture forth alone, even in the daytime, and so those engaged in housework were naturally compelled to live under their Master's roof, eating at his table and sitting "below the salt." But the Master and the Serf of feudal times disappeared long ago, only the Mistress ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... and our sideboards, and now what do they say to us? That Magdalene weeping amid her hair, who once spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner,—that Sebastian, arrow-pierced, whose upward ardent glance, spoke of courage and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf—that poor tortured slave to whose aid St. Mark comes sweeping down from above—can they speak to us of nothing save flowing lines, and correct drawing, and gorgeous colour? Must we be told that one is a Titian, the other a Guido, the third a Tintoret, before we dare to melt into ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... any man alive, as a shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants and dependants.' Lord Albemarle (Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 70) describes the 'bad Lord Lonsdale. He exacted a serf-like submission from his poor and abject dependants. He professed a thorough contempt for modern refinements. Grass grew in the neglected approaches to his mansion.... Awe and silence pervaded the inhabitants [of Penrith] when the gloomy despot traversed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... egregious executive blunder left wholly to the master class, with the startling result at its close that, whereas Negro slavery had been abolished, Negro serfdom reappeared in every instance as the industrial basis of the reconstructed States, and that a serf power was about to take the place of the slave power in the newly restored Union more dangerous than the old slave power to free industrialism than five is greater than three in federal numbers. For, while according to the old rule of slave representation in the lower house ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... is there one who will deny it?—the question of the licensed saloon must quickly be settled as the world in its advancement has settled the questions of constitutional government for the masses, of the opium traffic, of the serf, and of the slave—not as matters of economic and political expediency but as questions of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... judge has ruled that as you become a bondsman only by accession, and because you were not born a bondsman, your servitude will cease with the cause that makes you a serf. Now, if you love me more than all else, lose your goods to purchase our happiness, and espouse me. Then when you have had your will of me, when you have hugged me and embraced me to your heart's content, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... aggressive—bitterly, fiercely aggressive. For once at least I could make this woman understand what my real feelings toward her were. My soul was filled with a hatred as bestial as the love against which it was a reaction. It was the savage, murderous passion of the revolted serf. I could have taken the crutch from her side and beaten her face in with it. She threw her hands up, as if to avoid a blow, and cowered away from me into the ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of its franchise literally the highest dignity of human privilege. I would have been as proud—I was as proud when the day came—to vote for the President of the United States as he could have been to take his oath of office. I do not believe that any poor serf, escaped from the tyranny of Russia, ever saw the American shore with a more grateful eye than I looked to the prospect of being admitted, with the citizens of Utah, into the enfranchisement ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... she is at the parting of the ways. The day that a preponderance of her population becomes urban instead of rural, that day a preponderance of her population must ask leave to live from some other man—must ask leave to work for some other man, must ask leave to put the collar of the industrial serf on the neck as the sign of labor owned by some other man. That day the preponderance of Canada's population will cease owning their own vested rights and will begin attacking the vested rights of ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... who could not be properly and closely exploited; its free men proper might do something else in their leisure, and so produce art and literature, but their true business as members of a conquering tribe, their concerted business, was to fight. There was, indeed, a fringe of people between the serf and the free noble who produced the matters of handicraft which were needed for the latter, but deliberately, and, as we should now think, wastefully; and as these craftsmen and traders began to grow ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... rather than a creation of the Romans; but the ruin caused in this district by the Second Punic War, the annexation to the State of large tracts of rebel land,[195] and the reduction of large portions of the population to the miserable serf-like condition of dediticii,[196] must have offered the capitalists opportunities which they could not otherwise have secured; and both here and in Apulia the tendency to extend the grazing system to its utmost limits ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the night without paying his first visit to the church. Wherever he went, crowds of every rank poured out to meet him, and he never sent them away without the full Church service, and a sermon; nay, more—each poor serf might come to him, pour out his troubles, whether temporal, or whether his heart had been touched by the good words he had heard. Above all, Wulstan delighted in giving his blessing in Confirmation, and would go on from morning till night ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... thy heart, slave," said Damian, impatiently, "why hang these fetters on the free limbs of a Norman noble? each moment they con-fine him are worth a lifetime of bondage to such a serf ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer, Could Nature's equal scheme deface; New birth of our new ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... over her. The tawny and lionlike bulk of Tartar is ever stretched beside her, his negro muzzle laid on his fore paws—straight, strong, and shapely as the limbs of an Alpine wolf. One hand of the mistress generally reposes on the loving serf's rude head, because if she takes it away he groans and is discontented. Shirley's mind is given to her book. She lifts not her eyes; she neither stirs nor speaks—unless, indeed, it be to return a brief respectful answer to Mrs. Pryor, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the arrogant Caesaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed, had no more hesitation about forcibly ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... stepping back, "you mistake! I am no Russian serf, I am a free man, and no one has a right so ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... all that appertain to him, are the absolute property of his rulers. He is governed, bought, sold, punished, executed, by laws to which he never gave his assent, and by rulers whom he never chose. He is not a serf merely, with half the rights of men like the subjects of despotic Russia; but a native slave, stripped of every right which God and nature gave him, and which the high spirit of our revolution declared inalienable which he himself could ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... out from ev'ry land The language of her race; When Justice meekly sheathes her sword, And Freemen ne'er make laws; When Tyrants rule by force and fraud And dead is Freedom's cause; When Liberty shall see her home Low levelled with the turf, And watch each son in turn become A tyrant-driven serf; When Freedom's sacred name's forgot Within the hearts of men— They'll crush us to the earth, but not— By Heav'n!—but not ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... enacted by the old slave States under President Johnson's administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement of the freedmen. He maintained that in a free country there could be no safe or logical middle ground between the status of freeman and that of serf. There has been much criticism because the negro, it is said, acquired the ballot prematurely. There seemed imperative reasons, besides that of political expediency, for putting the ballot in his hands. Recent events have demonstrated that this necessity is as great ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... in such muddy driblets, {850} Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle, And genially floats me about the giblets. I'll tell you what I intend to do: I must see this fellow his sad life through— He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall. My father was born here, and I inherit His fame, a chain he bound his son with; Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it, But there's no mine to blow up and get done with: {860} So, I must stay ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... doomed to go to Russia with a husband who had 'tyrant' written in every line of his bad, blase little face and figure. French polish could not hide the brute, nor any quantity of flowers conceal the chain by which he was leading his new serf away ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... sanguine, my friend," she said. "Many generations have come and gone since the wonderful pages of history were opened to us. And during all these years how much nearer have the serf and the aristocrat come together? Nay, have they not rather drifted apart?... But listen! This is the great chorus. We ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... weak. My next-door neighbour may keep his children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a loose liver with a frantically foolish religious creed; but all this does not justify me in taking possession of his house, and either poking him out or making him a serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a thing as universal justice, then all men have their rights under it—even verminous persons. We are obliged to put constraint upon them when their habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised nations ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... proprietor only during those months in which he is engaged in the labours of preparing the land and sowing the seed. As soon as the harvest time arrives, he ceases to be master of his estate, and sinks into the condition of a serf of the revenue officer, or of the farmer of the land revenue. It is true, that the government tax only amounts to a tenth of the gross produce of the soil; but, in virtue of this right to a tenth, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... the earliest years of the reign of Alexander II. have to be kept in mind, in order to understand that humanitarian motives were not the ruling ones in the final adoption of the Serf Emancipation measure. On his death-bed, Nicholas is stated to have said to his son:— "Thou hast two enemies—the nobility and the Poles. Emancipate the serfs; and do not allow ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... neck. Misha declared that he would not enter the house, defiled as it was by the presence of a scoundrel; that he would allow no one to throw him out; but that he was on his way to the churchyard to salute the dust of his ancestors. This he did. At the churchyard he was joined by an old house-serf, who had formerly been his man-nurse. The speculator had deprived the old man of his monthly stipend and expelled him from the home farm; from that time forth the man sought shelter in the kennel of a peasant. Misha had managed his estate for so short a time that he had not succeeded in ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... certainly telling the truth—you come to recognize it readily in all ordinary cases after a few weeks in plain clothes. The real culprit was, of course, the employer. My righteous wrath demanded that he and not his poor serf be punished. I could not release the driver. But I would see that the truth was brought out in court next morning and a warrant sworn out against the owner. With showering tears and rib-shaking ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... us most concerned, of course, about the working-man and his dinner pail,—whom the Democrats had wantonly thrown out of employment for the sake of a doctrinaire theory. They had put him in competition with the serf of Europe. Such was the subject-matter of my own modest addresses in this, my maiden campaign. I had the sense to see myself in perspective; to recognize that not for me, a dignified and substantial lawyer of affairs, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the water, where the causeway crossed it, he saw two men standing, that from their dress seemed to be great chiefs. Behind them, with his hands bound, and attached by a rope held in the hand of one of the chiefs, was a young man of a wild and fierce aspect, in the dress of a serf, a rough tunic and leggings. His head was bare, and he looked around him in dismay, like a beast in a trap. Behind, at the edge of the clearing, stood four soldiers silent, with bows strung and arrows fitted to the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from one land, they take root in another. Suppressed entirely by Pope Clement XIV., in 1773, they virtually ignored suppression, and took up their headquarters in Russia. The influence they exerted there still lies on the serf population, like one of the many chains fastened to a Siberian exile's body. Yet they were driven from Russia in 1820,—from Holland in 1816,—from Switzerland in 1847, and from Germany in 1872. Latterly they have been expelled from France. Nevertheless, in spite of these numerous expulsions, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in the midst of a terrible snowstorm, and wandered about almost frozen. At last we were found by a serf who, in his sled, took us to his poor cottage. There we were warmed and fed back ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... now you enter on a realm where all— Use, custom, morals—are untried and strange, In Poland here reigns freedom absolute; The king himself, although in pomp supreme, Must ofttime be the serf of his noblesse; But there the father's sacred power prevails, And in the ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... he would have no more ado, he had made his gift. 'Get thee gone,' he said, as if he had been ordering off a horse or dog. Well-a-day! it was hard to brook the sight, and Hal's blood was up. He flatly refused to go, saying he was the Cardinal's servant, but no villain nor serf to be thus made over ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... become its master. Some people talk nonsense or cheat, and even so enjoy life, while I consciously do good, and feel nothing but uneasiness or complete indifference. I explain all that, Gavrilitch, by my being a slave, the grandson of a serf. Before we plebeians fight our way into the true path, many of our sort will perish on ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... saloon-keepers, he was serf to a brewery; and the particular brewery whose beer his mortgage compelled him to push did not make a beer that could be pushed. People complained that it had a disagreeably bitter aftertaste. In the second place, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... young Mr. Meyer's newest display—the paper that refused to teem would have had to tell him why. Jared stood in the calcium-light of absolute unshaded publicity. "An American Boy's Triumph." "A New Idea in American Art." "The Western Angelus"—this last from a serf that submitted, indeed, yet grimaced in submitting. Under head-lines such as these were detailed his crude ideas and the scanty incidents of his life. And there were editorials, too, that contrasted the sturdy and wholesome truthfulness of his genius with the vain ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... serf, who has toiled through the long day in the fierce rays of the sun, can sleep such nights as these. I call them nights, yet what a strange mistake. The sunshine still lingers in the heavens with a golden glow; the evening vanishes dreamily in the arms of the morning; there is nothing ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... baron's hall To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; All hailed with uncontrolled delight, And general voice, the happy night That to the cottage, as the crown, ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... impalpable—was but to think A dream of phantoms held him as he stood. The late, last thunders of the summer crash'd, Where shrieked great eagles, lords of naked cliffs. The pulseless forest, lock'd and interlock'd So closely, bough with bough, and leaf with leaf, So serf'd by its own wealth, that while from high The moons of summer kiss'd its green-gloss'd locks; And round its knees the merry West Wind danc'd; And round its ring, compacted emerald; The south wind crept on moccasins of flame; And the fed fingers ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... round progress, will crumble; in spite of censorships, in spite of index expurgatorius, it will rain books and journals upon every country under the sun; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, will fall like hail upon Rome, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg; the human word is manna, and the serf will gather it in the furrows; fanaticism will die, oppression will be impossible; man dragged himself along the ground,—he will escape; civilization changes itself into a flock of birds, and flies away, and whirls about and alights joyously at the same moment ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... plain pour fate wean hoard berth isle throne vane seize sore slight freeze knave fane reek Rome rye style flea faint peak throw bourn route soar sleight frieze nave reck sere wreak roam wry flee feint pique mite seer idle pistol flower holy serf borough capital canvas indict martial kernel carat bridle lesson council collar levy accept affect deference emigrant prophesy sculptor plaintive populous ingenious lineament desert extent pillow stile descent incite pillar device patients lightening proceed plaintiff prophet immigrant ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... who (as all of us) are imperfect, be controlled by public law, or by individual caprice? Was not my reviewer intending to advocate some form of serfdom which is compatible with legal rights, and recognizes the serf as a man; not slavery which pronounces him a chattel? Serfdom and apprenticeship we may perhaps leave to be reasoned down by economists and administrators; slavery proper is what I attacked ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the people to luxurious bathing. The Romans are famous to this day for the magnificence of their lavatories and the universal use of them by the rich and poor alike. In Russia the bath is general, from the Czar to the poorest serf, and through all Finland, Lapland, Sweden and Norway, no hut is so destitute as not to have its family bath. Equally general is the custom in Turkey, Egypt and Persia, among all classes from the Pasha down to the poorest camel driver. Pity it is that we cannot say as much ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... history of the poor-law is sufficiently familiar.[76] The mediaeval statutes take us to a period at which the labourer was still regarded as a serf; and a man who had left his village was treated like a fugitive slave. A long series of statutes regulated the treatment of the 'vagabond.' The vagabond, however, had become differentiated from the pauper. The decay of the ancient order of society and its ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... visit that he paid To the gross air of earth, this mystic seer, The tyrannies of sense were too severe For one of clay more fine than Adam's made. The inhumanity of man, the trade Of coining gold from the serf's groan and tear, The galling fetters of religious fear, And vain ecclesiastic masquerade Tortured his gentle soul, and made his life One bitter struggle with the powers that be: Yet not in vain he lived; his manful strife With all the deadening despotisms we see Will ring along the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... birth sharing the lot of their lesser comrades according to the old Saxon war-custom; but it needed not the daring of the attack to mark them as the very flower of English chivalry. The young noble, who hovered around his chief much as Rothgar circled about Canute, would have been lordly in a serf's tunic; and the leader's royal bearing distinguished him even ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... preparing for his last university examinations, and was leading a very regular life. He was asleep. I looked at him, his head buried in the pillow and half covered with the quilt; and I affectionately pitied him, pitied him for his ignorance of the bliss I was experiencing. Our serf Petrusha had met me with a candle, ready to undress me, but I sent him away. His sleepy face and tousled hair seemed to me so touching. Trying not to make a noise, I went to my room on tiptoe and sat down ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... bulk; a physiognomy of Rodinesque modelling. His cane a trim touch to the ensemble. Decidedly affable in manner to us. "Very nice man," comments our hasty note. "One of our young gentlemen here, black eyes, black hair."—describes with surprising memory of exact observation a fellow-serf—"was to get a book for me a couple of months ago." Bought the Muther monograph on Goya. Referred humorously to his new book—one on music. Said, "Many people won't believe that one can be equally good, or perhaps bad, at many things." ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... should all be really only so many glebae adscripti. It is due especially to the ever increasing perfection of tools, machines and operations, that the slave of antiquity was transformed into the serf of the middle ages, and afterwards into the day laborer of modern times.(413) It is more particularly to be remarked, that machines, since 1750, "first made the constitutional liberty of many, instead of the feudal freedom of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... themselves some kind of art befitting their conditions; and even the most despotic aristocracies and priesthoods could adequately express their power and pride only in works which even the slave and serf was able to see. In the whole of the world's art history, it is this present of ours which forms the exception; and as the changes of the future will certainly be for greater social health and better social organisation, it is not likely that this bad exception will be the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... "Serf? That's good!" she said skeptically. "And say, you must love Conrad about as much as Cap ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... has not taken sacred fire from the altar of the gods. The creative genius is the highest gift vouchsafed to man, and wherein man is likest God. The desire to create does not burn the heart of the serf, and only free people can respond to the greatest power ever given to any ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... was tremendous, like a powerful spring that has been held down, or like an explosive which is the more destructive in proportion as it is more confined. People newly made free go to the opposite extreme. Emancipate a serf and he becomes insolent, he does not know how to use his freedom, and becomes violent. The great majority of the people are smarting from the old land laws, which have left a bitter animosity against English rule, which is popularly ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... one of very respectable antiquity and antecedents. By a certain provision of the Feudal System a freeman who had committed a felony, or become hopelessly involved in debt, might purge himself of either by becoming a serf. So, at a later date, persons in the like predicament were permitted to exchange their fetters, whether of debt or iron, for the dear privilege of "spilling every drop of blood in their bodies" [Footnote: Admiralty Records ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... so long completely his own master, consented to become the servant even of famous Royal princes? I think that as mothers accept irksome situations for the support of their children, so La Bruyere became the serf of the Condes for the sake of his book. For it is now time to reveal the fact that in this apparently listless, empty life there was one absorbing secret interest. This was the collection of the maxims, reflections, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... and too much bread: So the man's life serves under the beast's law, And things whose spirit lives in mouth and maw Share shrieking the soul's board and soil her bed, Till man's blind spirit, their sick slave, resign Its kingdom to the priests whose souls are swine, And the scourged serf lie reddening from their rod, Discrowned, disrobed, dismantled, with lost eyes Seeking where lurks in what conjectural skies That triple-headed hound ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... contrasts most favourably with the "vassus" and the "servus" of our feudal times. Their wives and children are their own: the master cannot claim the tyrannous marriage-rights of the baron; no "wedding-dish" is carried up to the castle; nor is the eldest born "accounted the son of the serf's lord, for he perchance it was who begat him." The brutality of slavery, I must repeat, is mainly the effect of civilization. "I shall never forget," says Captain Boteler, "the impatient tosses of the head and angry looks displayed by a— ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... some secret grief were gnawing at his vitals. And, indeed, good cause existed for his sorrow; for, but a few days previously, he had lost his wife. They had buried the countess at midnight, as was the custom of the family, in the old, ancestral vault of the castle. Vassal and serf had waved their torches over the black throat of the grave, and the wail of women had gone up through the rocky arches. Still the count had been seen to shed no tear. An old warrior, schooled in the stern academy of military life, he had early learned to conquer his emotions; ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... snow, piled in drifts, blocks his passage and binds him to his threshold. Sometimes by a sudden change in the temperature a thaw converts the vast frozen mass into slush. In the depth of those arctic winters sometimes fire, that necessary but dangerous serf, breaks its chains and devastates its master's dwelling; then frost allies its power to that of fire, and the household often succumbs to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... drawn round his waist. Generally speaking, each person's caste is decided by the quality of the blood, which shows itself, too plainly to be concealed, at first sight. Yet the least drop of Spanish blood, if it be only of quadroon or octoroon, is sufficient to raise one from the position of a serf, and entitle him to wear a suit of clothes,— boots, hat, cloak, spurs, long knife, all complete, though coarse and dirty as may be,— and to call himself Espaol, and to hold property, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... individuality of man is lost, and he falls prostrate in the very dust of fear. Beneath the frown of the absolute, man stands a wretched, trembling slave—beneath his smile be is at best only a fortunate serf. Governed by a being whose arbitrary will is law, chained to the chariot of power, his destiny rests in the pleasure of the unknown. Under these circumstances what wretched object can he have in lengthening ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... legitimates the baseness of to-day by the baseness of yesterday, a school which explains every cry of the serf against the knout as rebellious, once the knout becomes a prescriptive, a derivative, a historical knout, a school to which history only shows itself a posteriori, like the God of Israel to his servant Moses, the historical juridical school would ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... went in at the door, She entered with him in disguise, 340 And mastered the fortress by surprise; There is no spot she loves so well on ground, She lingers and smiles there the whole year round; The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land Has hall and bower at his command; 345 And there's no poor man in the North Countree But is lord of the earldom as ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Tette on the 17th August, 1858; the navigation was rather difficult, the Zambesi from Shupanga to Senna being wide and full of islands; our black pilot, John Scisssors, a serf, sometimes took the wrong channel and ran us aground. Nothing abashed, he would exclaim in an aggrieved tone, "This is not the path, it is back yonder." "Then why didn't you go yonder at first?" growled out our Kroomen, who had ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread of industry and trailing the puissant pike, a diligent serf. I have no ethics, and yet I am on the side of the just when they do not put thorns in my bed to keep me ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro will not work," said the anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated," said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class. In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel oppressor the nobleman, he believed he could trace a substratum of simple- minded brotherly love, and that instinct which leads animals to hate the men who hunt them. In support of this idea he cited ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... tight hand on her, be a Bartholo! Ware Auguste, Hippolyte, Nestor, Victor—or, that is gold, in every form. When once the child is fed and dressed, if she gets the upper hand, she will drive you like a serf.—I will see to settling you comfortably. The Duke does the handsome; he will lend—that is, give—you ten thousand francs; and he deposits eight thousand with his notary, who will pay you six hundred francs every quarter, for I cannot ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... harbouring a fugitive serf was liable to a fine of twelve silver lions into court ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... Santry, Clontarf, and Castleknock—for even these places, almost within sight of Dublin, were included in de Lacy's original grant. None of these fortresses could have been more than a few miles distant from the next, and once within their thick-ribbed walls, the Norman, Saxon, Cambrian, or Danish serf or tenant might laugh at the Milesian arrows and battle-axes without. With these fortresses, and their own half-Irish origin and policy, the de Lacys, father and son, held Meath for two generations in general subjection. But the banishment of the brothers in 1210, and the death of Walter of Meath, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... over the young one in the price of producing food; on the contrary, it is decidedly its inferior. There, as in love, the apprentice is the master. The proof of this is decisive. Poland can raise wheat with ease at fifteen or twenty shillings a quarter, while England requires fifty. The serf of the Ukraine would make a fortune on the price at which the farmer of Kent or East Lothian would be rendered bankrupt. The Polish cultivators have no objection whatever to a free competition with the British; but the British anticipate, and with reason, total destruction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... judicious protection,—his property secure, his person safe, his rights guarded, and with equal law, in place of the grasping avarice of a crafty minister, or the hot fury of a drunken tyrant. The Indian subject of England will then form a contrast to the wretched serf of a Rajah, that will be a more powerful pledge of obedience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination to marriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman of true discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior man, even on unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the request: the maids, with the simple familiarity of the Russian serf, taking their dismissal reluctantly. But Madame Dravikine held them all in awe, and before her they did not dare the protest that their Princess might have listened to. When the sisters were alone, they ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... me, Lizzie! pity me, for from that fatal moment, I have been the slave, the serf, of a stronger will—a will that has withered and crushed out, by slow degrees, the last trace of moral courage that might have beautified and strengthened my character; crushed it out, and left me a cowardly, miserable, helpless girl! But ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... in hovel and hall, Ever from Erin's young face! The shamrock, the rose, and the thistle, The shamrock, the rose, and the leek, One in the face of a missile, One when the batteries speak. Each of himself is delighted To succour the serf or the slave, And who can deny them united?— ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Stories of Suffering and Saving at Sea. Jack's Victory: and other Stories about Dogs. Story of a King, told by one of his Soldiers. Prince Alexis, or "Beauty and the Beast." Little Daniel: a Story of a Flood on the Rhine. Sasha the Serf: and other Stories of Russian Life. ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... Petrovitch," he said, "puts me in mind of our much respected friend, Alexai Ivanovitch Tveritinov, and the petition he sent in, in the year 1860. He insisted on reading it in every drawing room in St. Petersburg. There was one rather good sentence in it about our liberated serf, who was to march over the face of the fatherland bearing a torch in his hand. You should have seen our dear Alexai Ivanovitch, blowing out his cheeks and blinking his little eyes, pronounce in his ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... a jellyfish—a crushed worm—a mere serf and vassal! She's frightened to death of her sister, in my opinion, and hardly dare call her soul her own. She'd be nice enough to ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... civilization in the Americas has there existed—in any year, in any decade, in any generation in all that time—a greater spirit of mutual understanding, of common helpfulness, and of devotion to the ideals of serf-government than exists today in the twenty-one American Republics and their neighbor, the Dominion of Canada. This policy of the good neighbor among the Americas is no longer a hope, no longer an objective ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... cunning as was the policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left France, though advanced, miserable. For these monarchs had not cut the root of the evil. The French nobility continued practically a serf-holding nobility. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... king's son in fosterage,[31] Impart no dangerous secret to thy wife, Raise not the son of a serf to a high position, Commit not thy purse or ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... made him patient under the insult, his friends were less romantically credulous: the stigma of that night cleaves to him still. Brazen it out as he may, the hang-dog look remains, telling us that the barriers have been at least once broken down which separate the man from the serf. There would be, perhaps, less mischief abroad if slander were always ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... thin air o'er our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind; Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf or Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... circumstances external to the community—circumstances with which, by position, it is more immediately concerned. Ceasing by-and-by to have any knowledge of, or power over, the concerns of the society as a whole, the serf-class becomes devoted to the processes of alimentation; while the noble class, ceasing to take any part in the processes of alimentation, becomes devoted to the co-ordinated movements of the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... ruling class is benefited by the labor of a slave or serf class, there is, at least for the ruling classes, a marked utility in the increase in population. It means just so much opportunity for increase of wealth on the part of landowning and slaveholding or serf-controlling classes. In any country, increase in the labor supply means just ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... that woman would lose her dignity if marriages were dissoluble. Is it necessary to lose your freedom in order to retain your character, in order to be womanly or manly? Must a woman in order to retain her womanhood become a slave, a serf, with a wild beast for a master, or with society for a master, or with a phantom for a master? Has not the married woman the right of self-defence? Is it not the duty of society to protect her from her husband? If she ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... trivial parliamentary forms?" demanded the Tragic Muse, as McCall called her. "Away with all worn-out garments of a degraded Past! Shall the rebellious serf of man still wear his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... classes are admitted to the benefits of religion. The Sudras and the outcasts are forbidden to read the sacred books, and for any one of the upper classes to teach a serf how to expiate sin is ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Russian serfs, if it does not go to the other extreme and make him a nihilist or some other brand of the political desperado. It was from this quarter, forget it not, that the old flint locks came, "whose report was heard around the world," and the serf will never be his model, for the old spirit has still enough of life left for another blaze, as these new oppressors will find to ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... KING. Yet to die were witless, When Death, who with his fatal finger taps At princely doors, as freely as he gives His summons to the serf, may at this instant Have sealed the only life that throws a shade Between us ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... servant, formerly a serf of my mother's, Yegor, by name. He was a quiet, honest fellow; I had known him from a child, and treated him ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... this sublime comparison, Methinks we may proceed upon our narrative, And, as my friend Scott says, "I sound my warison;"[752] Scott, the superlative of my comparative— Scott, who can paint your Christian knight or Saracen, Serf—Lord—Man, with such skill as none would share it, if There had not been one Shakespeare and Voltaire, Of one or both of whom he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... from the stall; No serf is seen in Hassan's hall; The lonely Spider's thin gray pall[dd] 290 Waves slowly widening o'er the wall; The Bat builds in his Haram bower,[74] And in the fortress of his power The Owl usurps the beacon-tower; ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... bury remains Saxon, because both high and low must be hidden under ground at last; but as only the rich and noble could afford any pomp in that sad office, we get the word funeral from the Norman. So also the serf went into a Saxon grave, the lord into a Norman tomb. All the parts of armor are naturally named from the French; the weapons of the people, as sword, bow, and the like, continued Saxon. So feather is Saxon; but as soon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the beard and the peculiar sign of the cross. The Raskol offered to all the oppressed a moral, and often a material, refuge, an asylum for all enemies of the master and the law, and a shelter for the fugitive serf, for the deserter, for public debtors and outlaws of every description. Some sects (as the Wanderers, for example) are specially organized for such purposes. In these respects the Raskol was unconsciously one form of the opposition to serfdom and official despotism; and hence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... Moscow. The members of the party were met by the Prince and went with him to a part of the park where a deputation of peasants awaited them. Leader of the peasant group was the mayor of the neighboring village, an emancipated serf, who presented Fox with bread and salt—traditional symbols of Russian hospitality—on a ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... words—"whether it may not be possible that the fever of political and religious excitement which was quickening the pulse and fluttering the bosom of the whole Catholic population—which had inspired the serf of Clare with the resolution and the energy of a free man—which had in the twinkling of an eye made all considerations of personal gratitude, ancient family connections, local preferences, the fear of worldly injury, the hope of worldly ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is held politically to have no existence; (2) civilly, she is a minor; (3) in marriage she is a serf; (4) in labor she is made inferior and robbed of her earnings; (5) in public instruction she is sacrificed to man; (6) out of marriage, answers to the faults committed by both; (7) as a mother is deprived of her right to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... call smoking made easy," said Harry. "I've heard of a man being another's mouthpiece, and this old gentleman seems to make use of his serf for the ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him,—the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who, 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... to his position, with special gifts whenever he or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye had rested. Therefore the [vc]if[vc]ija would lose the last shadow of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement, with little wooden ploughs and with a total absence of manure. And ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... his original fetishism, which the 'recaptive' apparently can never throw off. Moreover, he became an inveterate slave-dealer, impudently placing himself under native protection, and renegading the flag that saved the crime-serf from lifelong servitude. These 'insolent, vagabond loafers' were the only men who gave me much trouble in the so-called 'Oil rivers,' where one of them accused a highly respected Scotch missionary of theft. Finally, the Gaboon ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... thou; and take this baton of my baronie, and give me instead thereof that sprig of hawthorn thou holdest in thine hand.' Now the hawthorn-bough was no larger a thing than might be carried by a wood-pigeon to the nest, when she flieth low, and the baronial baton was covered with fine gold, and the serf, turning it in his hands, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... which we attach to the word. 'In Limousin,' says Arthur Young, 'the metayers are considered as little better than menial servants.' And it is not going beyond the evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the lowest misery. More than half of them were computed to be deeply in debt to the proprietors. In many cases they were even reduced every year to borrow from their landlord, before the harvest came round, such coarse bread of mixed rye and barley as he might choose to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... period was of three kinds: the leibeigener or serf, who was little better than a slave, who cultivated his lord's domain, upon whom unlimited burdens might be fixed, and who was in all respects amenable to the will of his lord; the hoeriger or villein, whose services were limited alike ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... father to son, and graven in mystic symbols on a tablet of the stone of Syene. But of what avail was it to be Royal by right when Egypt, my heritage, was a slave—a slave to do the pleasure and minister to the luxury of the Macedonian Lagidae—ay, and when she had been so long a serf that, perchance, she had forgotten how to put off the servile smile of Bondage and once more to look across the world ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... of the World in the Moon. Cyrano de Bergerac's [Greek Selaenarchia] or the Government of the World in the Moon: Done into English by Tho. St. Serf, Gent. (16mo, 1659), and another version, The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun, newly Englished by ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... become in the short story, Anton Chekhov still stands out as the supreme master, one of the greatest short-story writers of the world. He was born in Taganarok, in the Ukraine, in 1860, the son of a peasant serf who succeeded in buying his freedom. Anton Chekhov studied medicine, but devoted himself largely to writing, in which, he acknowledged, his scientific training was of great service. Though he lived only forty-four years, dying of tuberculosis in 1904, his collected works consist of sixteen ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By those declarations, kings, priests, popes, aristocrats, were all alike dethroned, and placed on a common level, politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, men, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule, and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of those declarations all class and caste distinction will be abolished; and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... committed by the low class of Russians who had remained in Moscow. This is not surprising because these were of the most depraved of the population, including especially many criminals who had been set free to pillage and burn the city. "A little while before the French entered," tells the serf Soimonof, "the order had been given to empty all the vodka (whiskey) from the distilleries of the crown into the street; the liquor was running in rivulets, and the rabble drank until they were senselessly drunk, they had even licked the stones and the ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... sacred meal was spread. All sat at board Within the house of Rabbi Jochanan: The kind old priest; his noble, new-found son, Whose name was wrung in every key of praise, By every voice in Prague, from Duke to serf (Save the vindictive bigot, Narzerad); The beautiful young wife, whose cup of joy Sparkled at brim; next her the vacant chair Awaited the Messiah, who, unannounced, In God's good time shall take his place with us. Now when the Rabbi reached the verse ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... dilapidated, and of a moldy savor. Some of the unwilling visitors, finding that the grounds included a strip of sandy beach, took their ordeal with reasonable philosophy. "Since we are to be slaves," they said, "at least let's have some serf bathing." And donning (with a shudder) the rather gruesome padded bathing suits they found in the lockers, they went off for a swim. Others, of a humorous turn, derived a certain rudimentary amusement in studying the garden marked Reserved for Patients with Insane Delusions, where ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Helene, fascinatingly ugly in her serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria's jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs. Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... His family prospered, and his farm also. The Irish peasant became a landed proprietor, and though his little estate had only been under cultivation for two years, he had five hundred acres cleared by his own hands, and five hundred head of cattle. He was his own master, after having been a serf in Europe, and as independent as one can be in the freest country in ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the fine womanly nature of the man rose exulting in the free picturesque glow of the day of crusader and heroic deed! How he crowded in traits of perfected manhood in the conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to color and weaken his argument, not seeing that he weakened it! How, when he thought he had cornered the Doctor, he would color and laugh like a boy, then suddenly check himself, lest he might wound him! A curious laugh, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... people with a passion for agriculture, there was not enough bread! The reasons for this are too complex to be stated here, but a few may have brief mention. The allotment of land bestowed upon each liberated serf was too small to enable him to live and to pay his taxes, unless the harvests were always good and he was always employed. He need not live, but his taxes must be paid. It required three days' work out of each week to do that; and if he had not ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... emergence of an Equilateral from the ranks of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for all the higher classes are well ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... sister of sunrise, and herald of life to be, Smiled as dawn on the spirit of man, and the thrall was free. Slave of nature and serf of time, the bondman of life and death, Dumb with passionless patience that breathed but forlorn and reluctant breath, Heard, beheld, and his soul made answer, and communed aloud ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... two horses, he made his escape. This Vasili was his stirrup-bearer, one of those serfs over whom the boyard on whose land they were born possessed absolute power. That power was often abused, but the instinctive faithfulness of the serf towards his master could hardly be shaken, even by the most savage treatment, and a well- treated serf viewed his master's family with enthusiastic love and veneration. Vasili accompanied his master's ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the spirit of humour, and its author must be ranked among the great humorists of all time. There is an absurdity about the mission of the chief character, which gives rise to all sorts of ludicrous situations. It takes time for each serf-owner to comprehend Chichikov's object, and he is naturally regarded with suspicion. In one community it is whispered that he is Napoleon, escaped from St. Helena, and travelling in disguise. An old woman with whom he deals has an avaricious cunning worthy of ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... individual, and as a class, just in proportion as the higher culture comes to his leaders and teachers, and so gets into his schools, academies and colleges; and then enters his pulpits; and so filters down into his families and his homes; and the Negro learns that he is no longer to be a serf, but that he is to bare his strong brawny arm as a laborer; not to make the white man a Croesus, but to make himself a man. He is always to be a laborer; but now, in these days of freedom and the schools, he is to be a laborer with intelligence, enlightenment ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... They are deprived of liberty, separated from friends, no social intercourse, and constantly maintaining an unnatural position. The convict's place is lower than the most degraded menial; he must ask for permission even to get a drink of water. No serf of earth, no slave, however wretched, has a sadder lot. These unhappy mortals have yielded to temptation, have fallen, and are paying the penalty of violated law. Who can think of these degraded beings, ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... changed its name and become a restaurant—a title quite out of keeping with the wretched little hut with its thatch torn off its roof, and its couple of dingy windows—two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been employed in a nail factory, has been turned off for drunkenness and idleness, and now lives upon his old wife, who begs for alms. He is thin and weak, with a mangy-looking ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... serf and vassal Held, that night their Christmas wassail; Many a carol, old and saintly, Sang the minstrels ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... serf of mine, Nor subject to my throne; Where'er her golden hair may shine That is her ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... the prince questioned him, and was told a plausible story by the young man. He had escaped the murderer, he said, the boy who died being the son of a serf, who resembled and had been substituted for him by his physician Simon, who knew what Boris designed. The physician had fled with him from Uglitch and put him in the hands of a loyal gentleman, who for safety had consigned him to ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of Homer (though they say he never used one), or even that of the worthy who wasted precious years in writing a Homer Burlesqued, what heroic exploits might not I immortalise! In every stupid serf and cunning ruffian there, there was a heart as brave as Ajax's own; but then they fought with sticks instead of lances, and hammered away on fustian jackets instead of brazen shields; and, therefore, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... law, the expropriation of a debtor will be effected a hundred times more rapidly; then, also, spoliation will be a hundred times surer, and the free laborer will pass a hundred times sooner from his present condition to that of a serf attached to the soil. Formerly, the length of time required to effect the seizure curbed the usurer's avidity, gave the borrower an opportunity to recover himself, and gave rise to a transaction between him and his creditor which might ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... deposit, converted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. It is surely not very great Radicalism to affirm that a state of things so anomalous ought not to exist—that the English tenant should be a freeman, not a serf—and that he ought not to be bound down by a weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience of his own. The simple principle of 'No lease, no vote,' would set all right; and it is a principle which so recommends itself ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... they will be sure to listen if they find that you are a good speaker. There was a notion that came into my mind while you were speaking; I said to myself: 'Well, and what if Euthyphro does prove to me that all the gods regarded the death of the serf as unjust, how do I know anything more of the nature of piety and impiety? for granting that this action may be hateful to the gods, still piety and impiety are not adequately defined by these distinctions, for that which is hateful to the ...
— Euthyphro • Plato
... who ruled by sword and flame, Who swore to ravage France, Like some poor serf without a name, Has died by ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... a proprietor could send his human property into exile. He was not required to give any reason, the record accompanying the order of banishment stating only that the serf was exiled "by the will of his master." This privilege was open to enormous abuse, but happily the ukase of liberty has removed it. The design of the system was no doubt to enable proprietors to rid themselves of serfs who were idle, dissolute, or quarrelsome, ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... conscience which had abolished slavery in every other Republic of America, which had thrown the protection of law over the helpless millions of India, which had moved even the Russian Autocracy to consider the enfranchisement of the serf. They would not realize that the contest they were rashly inviting was not alone with the anti-slavery men of the free States, not alone with the spirit of loyalty to the Republic, but that it carried with it a challenge to the progress of civilization, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... their "hundred" without a passport. Their sons might not be educated to anything but agriculture; their daughters could not be married without paying a fine to the master. Worse things than these are told of some, for of course the condition of the serf largely depended on ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... heads of the Church exercised all the rights of a feudal lord, and were even more tenacious of their privileges. The serfs were prohibited from migrating from one part of the country to another. The daughter of a serf could not marry without the consent of the lord, who frequently demanded payment for permission; or, worse still, the infamous "Right of the First Night." The serf was bonded in a hundred different ways, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... weighted down by the inertia of the established; that the government that is representative of them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness; that this blind thing called government is not the serf of their wills, but that they are the serfs of it; in short, speaking always of the great mass, that they do not make government, but that government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid and awful monster, misbegotten of the glimmerings of intelligence ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... cultivate it without depending on a landlord. More than once, when comparing the position of a landowner with that of an owner of serfs, Nekhludoff had compared the renting of land to the peasants instead of cultivating it with hired labour, to the old system by which serf proprietors used to exact a money payment from their serfs in place of labour. It was not a solution of the problem, and yet a step towards the solution; it was a movement towards a less rude form of slavery. And it was in this way he ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... and tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with Britain; for I could only expect to till the soil in Britain as a serf. I thought of tilling it in America, in which it was said there was plenty of wild, unclaimed land, of which any one, who chose to clear it of its trees, might take possession. I figured myself in America, in an immense forest, clearing the land ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... "Insolent serf! unsay thy words, or maintain them with thy sword!—Crouch, like a low-born slave as thou art, and beg Macpherson's pardon, if thou darest not bare ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... or German, or Frenchman, is not capable of this natural town-meeting sort of action. He needs 'laws,' and government, and a lord or a squire in the chair, or a demagogue on the rostrum. The poor serf does ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in a corner, is said to have witnessed the whole scene. He was a serf, and fear ensured his silence, but he told his wife, the drunken widow who is now chattering about it. Of course it is nonsense, incredible nonsense. I am the first to cry that it is a lie, a lie. Our respected and saintly Tatiana Markovna!" Paulina Karpovna burst out laughing, but checked ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... without escape. In this city there is an artisan who cuts and carves wonderful images: there is no land where he is not known for the figures which he has shapen and carved and made. John is his name, and he is a serf of mine. No one could cope with John's best efforts in any art, however varied it might be. For, compared with him, they are all novices, and like a child with nurse. By imitating his handiwork the artisans of Antioch and Rome have learned all they know how to do—and ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... years, yet shrewd and cunning, greedy of gold, malicious, and looked upon by the common people as an imp of darkness. It was this old villain who told Thancmar that the provost of Bruges was the son of a serf on Thancmar's estates.—S. Knowles, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... fellow his sad life through— He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall"; ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne |
