"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love. (See, e.g., C.F. von Schlichtegroll, Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus, p. 69.) Krafft-Ebing believes that this is true at the present day, and adds that it is the same in Hungary, a Hungarian official having informed him that the peasant women of the Somogyer Comitate do not think they are loved by their husbands until they have received the first box on the ear. (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, English translation of the tenth edition, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... active, were adored by their flocks, and ruled them with benevolent despotism. The tithe was specially burdensome to the poor, both because the rich pasture-lands of the wealthy were exempt from payment, while it was levied on little plots worked by the plough or spade of the peasant, and because it was constantly farmed out to men who made their bargains profitable by oppressing the needy with unfair exactions. Chief among the causes of the misery of the peasants was the extent to which arable land was converted into pasture. Commons were unjustly ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... poverty and ignorance is not new. I remember that those who first followed the Son of man, the Savior of the world, were not the learned rabbis, not the enlightened scholar, not the rich man or the pious Pharisee. They were the poor and needy, the peasant and the fisherman. I remember, also, that the more learned the slaveholder, the greater the rebel. I remember that no black skin covered so false a heart or misdirected brain, that when the radiant banner of our nationality ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... Vicar was only spiritual, let him be accursed! In Christ's name the Pope was sovereign—supreme sovereign over the bodies and souls of men—acknowledging no superior, holding the right to make and depose kings, and claiming to be supreme judge over the consciences and crimes of all—the peasant that tills the soil, and the prince that sits on ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... papers before learned bodies and have them printed. And you come with as silly a story as a Staffordshire peasant who thinks someone has been trying to poison him because he's got a stomach-ache. You may be a very admirable surgeon, but I venture to think I am more capable than you of judging in a case which I attended and ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... I,' cried the master of the ship: 'is he not sprung from the loins of a peasant? Has not the camp been his home? Was not a shield his cradle? Such power as his will craze him. Born to it, and the chance were better. Mark a sailor's word: he will sooner play the part of Maximin, than that of Antonine or Severus, or of our late ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... broad plain the ploughman's conquering share Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew, And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre The peasant's team ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... not, or what is practically the same thing, if a numerical majority of your fellow-citizens think you are not, making the most beneficial use of your property; if it be generally considered that it would be for the greater good of the greater number to divide your park and garden into peasant properties and cottage allotments, to double the wages of the workmen in your employment, or to subject you and the likes of you to a graduated income tax for the purpose of setting up national workshops to compete with you in your own trade; and, if you do not readily enter into ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... his own hard lot, and envied the riches of some persons who actually had cows and cornfields. Bonaparte inquired if some fairy were to offer to gratify all his wishes what he would ask? The poor peasant expressed, in his own opinion, some very extravagant desires, such as a dozen of cows and a good farmhouse. Bonaparte afterwards recollected the incident, and astonished the goatherd by the fulfilment of all ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who will read his Wanderer,—the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near Cuma,—may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek power to that power which is, as ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... an open sky To peasant, tyrant, priest, Bowing in fear with a dazzled eye Towards ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... of the poor family: Francois Derblay was a peasant, born and brought up in Picardy, and the son of poor parents, who, at dying, had left him little to add to what Nature had given him—a pair of strong arms and a sound, honest mind. With this fortune Francois had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the town he met a rough-looking peasant who was dragging a cat after him by a string which was fastened round ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... following: A peasant of Vatan (Indre), the paternal uncle and guardian of Mlle. Flore Brazier, known as "La Rabouilleuse." In 1799 he placed her in the house of Dr. Rouget on very satisfactory conditions for himself, Brazier. Rendered comparatively ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... events. Pearl was a sweet, comely-looking damsel, who would have made a model wife to one of her own station in life, but who was utterly unsuited for the new dignity which would be thrust upon her as soon as she crossed the threshold of the wealthy family of Yin. She was simply a peasant girl, without education and without refinement. Her days had been passed amidst scenes of poverty, and though she was a thoroughly good girl, with the high ideals that the commonest people in China everywhere have, her proper position was after all amongst the kind of people ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... rioting and drunkenness in the village came to her knowledge, and she wondered yet more whence her clansmen obtained the means for their excesses, for she felt instinctively that the origin of all this rioting must be evil. Cathleen therefore called to her an old peasant, whose wife had died of hunger in the early days of the famine, so that he himself had longed to die and join her; but when he came to her she was horror-struck by the change in him. Now he came ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... put to him; for Paddy is conscientious. Then is the science displayed on both sides. The one, a veteran, trained in all the technicalities of legal puzzles, irony, blarney, sarcasm, impudence, stock jokes, quirks, rigmarolery, brow-beating, ridicule, and subtlety; the other a poor peasant, relying only upon the justice of a good cause and the gifts of nature; without either experience, or learning, and with nothing but his native modesty to meet the forensic effrontery of ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... Robert Burns: high duchesses were captivated with the chivalrous ways of the man; recognized that here was the true chivalry, and divine nobleness of bearing,—as indeed they well might, now when the Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down among them again! Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in Drury Lane or West-End drawing-rooms, yet as they do it in Valhalla and the General Assembly of ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness, even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living. Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously congratulate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the white Provence roses which climbed over ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... but not impersonally," she cried. "You feel it intellectually but not with your heart. You cannot see that a kindred soul lives in the Russian peasant and the German labourer, the British toiler and the French artificer. They are all pouring out their blood for the sake of their dream, a politician's dream. Freedom isn't won by wars. It must be won, if ever, by moral sacrifice ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... performance of duty stamps with a nobility which is not confined to great men—a nobility which kings can neither give nor take away—a nobility which is very, very difficult to attain unto, but which is open alike to the prince and the peasant, and must be wrought hard for and won—or lost with shame,—for, as ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the true cross. The priests manufacture little crosses of wax, on which, as they assure the faithful, they stick splinters of the real one. These little crosses, wrapped up in paper and packed in baskets, are placed ready for distribution, that is, for sale. Every peasant generally takes three: one to put in his room, one in his stable, and another in his barn. The most wonderful portion of the business is that these crosses must be renewed every year, as in that period they lose their ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... when kings ascended their thrones, princes died, artists painted their masterpieces, that will bring us to our finest opportunities of success? To the soul there is little greater or less chance of success offered by the degree of "polish" in the education we have the money to procure: the peasant who cannot read or write may achieve the purpose of life before the savant: we know it without caring to acknowledge it to ourselves: the education that we really require is the education of daily conduct, the education of character, the education by which we say to ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... eloquence, And large oaths, with the tongue thrust in the cheek, And promises, as if they were as gods, And no God held the forked bolt above! Turning all ignorance, disaffection, hatred, Religion, and the peasant's moody want, To glut themselves with hard-wrung copper coins, Verjuic'd with hot tears, thin and watery blood; Brazening the conscious lie unto the world That it was done for hallowing Freedom's sake, Until the names of "Freedom," "Patriot," stank, Blown on and poison'd ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... and short-breathed phrases of Liszt; no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts; his ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... occurs frequently in the case of sensitive children. How she was restored to herself and reinstated in her father's affection forms a narrative of unusual interest and truth to life. Whereas in Heidi there is only one other childish figure—if we except the droll peasant boy Peter—we have here a lively and varied array of children. Manly, generous Dino; Mux, the irrepressible; and the two girls form a truly lovable group. The grown-ups, too, are contrasted with much humor and genuine feeling. The story of Cornelli, ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... glad," answered Richter, with a note of sadness, in his voice. "Do not despise us before you know more of us. We are still feudal in Germany—of the Middle Ages. The peasant is a serf. He is compelled to serve the lord of the land every year with so much labor of his hands. The small farmers, the 'Gross' and 'Mittel Bauern', we call them, are also mortgaged to the nobles who tyrannize our ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... would it have been," cried the soul of the old Florentine, "had my countrymen still kept it as it was, and not brought upon themselves the stench of the peasant knave out of Aguglione, and that other from Signa, with his eye to a bribe! Had Rome done its duty to the emperor, and so prevented the factions that have ruined us, Simifonte would have kept its beggarly upstart ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... wearing an odd costume, a long frock made like a peasant's smock with an insignia of two crossed logs and a flame embroidered upon one sleeve. With her dark eyes, her dark, rather coarse hair, which she wore parted in the middle over a low forehead, and her white, unusually colorless skin, she suggested a foreigner. Nevertheless, although her mother and ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... twenty yards below, on a similar natural platform, sat a circle of peasant children, their eyes large with wonderment and interest. In their center, also seated on the earth, was the Queen of Galavia. She was dressed in a short walking skirt and a blue jersey, and as the man gripped the pine root to which he ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... those Pontoons