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Soil   Listen
noun
Soil  n.  
1.
The upper stratum of the earth; the mold, or that compound substance which furnishes nutriment to plants, or which is particularly adapted to support and nourish them.
2.
Land; country. "Must I thus leave thee, Paradise? thus leave Thee, native soil?"
3.
Dung; faeces; compost; manure; as, night soil. "Improve land by dung and other sort of soils."
Soil pipe, a pipe or drain for carrying off night soil.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Soil" Quotes from Famous Books



... was easier to say than to do; the trees grew so thickly that it was impossible to ride through them but slowly, and the soil was so sandy that the horses sank into it at every step. The cavalier gained upon them rapidly, and soon they ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas

... Giles," said the Red-faced man, "and when you have time, throw some soil on to the top of the lot. This place smells horrible. And look you here, Giles," he added in a voice of thunder, "if ever I find you killing a fox upon this property, you will be dismissed at once, as I have often told you ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard

... It was an iron soil. The valley was a furnace, the sky a brazen shield. No green thing was in sight, and the curling leaves of the dying corn brought back to me those desolate days in Dakota when my mother tried so hard to maintain a ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... strength would have been unequal to the task of moving the hackeri, heavily laden as it was, resting on soft soil, and interlocked with the next. But as soon as his followers saw the aim of his movements, and especially when they found that the defenders could not touch him without exposing themselves, he gained as many ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... and disconsolate, irresolute in leaf, and without flower or fruit. Their work is under the ground. In darkness and silence they are putting forth long fibres, searching hither and thither under the black soil for the strength that years hence shall burst into ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... may be, have we marched on without impediment." Handy paused here for a moment to catch his wandering thoughts in order to explain his text. "You see, Smith, Richmond marched on without impediment. So does the miner at first, when he has only to wrestle with the soil, sub-soil, and all that kind of thing. Then comes Gloster, the bloody and devouring boar, typified again by the hard and flinty rock the miner frequently encounters. For a time there's a fierce struggle ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville

... turned with a swift gesture: "Why should I mistreat my spirit, kill my brightest self trying for money, young Graham? Here among my flowers, working in the soil, I ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... dragon behind (Iliad, vi. 179), with three heads corresponding. She devastated Caria and Lycia until she was finally slain by Bellerophon (see H.A. Fischer, Bellerophon, 1851). The origin of the myth was the volcanic nature of the soil of Lycia (Pliny, Nat. Hist. ii. 110; Servius on Aeneid, vi. 288), where works have been found containing representations of the Chimaera in the simple form of a lion. In modern art the Chimaera is usually represented as a lion, with a goat's head in the middle of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... may otherwise be wasted, poultry are a source of considerable profit. The opinion of the Scottish Commission was that "Australia possesses natural conditions of almost unequalled value for the profitable keeping of poultry. In climate, soil, shelter, and in natural food she has the essential attributes to success." Poultry-farming is carried on together with wheat or dairying or pig farming, but in many places the raising of poultry is carried on as a single line. Poultry for consumption is extensively ...
— Australia The Dairy Country • Australia Department of External Affairs

... partook of that degeneracy which comes to the descendants of the large old families, while it is as inevitable that they should run out, so to speak, as flowers which have flourished too many years in a garden, whose soil they have exhausted, he had not lost the habit of rectitude of his ancestors. Virtue was a hereditary trait of ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... soil are beginning their activity with plough, shovel, rake, breaking the firm grip of grim winter upon the Earth, so that the mild spring warmth may penetrate her breast and coax into growth and maturity the seeds ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... ascertain how I came originally to devise them, and by dint of reflecting I remembered that to a single word in conversation, or some simple accident in a street or on a road, I was indebted for some of the happiest portions of my work; they were but tiny seeds, it is true, which in the soil of my imagination had subsequently become stately trees, but I reflected that without them no stately trees would have been produced, and that, consequently, only a part in the merit of these compositions ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... some elevation; and Factory Island, the largest, five or six miles long by one broad, and nearest the shore. Their aspect is not unpleasant: the features are those of the Sierra Leone peninsula, black rocks, reefs, and outliers, underlying ridges of red soil; and the land is feathered to the summit with palms, rising from stubbly grass, here and there patched black by the bush-fire. A number of small villages, with thatched huts like beehives, are scattered along the shore. The census of 1880 gives the total figures at 1,300 to 1,400, and of these ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... of Greece, vol. i. p. 75, observes, "Athene is locally identified with the soil and people of Athens, even in the Iliad: Erechtheus, the Athenian, is born of the earth, but Athene brings him up, nourishes him, and lodges him in her own temple, where the Athenians annually worship him with sacrifice and ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... you want?" said Seth, clearing his boot- sole from some superfluous soil upon the share of ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... power; his associations with them are associations of pride and wealth and triumph; the poor man's attachment to the tenements he holds, which strangers have held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stone; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty fare, that man has ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... Marguerite that there should be no more cigarettes until after lunch. It had also been agreed that he should put his nose to the grindstone that Sunday morning, and that she should do the same away in Manresa Road. George's grindstone happened to be Miers and Crosskey's The Soil in Relation to Health. He was preparing for his Final Examination. In addition to the vast imperial subject of Design, the Final comprised four other subjects—Construction, Hygiene, Properties and Uses of Building Materials, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... varying degrees of completeness or incompleteness. At the bottom of the biological scale we find organisms which have only the most limited correspondence with their surroundings. A tree, for example, corresponds with the soil about its stem, with the sunlight, and with the air in contact with its leaves. But it is shut off by its comparatively low development from a whole world to which higher forms of life have additional access. The want of locomotion ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... and sunshine, with just a thunderstorm or so; on wet days and cold days I was kept to closer limits; and it seems to me now rather an intellectual conviction than a positive memory that save for a few pine-clad patches in the extreme south-east, its soil was all thick clay. That meant for me only beautiful green marshes, a number of vividly interesting meres upon the course of its stream, and a wealth of gigantic oaks. The meres lay at various levels, and the hand of Lady Ladislaw had ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... saw Charley after that Thanksgiving day. Before the afternoon was half gone the doctor sent an ambulance for him, and insisted that he should go to City Point. By Christmas his wasted body had lain for three weeks in the red Virginia soil. ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson

... curiously. He was in a plainly furnished room, lying on the top of a bed covered with a rubber blanket, so that his wet clothing might not soil the linen beneath. His coat and shoes had been removed, likewise his collar and tie, but that ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield

... fact, however, this toadstool is traced to a series of dark shining strings, looking almost like the purple-black leaf stalks of the maidenhair fern, and these strings branch and meander in the wood of the tree, and in the soil, and may attain even great lengths—several feet, for instance. The interest of all this is enhanced when we know that until the last few years these long black cords were supposed to be a peculiar form of fungus, and were known as Rhizomorpha. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... Barnegat Light, to whom every piece of sea-drift from a tomato-can to a full-rigged ship rightfully belonged, but by a couple of aliens, one of whom wore knee-pants and a white collar,—a distinction in dress highly obnoxious to these lords of the soil. ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... the ideas long in his mind. In this year he sailed from Boston for Sierra Leone with thirty-eight free Negroes as settlers on the Black Continent. Only eight of these could pay their own expenses, but Cuffe, nevertheless, took out the entire party, landed them safe on the soil of their forefathers after a journey of fifty-five days and paid the expense for the outfit, transportation and maintenance of the remaining thirty, amounting to no less than twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000), out of his own pocket. The colonists were cordially welcomed by the people ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... grey and sullen, the hot rain was still falling; grass seemed to have sprung up from the sun-baked soil in the night and the slant-set leaves of the five gums smiled as they slid big drops on to their roots. The leaves of the wonga-vine that sheltered the rather scanty beds of the food-garden looked riotously alive and green; nasturtiums and sunflowers sent out by the uncle in England glowed ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... corn, but we should then have been worse off than ever. And in the end the dogs saved us by an occasional capture—an armadillo surprised in the open and seized before it could bury itself in the soil, or an iguana, opossum, or labba, traced by means of their keen sense of smell to its hiding-place. Then Nuflo would rejoice and feast, rewarding them with the skin, bones, and entrails. But at length one of the dogs fell lame, and ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... wood lands for bear & Deer and for the Salmon fish which we were told would be here in a fiew days and also a good Situation for our horses. the hills to the E. & N. of us are high broken & but partially timbered; the soil rich and affords fine grass. in Short as we are Compelled to reside a while in this neighbourhood I feel perfectly Satisfied with our position. imediately after we had Crossed the river the Chief Called the broken Arm or ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... Winstanley; and, as we have seen, he too met with the fate awaiting those who find themselves in advance of their times. As already pointed out, his memory has passed away, his teachings have remained unheeded. The seed he planted fell upon barren soil; but though so hardened by the withering frosts of ignorance, of that ignorance which is indeed "the curse of God," as to seem but as a dead stone, the vivifying sun of knowledge may yet stir its dormant potency, recalling it to ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... righted. Yet the pity of it! What floods of weeping! There is a tone about which strikes me as going well with the grace of these leafless birch-trees against the sky, the pale silver of their bark, and a certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It is all one half-light; and the heroine, nay! The hero himself also, that dainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour, have, I think, but a half-life in them truly, from the first. And I could fancy myself almost of their condition ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater

... and channels deep enough for hiding a pinnace or even a stout schooner. Yonder, Jean, is Barataria Bay, your old home. Here, under my finger, is Cote Blanche. Here comes the Chafalay, through its new channel—all this floating hyacinth, all this red water, comes from Texas soil, from the Red River, now discharging in new mouths. Yonder, west of the main boat channels that make toward the railways far inland, lie the salt reefs and the live-oak islands. Here is the long key they now call Marsh ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough

... the others tire their muscles and soil their hands and clothing while he attended strictly to the business of pleasing himself. He could not help being aware of a growing coolness on the part of his associates, but it gave him no concern. His month of probation was almost up, and he had decided that, come what might, he would ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... glad to see you once more safe on Confederate soil, at any rate," observed Harry, and he added, "as I will insist upon your staying at my house while you are here, let me know where your baggage is, that I may ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... these little sketches to all who love and reverence Nature and the occupations of the soil.' —Pall Mall Gazette. ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick

... wisdom, and embodied in upright character, else it is naught. Pestalozzi even held intellectual training by itself to be pernicious; insisting that the roots of all knowledge must strike and feed in the soil of the rightly-governed will. The acquisition of knowledge may, it is true, protect a man against the meaner felonies of life; but not in any degree against its selfish vices, unless fortified by sound principles and habits. Hence do we find in daily life so ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... and I bent down to lift her up, and in the picking of her up my garments were soiled, but I have brought her with me to Thy presence." And the Christ smiled and lifted them up beside Him, and the angels sang for joy. For it is not the sin and the shame that are shared that soil the garments of the Spirit, and leave upon it ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... time will come, if these men are allowed to harangue the populace, when the kings of England will be unable to accomplish the feat of knocking down Brown's followers. Heresies, like noxious weeds, grow without cultivation, and thrive best on barren soil. Or shall I say that, like the goodly vine, they bear better fruit when pruned? I cannot fully decide this question for myself; but I admire these sturdy fanatics who so passionately love their own faith, and so bitterly hate all others, and ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... a woman's life may be, Yet do not dreams belong to thee and me? To every life some visions must belong; Are we to blame that they are sometimes wrong? True women make true men,—'tis always so; Yet careless touch may soil the purest snow, The shadows of the night may hide the sky, Yet still beyond them all the stars ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick

... only separated from the land of Evangeline by a few miles of salt water, one might reasonably suppose that the good folk would look to the soil and the peaceful pursuits of Arcady for at least some part of their daily bread. But, with the exception of a few watery potatoes, Uncle Johnnie had never "growed e'er a thing in his life." His rifle and axe, his traps and his lines, had exacted sufficient tribute from wild nature ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... yet no signal or sign of any kind indicating human occupation had been descried. True, as we drew nearer, a faint wreath of smoke here and there was occasionally seen; but our telescopes showed us that these issued from the soil itself, and not from fires kindled by human agency, being, no doubt, the result of volcanic action; also there were a few goats dotted about, browsing in groups of two or three; and their perfect placidity ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood

... delicate green of the apple-trees in spring-time, half-smothered in pinky-white blossom, gives the country a garden-like aspect. You may see a man harrowing a field on a sudden slope with a cloud of dust blowing up from the dry light soil, and you may hear him make that curious hullaballooing by which the peasants direct their horses, so different from the grunting "way-yup there" of the English ploughman. Coming down a long descent, ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... of 1779, it became still more apparent that the purpose of the enemy was to shift the scene of their activity from the middle States to the South, and that Virginia, whose soil had never thus far been bruised by the tread of a hostile army, must soon experience that dire calamity. Perhaps no one saw this more clearly than did Governor Henry. At the same time, he also saw that Virginia must in part defend herself ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... off, eager for her new career, eager that he should stand on a soil where he could once more face his fellow- creatures without shame. She panted to put thousands of leagues of ocean between him ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... when we came to the Yuma Indians, spoken of before as not wearing any clothing. Here George Jones declared that he had gone far enough, saying he had found a place that he had been looking for for a long time where people did not have to wear clothing nor till the soil for a living. And he added: "This ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan

... when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank 130 Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, Or wild cats ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... islands were all visited by the different vessels engaged in the expedition; many of them appear to be of volcanic formation, others are of coral origin; they are all characterised as possessing an exceedingly fertile soil; they abound with a picturesque beauty of scenery, and luxuriant vegetation, which excites the most painful feelings when we learn, that where nature has bestowed so much bounty, the inhabitants are, it is greatly to be feared, cannibals. In some ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... went on Elfreda unabashed, but in a slightly lower key. "First, I shall spy upon the workmen, then I shall collect samples of campus soil and spend the rest of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower

... than is yet known. My own notion is, that Thomson was a much coarser man than his friends are willing to acknowledge[349]. His Seasons are indeed full of elegant and pious sentiments: but a rank soil, nay a dunghill, will ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... deal. Wonderful satirist, that. But still, I must admit that neither he nor Miss Austen are common. Now there's Mark Twain—for general reading, rain or shine, can't be beaten. American to the core, sir. Smacks of the soil. Perhaps he missed any warm love interest—but a delightful humorist, sir. You read him regularly, ...
— Best Short Stories • Various

... act the part for myself, and retire under the shady elms on the fair banks of the Ohio, and eat my coarse but sweet bread of industry and content, and when I have done, to have my body laid in the soft, warm, and loamy soil of the banks, with my name inscribed on a neighboring poplar, that future generations when traversing the mighty waters of the West, in the manner that I have pointed out, may find ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various

... will fail miserably unless the captain places each man where he can play best. Gardening is profitless when the gardener does not know the habits of plants and the possibilities of different kinds of soil. So in planning a health programme we must study our materials and use each where it will fit best. The materials of first importance to a health programme in civilized countries are men; for men working together can control water sources, drainage, and ventilation, or else move away ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... appeared in our ranks, especially in Missouri division. Surgeon recommends 385 eighty-pounders be loaded to the muzzle, first with blank cartridges,—to wit, Frank Pierce and Stephen A. Douglas, Free-Soil sermons, Fern Leaves, Hot Corn, together with all the fancy literature of the day,—and cause the same to be fired upon the disputed territory; this would cause all the breakings out to be removed, and drive ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... current issues: water shortages; soil eroding into the sea damages coral reefs; deforestation; ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Owhyhee. The whole island, eighty-six miles long by seventy broad, and rising, as it does at Mowna Keah, more than 15,000 feet above the sea, would seem to have been formed by layers of lava imposed at different periods. Some of these have followed quickly on each other; while the thickness of soil, made up of vegetable mould and decomposed lava, indicates a long interval of repose between others. The present surface is comparatively recent, though there is no tradition of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... Thaumantian Iris gleams, That yonder often shift on each side heav'n. Vapour adust doth never mount above The highest of the trinal stairs, whereon Peter's vicegerent stands. Lower perchance, With various motion rock'd, trembles the soil: But here, through wind in earth's deep hollow pent, I know not how, yet never trembled: then Trembles, when any spirit feels itself So purified, that it may rise, or move For rising, and such loud acclaim ensues. Purification ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... but chemical things they use on farms. Now you see there's the soil." Sally nodded, so deeply interested that she ceased her work. "Some soil's good for growing things, and some isn't. Well, when a soil's not good the farmers mix stuff with it, ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... storms arose that they were almost driven on the rocks, and once they had much ado to avoid being drawn into a whirlpool. But somehow or other they escaped everything, and Huon was safely landed on the holy soil with his uncle Garyn and a ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various

... out-of-the-way a corner as the threshold of the door which conducted to what Mrs. Kebby, with characteristic misrepresentation, called the woodshed. In reality the place in question was a cellar, which extended under the soil of the back yard, and was lighted from the top by a skylight placed on ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... will be that the wood will be growing enough faster to keep good the general stock of fuel. Doubtless the forests are now limited in their growth and stunted from their ante-Saurian stature, not so much for want of soil, moisture, or sunshine as for want of carbonic acid in the air, to be decomposed by the foliage, the great deposition of coal in the primitive periods having exhausted the supply. Our present havoc of wood only changes the locality of wood-lots, and our present consumption of coal, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... neglect and mismanagement present equally obvious exponents of their operation, upon properties like this of Castle Cumber? On this property, it is not every tenant that is allowed to have an interest in the soil at all, since the accession of M'Clutchy. He has succeeded in inducing the head landlord to decline granting leases to any but those who are his political supporters—that is, who will vote for him or his nominee ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... afterwards. I dreamed of ploughed land at night. But field labour did not attract me. I did not understand farming, and I did not care for it; it was perhaps because my forefathers had not been tillers of the soil, and the very blood that flowed in my veins was purely of the city. I loved nature tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen gardens, but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and urged on his pitiful horse, wet ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... great pivots of Eastern Europe. With a navigable river and the great main railway lines to important centres such as Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Dantzig, Kiev, and Odessa, with good climatic conditions, and fertile soil; with the pick of natural talent in art and science, and the love for enterprise that is innate in the Polish character, Warsaw cannot help being a ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... side by side, with like unwearied care, Each Ajax laboured through the field of war: So when two lordly bulls, with equal toil, Force the bright ploughshare through the fallow soil, Join'd to one yoke, the stubborn earth they tear, And trace large furrows with the shining share; O'er their huge limbs the foam descends in snow, And streams of sweat down their sour foreheads flow. A train of ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... Duryodhana of sinful soul and how also we bore it with patience. That Duryodhana, O Madhava, will behave with justice towards the Pandavas is what I cannot believe. Wise counsels will be lost on him like seed sown in a barren soil. Therefore, do without delay what thou, O thou of Vrishni race, thinkest to be proper and beneficial for the Pandavas, or what, indeed, should ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... further west was at that same time invading Kentucky; it might accomplish there was no saying how much. This much, one may gather from the "Life of Lord John Russell," any great victory of the South on Northern soil would probably have accomplished: the Confederacy would have been recognised, as Jefferson Davis longed for it to be, by European Powers. Lincoln now acted in total disregard of his Cabinet and of all Washington, and in equal disregard of any false notions of dignity. By ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... sweet and juvenile and innocent and pretty about these little tinsel vanities, these grave apings of monarchical fuss and feathers and ceremony, here on our ostentatiously democratic soil. She is the same lady that we found in the Autobiography, who was so naively vain of all that little ancestral military riffraff that she had dug up and annexed. A person's nature never changes. What it is in childhood, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... fell into receptive soil, and from that day the art and pleasure loving citizen of the world became an earnest man with a purpose. But as he chose his purpose mainly from selfish motives it did not become an ennobling one. He now gave double ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... only informed that the dove returned in the evening. If the winged messenger was despatched early in the day, it is not improbable that the delightful trophy was obtained from Mount Olivet, where, according to the late Dr. Clarke, 'the olive still vindicates its parental soil.' In considering the question of the geographical distribution of plants, this would likely be the nearest olive plane from the mountains of Armenia. It may be remarked also, that the olive remarkably synchronizes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various

... the road, in a high-walled garden, stood the parsonage. The garden was rich with orchard trees and wall fruit, and boasted in particular one golden plum that was the parson's boast and pride. He had imported rich soil from the valleys, and in each corner of the garden gathered little hills of leaf-mould. Mr. Ives ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... singular, but some golden apples. Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figs, apples, olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there was no such thing at all. The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they afforded proverbial expression, and the principal part thereof was empty spaces, with herbs and flowers in pots. I think we little understand the pensile gardens of Semiramis, which made one of the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... yard is the touching inscription in memory of two children,—"Blessed little lambs, and art thou gathered into the fold of the only true shepherd? Sweet lillies of the valley, and art thou removed to a more congenial soil?" The floor of the church is of stone, the pews of polished oak. It has an organ, which is not so entirely out of tune as are the pianos on the island. One of the ladies played, while the gentlemen sang,—old-fashioned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... make as many partitions and divisions in hell and purgatory, and describe as many different sorts and degrees of punishment as if they were very well acquainted with the soil and situation of those infernal regions. And to prepare a seat for the blessed above, they invent new orbs, and a stately empyrean heaven, so wide and spacious as if they had purposely contrived it, that the ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... fights with dirty foes Must needs be soil'd, admit they win or lose: Then think it doth a Doctor's credit dash To ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... world, and whose breadth from east to west is almost twice that of the Mexican highlands. From the range of mountains which being a little westward of Fort Laramie, to the farther side of the Wasatch Mountains, the elevation of the soil is uninterruptedly maintained from 5,000 to upwards of 7,000 feet above the sea level; nay, this elevated portion occupies the whole space between the true Rocky Mountains and the Californian snowy coast range from 34 degrees to 45 degrees north latitude. This district, which is ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... it had had a piece chopped out of it. Within a few yards of the surrounding glaciers, and close to the sea, the vegetation is abundant, and in many places semi-tropical, a fact which is due to the comparatively mild winters, the temperate summers, the moist climate, and the rich soil of these parts. Passing up English Reach, we now caught our first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, between Cape Pillar on one side, and Westminster Hall, Shell Bay, and Lecky Point, on the other. Steering to the north, and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... goodwill and prosperity[455]. King Leopold, in opening the Conference, made use of the inspiring words quoted at the head of this chapter, and asked the delegates to discuss the means to be adopted for "planting definitely the standard of civilisation on the soil of Central Africa." ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... hurry, for they were in possession of my chief quarters, where they fed without reserve at the expense of my blood. But, considering it would be easier to extirpate the ferocious colony in the infancy of their settlement, than after they should be multiplied and naturalised to the soil, I took the advice of my friend, who, to prevent such misfortunes, went always close shaved, and made the boy of our mess cut off my hair, which had been growing since I left the service of Lavement; and the second mate lent me an old bobwig to supply the loss ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... went down to Guantanamo Bay to put some coal on and landed 40 Marines in the Morning. we wer the first to put foot on Cuban soil in this war. The 9th the Marblehead and Dolphin Bombarded the place and made them look like Munkys; they ran away and left ...
— The Voyage of the Oregon from San Francisco to Santiago in 1898 • R. Cross

... notwithstanding, acquitted Tyckelaer from every charge; at the same time sentencing Cornelius to be deposed from all his offices and dignities; to pay all the costs of the trial; and to be banished from the soil of the ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But the vaccine matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of which it is a peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced into the system, as a seed does in the soil. Therefore the hundredth part of a grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed, soon increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what is a very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... invasion, the impatient king was kept back by the declaration of Hereford and Norfolk that they would not cross the frontier, until definite assurances were given that the king would carry out the confirmation of the charters which he had informally ratified on foreign soil. Etiquette or pride prevented Edward himself satisfying their demand, but the Bishop of Durham and three loyal earls pledged themselves that the king would fulfil all his promises on his return. Then the two earls suffered the expedition to proceed; and on July 6 the army ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... digs a hole in the ground, in which hers are dropped to the number of dozens. The lizard does not provide shells for her eggs, but only covers them with a thick, soft skin, and they, buried in the soil, eventually ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... by Mr. Jackal came lilting along with his tail up. "Ho! ho! That is your game, is it?" said he to himself, when he saw the trail of the Crocodile in the sandy soil. So he stood outside, and said aloud, "Bless my stars! What has happened? I don't half like to go in, for whenever I come home my wife always ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... thoughtless vagabonds! yet, upon my conscience, 'tis very hard these poor fellows should scarcely have bread from the soil ...
— St. Patrick's Day • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... by the wayside. I know everything here by heart. I have moved every clod of earth with my own hands; now you say: sell and go elsewhere. Wherever I went I should be dazed and lost; when I looked at a bush I should say: that did not grow at home; the soil would be different and even the sun would not set in the same place. And what should I tell my father if he were to come looking for me when it gets too hot for him in Purgatory? He would ask me how I was to find his grave again, and Stasiek's, poor Stasiek who has ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... was leaning against an ancient alabaster vase, soil-stained, yellow with age and its long sojourn in the loam, but with traces of its carved garlands clinging to it still. He fingered it lovingly as he talked. His oration was concluding, and his voice rose high and tremulous; there were sparks in his hollow eyes.... "And ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... roofs, this fruitful soil, Bathed with an azure all divine, Where springs the tree that gives us oil, The grape ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... for feeding crops with, nitrogen appears not to stop here. Under certain conditions, the free nitrogen of the air which cannot be directly appropriated by vegetation, is oxidized in the pores of the soil to nitric acid, and thus, free of expense to the farmer, his crops are daily dressed with the most precious of ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson

... more than I wish to know; I've lived long enough in the world to know that roguery fattens on the same soil where honesty starves; and I care little whether time adds to information which opens to me more and more the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... weapons, his wrong environments for his fierce spirit. He belonged in a country at war. He had the misfortune to be in a country at peace. He belonged in a field of labor wherein weapons and armed men, sown by the need of justice, sprang from the soil. He was in a bucolic pasture, with no appeal. He was a striker with nothing save fate against which to strike. He raged behind prison-bars of circumstance. Now, for once, was an enemy for his onslaught, although even here he was restricted. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... maypole-girl. Gatty for ever smiles upon you; and Frontlet disdains to see you smile. Gatty's love is a shining quick flame; Frontlet's a slow wasting fire. Gatty likes the man that diverts her; Frontlet him who adores her. Gatty always improves the soil in which she travels; Frontlet lays waste the country. Gatty does not only smile, but laughs at her lover; Frontlet not only looks serious, but frowns at him. All the men of wit (and coxcombs their followers) are professed servants of Gatty: the politicians and pretenders give solemn worship ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... swords, our knights will seat themselves unarmed and deign to hear songs. When the world envies their present fortune they will have leisure to hear of the past! Then they will weep over the fate of their fathers, and then those tears will not soil ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... who was aware of the intimate relations subsisting between Charles Emmanuel and the Comte de Soissons, did not hesitate to urge the Princes to a resolute resistance; nor was this seed of rebellion scattered upon sterile soil. M. de Soissons pledged himself that on his return from Normandy, where he was about to sojourn for a short time, he would publicly insult the Chancellor; while M. de Lesdiguieres, who was still furious at the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... at a small group of farmhouses, with a varied walk of five miles before them. Half a mile through a shaded country lane; another half-mile along a path that led across low, damp ground through thickets of hazel and brier; a third half-mile over a light soil, increasingly sandy, beneath oaks and lindens and pines which cloaked the outlines of the slopes ahead; and finally a great mound of pure sand that slanted up into a blue sky and made ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... four miles an hour. The river still continues to rise, and is fast filling the creeks and lagoons on either side of it. The cattle enjoy the most luxuriant feed on the banks of the river—there being abundance of grass also in the flats, which far surpass those of the Murray both in richness of soil, and in extent. I cannot but consider the river as a most valuable feature of the interior: many a rich and valuable farm might be established upon it. Its seasons appear to be particularly favourable, for we have ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... Shakespeare was "deficient in just taste, and altogether unassisted by knowledge or art." And Adam Smith believed so strongly in the French doctrines that Wordsworth could call him "the worst critic, David Hume not excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced." Kames, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

... done, there at the western limit of the furrows of the plow and in the great province farther east which is one of the world's granaries. They went under and were forgotten, but they showed the way, and while their guerdon was usually six feet of prairie soil, the wheatfields, mills, and railroads came, for it is written plainly on the new Northwest that no man may live and labor for himself alone, and there are many who realizing it instinctively ask very little and freely give their best ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss

... Spain and England. Other offshoots of the original Aryans took their lives in their hands and penetrated the passes of the Himalayas, spreading all over India. Wherever they went, they seem to have held themselves superior to the aboriginal people whom they found in possession of the soil. ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis

... the many reverses which my ambition was doomed to meet with. You knew the man who opposed me; you know that a more shallow and insignificant fop and fool never yet dared to thrust his head into a deliberative assembly. But, he was rich, and I poor. He a potato, the growth of the soil; I, though generally admitted a plant of more promise and pretension—I was an exotic! He was a patrician—one of the small nobility—a growth, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... upon my lips, Italia mine, The sacred death-cry of my frozen clay! Let thy dear light from my dead body shine And to the passer-by thy message say: 'Ecco! though heaven has made my skies divine, My sons' love sanctifies my soil for aye!'" ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... The men fired their rifles as fast as they could load and reload, and the cannon on their flanks never ceased to pour shot and shell into the ranks of their opponents. The gunners were shot down, but new ones rose at once in their place. The fiercest conflict yet seen on American soil was raging here. North would not yield, South ever rushed anew to the attack, and a vast cloud of mingled flame ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler

... not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash." The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant

... called Langue-d'oc, was hardly a part of France; it had its own government, its own usages, as well as its own sweet tongue. It was lovely as the garden of the Lord ere the serpent entered therein; the soil was fruitful, the corn and wine and oil abundant. The people were unlike other people; they cared little for war, they wrote books and made love on the banks of the Rhone ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... with a great ball of frozen earth that insures the preservation of the fibrous roots, much time can be saved. It should ever be remembered that prompt, rapid growth of the transplanted tree depends on two things—plenty of small fibrous roots, and a fertile soil to receive them. It usually happens that the purchaser employs a local citizen to aid in putting his ground in order. In every rural neighborhood there are smart men—"smart" is the proper adjective; ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe

... horse was concerned, this region was so rocky that a horse could have been, there, of little use either for pastime or burden. The only creature they use for the latter purpose is a kind of large goat which is much employed on farms. The nature of the surrounding soil in these districts may be said to have first suggested the invention of wings and air-boats. The largeness of space in proportion to the space occupied by the city, was occasioned by the custom of surrounding every house with a separate garden. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... we left the boat at Brest, the men were lined up on the pier and given a sensible and appreciated address by the Commanding Officer. He told us that now more than ever before, since we were upon foreign soil, orders were to be obeyed to the letter. We were told to be careful in all that we did because by our actions the French people would judge the American nation. He advised us to do everything commanded of us by our officers with ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood

... look out of the small window; the landscape is magnificent: about twenty yards of virgin soil with Spring grass on it and the barn on the horizon. Behind—the fence, over which I see the tops of the heads ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... original estate was, or to what extent the colonel had encroached upon it, Sue never rightly knew. She had been brought up in the old faith that a Southerner is lord of the soil, but as she developed, the fact was forced home upon her that her father was not materialistic, and ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... Segur! how admirably that agreeable gossip develops the state of mind among the nobility of France!—"merry censurers of the old customs"—"enchanted by the philosophy of Voltaire"—"ridiculing the old system"—"embracing liberality as a fashion," and "gaily treading a soil bedecked with flowers, which concealed a precipice from their view!" In England, there are fewer flowers, and the precipice will ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... his side. The latter was in white satin and white slippers, her hair lying a heavy, enticing mass about her forehead and ears. Lester was brooding over the history of Egypt, its successive tides or waves of rather weak-bodied people; the thin, narrow strip of soil along either side of the Nile that had given these successive waves of population sustenance; the wonder of heat and tropic life, and this hotel with its modern conveniences and fashionable crowd set down among ancient, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... of these cottages is the Bonnicastle of the late Dr. Holland, whose spirit more or less pervades this region. It is charmingly situated on a projecting point of gray rocks veined with color, enlivened by touches of scarlet bushes and brilliant flowers planted in little spots of soil, contrasting with the evergreen shrubs. It commands a varied and delicious prospect, and has an air of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... instincts were always alive. Not a word escaped them, to warn their countrymen, that here was a power to threaten the landmarks of this federative Union, and with them the safeguards of popular and constitutional liberty; or that under this article there might be introduced, on our soil, a single Government over a vast extent of country—a Government foreign to the persons over whom it might be exercised, and capable of binding those not represented, by statutes, in all cases whatever. I find nothing ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard

... limits of our Work are already reached. Of Schiller's histories and dramas we can give no farther specimens: of his lyrical, didactic, moral poems we must take our leave without giving any. Perhaps the time may come, when all his writings, transplanted to our own soil, may be offered in their entire dimensions to the thinkers of these Islands; a conquest by which our literature, rich as it is, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... Environment: current issues: soil degradation; overgrazing; deforestation (much of the remaining forests are being cut down for fuel and building materials); desertification natural hazards: damaging earthquakes occur in Hindu Kush mountains; flooding international agreements: party to - Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... upon time as his helper. "Time and I against any two," was a maxim of Cardinal Mazarin. Time has been described as a beautifier and as a consoler; but it is also a teacher. It is the food of experience, the soil of wisdom. It may be the friend or the enemy of youth; and time will sit beside the old as a consoler or as a tormentor, according as it has been used or misused, and the past life has ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon



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