at Seligenstadt, is near eight miles westward [NORTHwestward, but let us use the briefer term] from Aschaffenburg: Dettingen is a poor peasant Village, of some size, close on the Mayn, and on our side of it. A Brook, coming down from the Spessart Mountains, falls into the Mayn there; having formed for itself, there and upwards, a considerable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was a peasant house: and on a little loggia in the sun two peasants in white shirtsleeves and black Sunday suits were sitting drinking wine, and talking, talking. Peasant youths in black hats, their sweethearts in dark stuff dresses, wearing no hat, but a black silk or a white silk scarf, passed slowly ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... of Euripides is not in Mycenae, in the open country, but on the borders of Argolis, and before a solitary and miserable cottage. The owner, an old peasant, comes out and in a prologue tells the audience how matters stand in the royal house, with this addition, however, to the incidents related in the two plays already considered, that not content to treat Electra with ignominy, and to leave her in a state of celibacy, they had forced her to marry ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... them among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland: Titans, male and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift, prone on floods of sentiment. The blue-flocked peasant swinging behind his oxen of a morning, the gaily-kerchiefed fruit-woman, the jackass-driver, even the doctor of those regions, have done more for their fellows. Horrible reflection! Lady Judith is serene above it, but it frets at Richard ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally minded; there was nothing to suggest national unity to their imagination. They could not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of crowned sovereigns, not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those symbols which bring home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to a national entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the "best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, but anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of an outside world ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing, approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if you knew you were to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... toward the speaker, coloring with embarrassment to hear himself lectured by this young peasant girl, whose ideas, however, had much more virility ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... a peasant whom he thought rude, "You are better fed than taught." "Shud think I was," replied the clodhopper, "as I feeds myself and you ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... incident. An aged peasant, in a sudden fit of weakness, had stumbled on the road, and, in falling, had struck his head on a stone and had lost consciousness. He was an old peasant of the usual Irish type, coarsely but cleanly dressed. Lying beside him was a leather bag, within which were odds and ends of food and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... apple-trees planted in the stubble here and there, and brown mud walls of hamlets; a church-top, a copse, an avenue of dwarf limes leading to the three-parts farm, quarter residence of an enriched peasant striking new roots, or decayed proprietor pinching not to be severed from ancient. Descending on the deep green valley in Summer is like a change of climes. The chateau stood square at a branch of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Confederation of National Chambers of Commerce or CONCANACO; Coordinator for Foreign Trade Business Organizations or COECE; Federation of Unions Providing Goods and Services or FESEBES; National Chamber of Transformation Industries or CANACINTRA; National Peasant Confederation or CNC; National Union of Workers or UNT; Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers or CROM; Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants or CROC; Roman ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... his stay in Edinburgh, his "irascible humour" never went so far as this, "the contumely of condescension" must have entered pretty deeply into the soul of the proud peasant when he made the following memorable entry in his diary, on the 9th April, 1787. After some remarks on the difficulty of true friendship, and the hazard of losing men's respect by being too confidential ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... delight, His day of mercy is the day of fight. But when the field is fought, the battle won, Though drenched with gore, his woes are but begun: His deeper deeds as yet ye know by name; The slaughtered peasant and the ravished dame, 300 The rifled mansion and the foe-reaped field, Ill suit with souls at home, untaught to yield. Say with what eye along the distant down Would flying burghers mark the blazing town? How view the column of ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Rope-dancers performed the most dangerous dances and salti-mortali. In Rome even elephants were trained to mount the rope. Flying-machines of a construction unknown to us are also mentioned, on which bold aeronauts traversed the air. Alkiphron tells a story about a peasant who, on seeing a juggler pulling little bullets from the noses, ears, and heads of the spectators, exclaimed: "Let such a beast never enter my yard, or else everything would soon disappear." Descriptions of these tricks are frequent in ancient writers, particularly in the indignant ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Ivn Mosvitch? Well, I've been to him too. I went there the other day. I had something else to settle, you know. Well, so I sat and chatted awhile and then came to the point. "Tell me, Ivn Mosvitch," says I, "how's one to manage an affair of this kind? Supposing," says I, "a peasant as is a widower married a second wife, and supposing all the children he has is a daughter by the first wife, and a daughter by the second. Then," says I, "when that peasant dies, could an outsider get hold of the ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... men, with whom one can do business—instead of the peasant saloon keepers and blatherskite labor leaders whom they choose ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... Except the Fergusons', hers was the only house in the city with rooms large enough to dance in, and that ball is still the most dazzling I can remember. I wore a rose-colored tulle skirt with a peasant waist of rose-colored satin, and father, for a great surprise, had given me a pair of pink silk stockings. No other girl in town had such a beautiful thing, and in the dressing-room they would not ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... brief records in Scripture, is felt by every thoughtful man to contain within its narrow compass adequate direction for, and to set forth the ideal of, human life. That is not because He went through all varieties of earthly experience, for He did not. The life of a Jewish peasant nineteen centuries ago was extremely unlike the life of a Manchester merchant, of a college professor, of a successful barrister, of a struggling mother, in this present day. But in the narrow compass of that life ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... know, but what does knowledge signify without the fear of God? The humble peasant who serves God is far better than the proud philosopher who neglects himself and considers the courses of the stars. Whoever knows himself well contemns himself, and takes no delight in human praise. If I should know all things in the world, and yet ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... thatched building, not very different from a peasant's hut; but near it there stood all sorts of long ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... patriotism in other countries is blind impulse, growing out of mere attachment to the soil, or the power of custom, or a helpless feeling of dependence on things as they are. "If my father in his grave could hear of this war," said a Spanish peasant, "his bones would not rest." Yet what earthly interest, what intelligible concern had Spanish peasants in the rivalships and struggles of princes who thought of nothing but their own or their family aggrandizement. ...
— The Spirit Proper to the Times. - A Sermon preached in King's Chapel, Boston, Sunday, May 12, 1861. • James Walker
... the Bavarians and French until they run away terror-stricken, and restore us to our dear Emperor Francis. But I am unversed in negotiations and devising shrewd tricks and stratagems. I am only a plain peasant, who has a great deal of love and fidelity in his heart, but only few thoughts in his head. Baron von Hormayr and the archduke may do the thinking for me. They shall be the head, and I the arm and heart. Speckbacher and Wallner yonder have good heads too, though I do not wish to say ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring success, as one might watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When she was talking ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key. But boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule. Denny and Birch followed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fairly on the road. Persons whom he met—and they were not all of the peasant class—seeing a traveller jaunty in plumed cap, light blue camail, pointed buskins, and close-fitting hose the color of the camail, sword at his side, and javelin in hand, stayed to observe him long as he was in sight, never dreaming they were permitted to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded. Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction against Republicanism provoked by ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... notable or distinct figure than Giotto is in all the history of Florence. He was born a peasant, in the village of Vespignano in the Mugello, the same district which afterward gave birth to Fra Angelico. Giotto had at least part of his professional training in the great cathedral at Assisi built over the bones of St. Francis, was one of those homely, vigorous ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... stillness of the moon. Well for him that, in reparation for those hours stolen from night, the hardy physical labor commenced with dawn. Students would not be the sad dyspeptics they are if they worked as many hours in the open air as my scholar-peasant. But even in him you could see that the mind had begun a little to affect the frame. They who task the intellect must pay the penalty with the body. Ill, believe me, would this work-day world get on if all within it were hard-reading, studious animals, playing the deuce ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... remain enlocked in each other's arms, murmuring words of mutual consolation. Love levels all ranks, but not more than misery—perhaps not so much. In the hour of despair there is no difference between prince and peasant, between the high-born dame and the lowly damsel accustomed to serve her caprices and wait upon ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... 1815, and the gradual exhaustion of the best lands since then, have brought about a decline of the industry, which is now confined to a few estates in the Blue Mountains and to scattered "settler" or peasant cultivation in the same districts ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the king and M. Guizot, ended in ruin. The latter saved himself by ignominious flight. He clothed himself as a peasant, and in this manner crossed the frontier. He afterward gave an eloquent description of his escape. So hurried was his departure from Paris, that he could not even bid his mother good-bye. He loved her fondly; ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... comparative ideal. The Russian peasant enjoys frugal life with his family and few humble friends. Is it likely that such feel the autocratic pressure of their Tsar? Perhaps there may be many cases wherein private rights have been ruthlessly invaded, but are not such results usually due to insolent perversions by minor officials? Doubtless ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the confusion, the whoop, the holla, the hallos, the hurrah, the abrasion, the snort of the hunter, the concussion, the sward, the open, the earth stopper, the strangulated hernia, the glad cry of the hound as he brings home the quivering seat of the peasant's pantaloons, the yelp of joy as he lays at his master's feet, the strawberry mark of the rustic, all, all are exhilarating to the sons of our ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... gomes to see Mina wunst more already," said Mrs. Schulenberg, whom Phillida encountered on the second flight of stairs, descending with a market-basket on her arm. She was not the strong-framed peasant, but of lighter build and somewhat finer fiber than the average immigrant, and her dark hair and eyes seemed to point to South Germany ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... eighteen thousand dollars in English sovereigns for them. He wanted gold to carry back with him for the jewels that he had brought out of the kingdom of Rumania. He seemed a simple, anxious person. He wished to carry his treasures with him like a peasant. The sapphires looked better in the daylight. There ought to have been seven thousand dollars' profit in them, perhaps more; seven thousand dollars, at any rate, that very day in the London market. Hargrave took them to the Empire Club and put them ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... security is at an end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the mercy of some blind elemental force. The earthquake burying an entire population under its falling houses; the flood that carries away the drowned body of the peasant with the carcasses of his cattle and the beams torn from his roof-tree; or the victorious army massacring those who defend their lives, and making prisoners of the rest—pillaging in the name of the sword, and thanking God to the roar of cannon—are ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... early manufacturers. The art of wine-growing, however, is now followed with more brains, more experience, and more capital, and the result is in many instances excellent. The vin ordinaire of California, largely made from the Zinfandel grape, has been described as a "peasant's wine," but when drunk on the spot compares fairly with the cheaper wines of Europe. Some of the finest brands of Californian red wine (such as that known as Las Palmas), generally to be had from the producers only, are sound and well-flavoured ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... nations. Napoleon did not understand the power of such explosions when he invaded Spain and Russia. One may easily disaggregate the facile mind of a crowd, but one can do nothing before the permanent soul of a race. Certainly the Russian peasant is a very indifferent being, gross and narrow by nature, yet at the first news of invasion he was transformed. One may judge of this fact on reading a letter written by Elizabeth, wife of the Emperor ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... When first the peasant, long inclined to roam, Forsakes his rural sports and peaceful home, Pleased with the scene the smiling ocean yields, He scorns the verdant meads and flowery fields: Then dances jocund o'er the watery way, While the breeze whispers, and the streamers play: Unbounded prospects in his bosom ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... Most bulbuls are pretty birds and are most particular about their personal appearance. Black bulbuls are as untidy as it is possible for a bird to be. The two types of bulbul stand to one another in much the same relationship as does the honest Breton peasant to the inhabitant of the Quartier Latin ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... is striding across a field in the twilight shadow of a hill. Beyond, where the fold of the hill dips down into the field, another peasant is driving a team of oxen at a plow. The distant figures are aglow with golden mellow light, the last light of day, which deepens the gloom of the shadowing hillside. The sower's cap is pulled tight about his head, hiding under its shade the unseeing eyes. The mouth is brutal and ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... met them," Ruth added. "They told him that Little Poland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a 'Man with the Hoe' around ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... furnished peasant fashion, in the basement of the "Grey Swan" hotel. Through two windows set high in the left wall, the gloomy light of a late winter afternoon sickers in. Under the windows there stands a bed of soft wood, varnished yellow, in ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... virtues to the vervain—found growing on Mount Calvary, and therefore possessing every sort of miraculous power, according to the logic of simple peasant folk—the Druids had counted it among their sacred plants. "When the dog-star arose from unsunned spots" the priests gathered it. Did not Shakespeare's witches learn some of their uncanny rites from these ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... picture to the disgraced clerk is that of "the noble peasant Isaac Ashford[40]," who won from Crabbe's pen a gracious panegyric. He says ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... was a natural enough mistake. To her, Monsieur Covington was still the husband of madame. She had stood in the little chapel in Paris when madame was married. When one was married, one was married; and that was all there was to it for all time. So, doubtless, Marie reasoned. It was the simple peasant way—the old, honest, ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the same words we need not inquire. Certain it is that accuracy would be likely to generate the love of accuracy, and that again to react so as to compel adherence to the form of words which the ear had been led to expect. Readers of Grimm will remember the anxiety betrayed by a peasant woman of Niederzwehr, near Cassel, that her very words and expressions should be taken down. They who have studied the records collectors have made of the methods they have adopted, and the assistance they ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church, either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It was originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit was ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and heart of the most memorable movement of modern times,—the German peasant, Martin Luther. With a nature originally rougher, more earth-born, and of less genial goodness than that of Joan of Arc, but with a shaping imagination of the same realizing intensity, the beautiful myths of Romish superstition, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... and unrestrained life at Bratvold, and so at first she always dreaded the slightest allusion to it. She had at the same time quite made up her mind to confess openly how matters stood, and to say plainly that although he was nothing but a simple peasant and fisherman, she, Madeleine Garman, would be true to him. But in the course of conversation she could not discover even the most distant hint at her adventure; it did not even appear that anything really was known about it; her past life was, in fact, never mentioned in any way, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... of the day to lay great stress upon what they call "imagination" and "invention," the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... gathered about a puppet-show, somewhat like the English Punch and Judy, shrieking with laughter like so many children; a group of girls consulting an old fortune-teller; pretty peasant girls from the hills slily listening to compliments from the town gallants, evidently to the great indignation of their country swains; in short, every way we turned, some picture that would have ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... conditions of men came together to dwell upon considerations interesting to all equally, is not adapted to modern society, wherein one man differs from another in knowledge even more than a king once differed from a peasant in rank. When all were ignorant, a mass chanted in an unknown tongue, and a short address warning against the only vices known to ignorant people, sufficed for the whole community. But what form of service can be even imagined, that could satisfy Bridget, who cannot ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the man as it tugs at the woman; the smirk of the well-fitted prince is no different from the smirk of the Sunday-clad peasant; and the veins of the elders tingle with the same thrill that sets their fresh-frocked grandchildren skipping. Never trust people who pretend that they have no joy in ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... with himself for having taken the cap and stick away from Jan; it looked as if he had at the same time relieved the peasant of ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... solemn, unsmiling droop. Her best feature was her brown, melancholy, imaginative eyes. She looked like the American-born daughter of Swedish or Norwegian emigrants and her large-knuckled hands, too, bespoke the peasant strain. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... the peasants stolidly resisted the socialization of the country, but this did not discourage the bolshevist leaders. "We have never spoken of liberty," said Lenin early in 1921. "We are exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat in the name of the minority because the peasant class in Russia is not yet with us. We shall continue to exercise it until they submit. I estimate the dictatorship ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... lips breathed forth a psalm. The congregation began to assemble, and Flemming went up with them to the house of the Lord. In the body of the church he found the pews all filled or locked; they seemed to belong to families. He went up into the gallery, and looked over the psalm-book of a peasant, while the congregation sang the sublime old hymn of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... forgot all the perils, and cares, and pompous irksomeness of a royal life; and was as happy, while playing with his child, as the humblest peasant in the realm of Sweden. How gayly did they dance along the marble floor of the palace, this valiant king, with his upright, martial figure, his war-worn visage, and commanding aspect, and the small, round form of Christina, with her rosy face of childish ...
— Biographical Stories - (From: "True Stories of History and Biography") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... how he would take it when he saw me and recognized me for the peasant girl he had insulted. Would he be abashed, confused? I thought he must be; and the one pleasant thing in what was going to befall me was that I should see ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... honourable and learned gentleman who now represents the county of Waterford, was a Protestant freeholder in Louth to be punished for the crime of a Catholic freeholder in Clare? If the principle of the honourable and learned Member for Newport be sound, the franchise of the Irish peasant was property. That franchise the Ministers under whom the honourable and learned Member held office did not scruple to take away. Will he accuse those Ministers of robbery? If not, how can he bring such an accusation against ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Heaven and earth! Her large, meaning eyes, glow beneath her arched brows, while her auburn hair, laid in smooth folds over her ears and braided into a heavy circle at the back of her head, gives her the fascinating beauty of a Norman peasant. Annette plays around her, is dressed in her very best,—for Marston is proud of the child's beauty, and nothing is withheld that can gratify the ambition of the mother, so characteristic, to dress with fantastic colours: the child gambols at her feet, views its many-coloured dress, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... own French uniform beneath it. In front of him, his white moustache bristling with fury, and murder in every line of his wolf-like face, the old forester lifted a hatchet in both hands, while his wife, no longer the trembling servile old peasant of half an hour before, was tightening the knots of the rope she had thrown round Laval's body, binding him tightly to ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... the storm-beaten party sat before a blazing fire in the cottage of the German peasant. Their clothing was dry, and they were quite comfortable. The only thing that disturbed them was the anxiety of their friends at Friedrichshafen. Possibly something else disturbed the young baronet, for the lady, ingenuous enough to talk and act as she felt, seemed ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... he spent in land-surveying he obtained a more practical knowledge of the laws pertaining to public and private property as they affected the lives and habits of both squire and peasant. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... from actual observation. I look out of the windows of my house in Fukui. Here is a peasant who comes back after the winter to prepare his field for cultivation. The man's horizon of ideas, like his vocabulary, is very limited. His view of actual life is bounded by a few rice-fields, a ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... for their existence. Their plough, an heirloom from remote antiquity, merely scratches the earth. The use of superior implements would result in superior tillage and augmented crops; but it would be as simple to induce the peasant to change his religion as to get him to forsake the plough used by his ancestors. The implements of daily life mostly belong to the barbarous ages. Attempt to introduce any other and you are rebuked by the reply: "It is not the custom; my father used this article, and therefore it is my ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... renunciation of all worldly goods. He lived on what was given to him to eat from day to day; he nursed the lepers and the sick. Ever described as a most lovable person, he won by his preaching the hearts of people of all classes, from the King of France to the humblest peasant. He wrote beautiful hymns in praise of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and had a great love for every living thing. The birds were said to have flocked around him because they loved him, and we read that he talked to them and called them his 'little sisters.' An old writer tells this story ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... should not be inattentive to the public feelings expressed in theatres. Mr. Perceval thinks he has disarmed the Irish: he has no more disarmed the Irish than he has resigned a shilling of his own public emoluments. An Irish peasant fills the barrel of his gun full of tow dipped in oil, butters up the lock, buries it in a bog, and allows the Orange bloodhound to ransack his cottage at pleasure. Be just and kind to the Irish, and you will indeed disarm them; rescue them from the degraded servitude in which they are ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very far away from ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... a big man of thirty-five; a type of the strong-limbed, quick-witted peasant, who is by nature active as a squirrel and industrious as a beaver; and who, if once fired with ambition, soon learns to direct all his energies to a chosen end, and infallibly wins his way from the cart-tracks and the muck-wagons to office stools and black coats. Not yet dressed ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... the Negroes as peasant proprietors the Bureau was severely handicapped, as I have shown. Nevertheless, something was done. Abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of $400,000 derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... purple pane.] And see, my signal rises, Mildred's star! I never saw it lovelier than now It rises for the last time. If it sets, 'Tis that the re-assuring sun may dawn. [As he prepares to ascend the last tree of the avenue, TRESHAM arrests his arm.] Unhand me—peasant, by your grasp! Here's gold. 'Twas a mad freak of mine. I said I'd pluck A branch from the white-blossomed shrub beneath The casement there. Take this, and hold ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... your wond'ring eyes A race of beings that must 'cite surprise; The strangest compound truth and contradiction Owe to dame Nature, or the pen of Action; Where wit and folly, pride and modest worth, Go hand in hand, or jostle at a birth; Where prince, peer, peasant, politician meet, And beard each other in the public street; 6 Where ancient forms, though still admired, Are phantoms that have long expired; Where science droops 'fore sovereign folly, And arts are sick with melancholy; Where knaves gain ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... children, and devouring them. "The official records frequently speak of the mail-bag being carried off by wild beasts." So great was the damage done by these depredations, that "the company offered a reward for each tiger's head, sufficient to maintain a peasant's family in comfort for three months; an item of expenditure it deemed so necessary, that, when under extraordinary pressure it had to suspend all payments, the tiger-money and diet allowance for prisoners were the sole exceptions to the rule." Still more formidable ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... that I would look upon every Prussian peasant child as a being who could complain of me before God if I did not provide for him the best education, as a man and a Christian, which it was possible for me to ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... I've made,' thought Gudbrand, when, just at that moment, he descried a peasant driving along a hog so fine and fat that ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... has to keep in concealment and travels from town to town as best he may. He has heard of our airship, I suppose from inquiries the revolutionists have been making in our behalf, and when he unexpectedly came upon us just now he was not frightened, as an ordinary peasant would have been. But he did not know ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... Chinaman, in the robes of a mandarin, lectured on Confucius. The Armenian, in fez and baggy trousers, spoke of the Unspeakable Turk. The mandolin player, dressed like a bull fighter, held musical conversaziones, interpreting the peasant songs of Andalusia. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... hour's walk from the hamlet, out on the point, lived Soeren Man. In his young days he had roamed the seas like all the others, but according to custom had later on settled himself down as a fisherman. Otherwise, he was really more of a peasant and belonged to that branch of the family which had devoted itself to the soil, and for this had won much respect. Soeren Man was the son of a farmer, but on reaching man's estate, he married a fisher girl and gave himself up to fishing ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... outraged and then strangled in the woods a peasant woman, the mother of a family. On this occasion there could be no question of a miscarriage of justice or even of any suggestion of such a thing, because the prisoner pleaded guilty. That is a ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Wicklow, some five or six miles from Dublin, there lived, not many years ago, a humble peasant family, by the name of O'Shaughnessy. Michael O'Shaughnessy worked in the bog—that is, he cut up the turf of the bogs, and piled it in stacks for drying—so making the peat which is the common fuel of Ireland. He was very poor, and ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... eyes looked into the garden. One moment the figure rested upon the wall, as if exhausted by the exertion, or listening for some sound. It was a young man, in the garb of a peasant, who sat upon the wall; but the heavy, black mustache little suited this peaceful dress, and his bold air, verging on insolence, seemed to challenge ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... by a comfortable English or American farmer would represent wicked waste and shameful indulgence to a much richer French peasant. I, myself, know a laborer on wages of less than twenty shillings a week, who by thrift has bought ten acres of the magnificent garden land between Fontainebleau and the Seine, worth many thousand pounds, ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... The toil-worn peasant looked with eager eyes O'er the blue waters, to those distant skies; Where no one groaned 'neath unrequited toil, Where the strong laborer might own the soil On which he stood; and, in his manhood's strength, Smile to behold his growing fields at length;— Where his brave sons might easily ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... when she emerged, "she is just a simple peasant girl, and only needs to be told. It is very ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... I will disguise myself." Hiding his royal hat under the bench, he put on Happy Toko's broad-rimmed peasant hat. It turned down all 'round and almost hid his face. Then he turned his robe inside out and ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... history. Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman's Crede (1394), and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was {32} appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... The soldier, a peasant from Nijni Novgorod, with a red, pock-marked face, put the paper into the sleeve of his coat, winked to his companion, a broad-shouldered Tchouvash, and then the prisoner and the soldiers went to the front entrance, out of the prison yard, and through the town ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... Europe, I know of none, save Italy, in which the characters are the same in every class and gradation. The appeal you would make to the Italian noble must be the same you would address to the humble peasant on his property. The point of view is invariably identical; the sympathies are always alike. No matter what differences education may have instituted and habits implanted, the nobleman and his lackey think and feel and reason alike. Separate ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... A young peasant girl, one Jeanne d'Arc, had been brought up in the village of Domremy, hard by the Lorraine border. The district, always French in feeling, had lately suffered much from Burgundian raids; and this young damsel, brooding over the treatment ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the French sense does not well distinguish, and has no fine perception of that affinity with the peasant which remains with the great ladies of the old civilisation of Italy, and has so long disappeared from those of the younger civilisations of France and England—a paradox. The peasant's gravity, directness, and carelessness—a kind of uncouthness which is neither graceless nor, in any intolerable ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... the fold from within. Like them, as they re-echoed Colet—the saintly Dean of St. Paul's,—he passionately favoured the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular and placing them in the hands, or at any rate bringing them to the familiar knowledge, of peasant as well as prelate. But surely one must know very little of the teachings of the stoutest Churchmen of Holbein's day and acquaintance not to know also that they encouraged if they did not plant these opinions ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... the motley variety of human types gathered under Wallenstein's banner, while giving to each of his figures a fairly distinct individuality. With a little study of costume a painter could paint them all. There is the wretched Peasant, who has been reduced to beggary and is willing to retrieve his fortunes by gambling with loaded dice; the sagacious Sergeant, who always knows more than other people, and prides himself upon 'the fine touch and the right tone' that can only be acquired ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... which has no national institutions must show its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams of what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier, the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, possessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell said 'had the ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though she could not come at the world's other ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas and images ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... was out of the palace, he looked round him on all sides, and perceiving a peasant going into the country, hastened after him; and when he had overtaken him, made a proposal to him to change habits, which the man agreed to. When they had made the exchange, the countryman went about his business, and Aladdin to the city. ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... consideration. Julia Cloud looked at them almost with awe, recognizing by instinct the priceless worth of them, and almost afraid at the idea of living a common, daily life on them. For Julia Cloud had read about rugs. She knew that in far lands poor peasant people, whole families, sometimes wove their history into them for a mere pittance; and they had come to mean something almost ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill |
