"Pruning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rankle in the bosom of the people, and ambition to fire the breasts of kings, the world may expect ever and anon to hear the voice of Joel sounding out this trumpet call, "Prepare ye war; wake up the mighty men; let all the men of war draw near—beat your ploughshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears—put ye in the sickle, ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... very benevolent man. Have you seen Barry Cornwall's new volume? He is one of the best writers of blank verse we have, but I think blank verse is not much in favour with you. The rhyme that is now in fashion runs rather too wild to please me. It seems to want pruning and nailing up. A sonnet, like a rose tree may be allowed to grow straggling, but a long poem should be trained into some order. I hope you and your family have got well through this hard winter. Mrs. Cary, who has hitherto almost uniformly enjoyed good health, has suffered much from ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... is unexcelled. It is of rapid growth, entirely hardy anywhere at the north, requires very little attention in the way of pruning, is never troubled by insects, and has the merit of great cleanliness. It is equally valuable for the lawn. In fall, it changes its summer-green for purest gold, and is a thing of beauty until it loses ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... and many other favourite sports, and commenced to dig in the piece of kitchen garden under their grandmother's direction. In fact so zealous did Tuttu become that he borrowed a knife from one of the farm labourers who was vine pruning, and cut the whole of the branches off a vine near the house, ending with a terrible gash in his own thumb, which necessitated his being carried in an ox-cart to the hospital in Siena, supported in his grandmother's arms; while Tutti walked behind weeping bitterly, under the ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... just. And while his Master prepared him beforehand for these trials, He had ends to accomplish in his servant by means of them. There were other trials, also, besides these, which were very heavy to him; but in all we could discern the Husbandman pruning the branch, that it might bear more fruit. As he himself said one day in the church of Abernyte, when he was assisting Mr. Manson, "If we only saw the whole, we should see that the Father is doing little else in the world but ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... interest in her vegetable gardens, and superintended the planting of the different seeds. When vegetables were ready for pulling, from time to time, all the Court ladies were supplied with a kind of small pruning fork and gathered in the crop. Her Majesty seemed to enjoy seeing us work in the fields, and when the fit seized her she would come along and help. In order to encourage us in this work, Her Majesty would give a small present to the one who showed the best results ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... open profligacy, his utter want of honour, is disclosed by one of his own opinions. Corrupted ere yet he had left his home, whilst in age a boy, there is, however, the comfort of reflecting that he outlived his vices. Fox, with a green apron tied around his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit-trees at St. Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career recurs ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... the room and down the hall, followed by Mary Anne. The door into the clothes chute was securely bolted, and when I opened it I saw the evidence of the woman's story. A pruning-ladder had been brought from where it had lain against the stable and now stood upright in the clothes shaft, its end resting against the wall between the first ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... foliage becomes poor and scanty, and the tree has a tendency to run too much to thick bole, and thick branches, which are poorly supplied with smaller branches and foliage. When about thirty years old, I have generally found this tree to be a poor shader, but it can be much improved by severe pruning, or rather lopping. When thinning out shade on this estate about twenty years ago, a twelve year old tree had every branch removed preparatory to cutting down, but by some accident the tree was left standing, and the stumps ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... pippins and leather-coats, was doubtless much superior. Nevertheless, it pleases me to think of the good minister, walking in the shadows of these old, fantastically-shaped apple-trees, here plucking some of the fruit to taste, there pruning away a too luxuriant branch, and all the while computing how many barrels may be filled, and how large a sum will be added to his stipend by their sale. And the same trees offer their fruit to me as freely as they did to him,—their old branches, like withered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism—the immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeed part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the accoucheur, of the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and breast-plate, anoint his head ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... rose garden, which had taken the place of the old fernery, he could see Irene snipping and pruning, with a little basket on her arm. She was never idle, it seemed to him, and he envied her now that he himself was idle nearly all his time. He went down to her. She held up a stained glove and smiled. A piece of lace tied under her chin concealed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... will harden them so that they will not be apt to be injured by the cabbage beetle, as well as chilled and put back by the change. Should the plants be getting too large before the season for transplanting, they should be checked by root pruning,—drawing a sharp knife within a couple of inches of the stalk. If it is desirable still further to check their growth, or harden them, transplant into another cold frame, allowing each plant double ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... all accepted the kind invitation, And much bustle it caused in the plumed creation; Such ruffling of feathers, such pruning of coats, Such chirping, such whistling, such clearing of throats, Such polishing bills, and such oiling of pinions, Had never been known in the biped dominions. Peacock ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... war, when the property destroyed is their own and not to be replaced. When wars are no longer the usurer's opportunity, but the consumption of his wealth, Mammon himself will beg that swords may be beaten into plow-shares and spears into pruning-hooks. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds, clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and has become more treacherous and cruel than the Indian ally whose aid he has invoked. Judge Thou betwixt us, O Lord; look upon this scene! Strengthen Thou mine arm to the battle, for here I vow that I will henceforth give my life to this work. I will till the fields no more. I will beat my pruning hook into a sword. I will slay, and spare not, and Thou, O God of battles, shalt be with me. Thou shalt strengthen mine arm; Thou shalt give unto me the victory. Thou shalt deliver mine enemy into mine hand. I know it, I see it! For Thou art God, and I am Thy servant, and I will avenge upon him who ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... why sweep away these fantastic figures who, without any religious character, recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a helping hand with the pruning knife in the vineyard, or with the pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin." The salt had lost its savour, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... for two years previous to its publication he was employed in the drudgery of laborious compilations for the booksellers, his few vacant hours were fondly devoted to the patient revisal and correction of this his greatest poem; pruning its luxuriances, or supplying its defects, till it appeared at length finished with exactness and polished into beauty. While writing his History of England, he would read Hume, Rapin-Thoyras, Carte, and Kennet, in the morning, make a few notes, ramble with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on very well under Lowell's discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Father made a mistake, and wrote a blessing instead of a curse on that amulet?" said Daphne anxiously. They ran back to the house as fast as they could go. Melas was just coming out of the farm-yard with a pruning-hook ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... no pruning. You can hardly read a paper in the Rambler or Idler, and, I will add, the Adventurer, without deriving from it some improvement, either moral or intellectual, or both. The structure and cadence of Johnson's sentences is certainly monotonous; but I seldom read half a page without being struck by ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... dealing with your little "olive plants," "let patience have her perfect work," and of a truth you shall "be perfect and entire wanting nothing." Much of redeeming grace is needed to enable the parent to be calm and kind under the many trying circumstances connected with the pruning and training of the "fruit of the womb." It is a source of great joy, however, to know that God's grace is sufficient ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... incomparable fertility of invention, but his fertility is always checked by that just sense, which made him reject every superfluous thing which his vast imagination could offer, and to retain only what was necessary and useful. Judgment guided the hand of this admirable gardener, and was the pruning hook he employed to lop off every ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... they have yet thought it proper to prune, any more than to graft upon Cocao-Trees: There is however a sort of Pruning which, in my Opinion, would be very advantageous to it. These sort of Trees, for example, have always (some more than others) dead Branches upon them, chiefly upon the Extremities of the Boughs; and there is no room to doubt but it would be very proper to lop off these useless Branches, ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... heard nothing from him, he has been profiting by his opportunities, and fortune has sent him favoring gales. He obtained another employment in the custom-house; then he trafficked in negroes; then he failed—an occurrence which for certain business men is like a good pruning for trees, making them sprout again with fresh vigor—and now he is so prosperous that he has formed the resolution of entering the highest circles of the aristocracy, under the title of marquis or duke. Pepita is frightened and troubled at this unexpected turn of fortune, but I tell her not ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... reply to them in a few words. One must marvel at the clearsighted intelligence, the sureness, the mastery with which Rashi conveys the gist of a discussion as well as the value of the details, easily taking up each link in the chain of question and answer, pruning away superfluities, but not recoiling before necessary supplementary developments. In addition, rather than resort to forced explanations, he did not hesitate to avow that certain passages puzzled him, or that his knowledge was insufficient ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... occupied was covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he was pruning ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... if divested of certain exuberances—for Chatterton was precocious in every thing, and many of his fancies want the Bowdler pruning-knife—might be seasonably transferred to some of the penny publications for the benefit of Mr Frost's disciples. A poor man and woman, on their way to the parson's hayfield, complain to each other of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... pruning left but a single member of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud, suddenly disappeared from the relieved ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Portuguese in the latter half of the fourteenth century, [2] was first printed in a Spanish version, probably not far from 1490. [3] Its editor, Garci Ordonez de Montalvo, states, in his prologue, that "he corrected it from the ancient originals, pruning it of all superfluous phrases, and substituting others of a more polished and elegant style." [4] How far its character was benefited by this work of purification may be doubted; although it is probable it ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... parts of our Father's husbandry, ought to silence every question, quiet every fear, and give peace and restful assurance to our hearts in all their pain. We cannot know the reason for the painful strokes, but we know that he who holds the pruning-knife is our Father. That ought always to be ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... A day or two more, and the shell and husk, which, in the last and germinating stage of the nut, are so hard that a knife will scarcely make any impression, spontaneously burst by some force within; and, henceforth, the hardy young plant thrives apace; and needing no culture, pruning, or attention of any sort, rapidly advances to maturity. In four or five years it bears; in twice as many more, it begins to lift its head among the groves, where, waxing strong, it flourishes for ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... action only is the life, The grapes for which we feel the pruning knife. Thoughts are but leaves; they fall and feed the ground. The holy seasons, swift and slow, go round; The ministering leaves return, fresh, large, and rife— But fresher, larger, more thoughts to the brain:— Farewell, my dove!—come back, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we hold a Peace Sunday and on that day we pray mightily that God will give us peace in our time and that war shall be no more, and the spear shall be beaten into the pruning hook. But the next day we show God that he need not take us too literally, for we go on with the military training, and the building of the battleships, and our orators say that in time of peace we must prepare ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... the Invisible Choir, and with unequalled purity and tenderness, sending them ringing down to his brooding mate, whose home and happiness would be despoiled by the reaping of that spot of green. He delayed burning the brush-heap from the spring pruning, back of the orchard, until fall, when he found it housed a pair of fine thrushes; for the song of the thrush delighted him almost as much as that of the lark. He left a hollow limb on the old red pearmain apple-tree, because when he came to cut it there was a pair of bluebirds twittering ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Sillcocks participated with great enthusiasm in the work of pruning our line-up, and after the Faculty had thrown up its hands he climbed right in and led a new campaign. We had to admire the scientific way in which he went about it, too. For a man whose most violent exercise consisted of lugging books ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... the government. I have always differed with the preachers in politics and war, except the Southern preachers who are now in arms against the invader. I think war is one of the providences of God, and certainly no book chronicles so much fighting as the Bible. It may be to the human race what pruning is to vegetation, a necessary process ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury[obs3], lancet; plowshare, coulter, colter[obs3]; hatchet, ax, pickax, mattock, pick, adze, gill; billhook, cleaver, cutter; scythe, sickle; scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c. (arms) 727; bodkin &c. (perforator) 262; belduque[obs3], bowie knife[obs3], paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing shave; microtome[Microbiol]; chisel, screwdriver blade; flint ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... whole of his face was bizarre and odd, yet singularly impressive. We walked round, I with great pain, by the Hooded Corbies' seat, and this great Lord of the woodland gave the plantation great approbation. He seems rather systematic in pruning, yet he is in a great measure right. He is tolerably obstinate in his opinions. He dined, leaving me flattered with his applause, and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... children of the soil," said Balafre, drawing up his gigantic height. "Thus says King Louis 'My good French peasant—mine honest Jacques Bonhomme, get you to your tools, your plough and your harrow, your pruning knife and your hoe—here is my gallant Scot that will fight for you, and you shall only have the trouble to pay him. And you, my most serene duke, my illustrious count, and my most mighty marquis, e'en rein up your fiery courage till it is wanted, for it is apt to start out of the course, and ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Joseph, struggling still more and more: and out comes Will.'s pruning-knife; for the rascal is a gardener in the country. I have ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... considering how I may shorten what I am going to say to the Athenians." Even Demosthenes himself, who used to despise the rest of the haranguers, when Phocion stood up, was wont to say quietly to those about him, "Here is the pruning-knife of my periods." This however, might refer, perhaps, not so much to his eloquence, as to the influence of his character, since not only a word, but even a nod from a person who is esteemed, is of more force than ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... be compelled to sell his wine every year, for old wine sells better than new, and the same quality sells better at one time than another. Cato writes further in great detail of the kind and number of iron tools which are required for a vineyard, such as the falx or pruning hook, spades, hoes. So also several of these instruments are of many varieties, as for instance the falx, of which this author says that there must be provided forty of the kind suitable for use in a vineyard, ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... discussion and form of industry at this time were the pruning and cleansing of trees, and Amy often observed Webb from her windows in what seemed to her most perilous positions in the tops of apple and other trees, with saw and pruning shears or nippers—a light little instrument with such a powerful leverage that a good-sized bough could be lopped away by ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... enabled," you say, "to hope for existence with God in an eternal state, and this is as much as our present welfare requires." Most excellent! To this proposition I cherfully assent. Yea, I would consent even to pruning it a little, which no doubt would spoil it in your view. Instead of 'this is as much as,' read, 'even this is more than,' and your proposition would stand exactly right. ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... Black Forest and the Thueringian Forest, and Frederick had a mental picture of the magnificent man clipping his privet hedge in front of his cosey cottage, or walking among his rose bushes with a pruning knife in his hand. He could detect that the captain would far rather be living secluded in a sea of green leaves and green pine needles; and he felt convinced that it would have been delicious to him to submerge himself forever in the soft rushing ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... wide stone steps to the wide galleries, with their fluted pillars, not a murmur but the winged insects droning in the tangled grasses, for the wild luxuriance of rose tree and japonica, of lawn and crape myrtle, betrayed a lack of pruning knives in the immediate season past; and to the south, where the rice fields had reached acre beyond acre towards the swamps, there were now scattered patches of feathering young pine, creeping everywhere not forbidden to it by ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... of that benighted corps, taken as the subject of pruning and cultivating effort, would have occupied, I believed, the faithful labors of a lifetime. Considered as a gloriously rampant mass, the aspect of the field ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... to grow among them; how excellent Parts are often starved and useless, by being planted in a wrong Soil; and how very seldom do these Moral Seeds produce the noble Fruits which might be expected from them, by a Neglect of proper Manuring, necessary Pruning, and an artful Management of our tender Inclinations and first Spring of Life: These obvious Speculations made me at length conclude, that there is a sort of vegetable Principle in the Mind of every Man when he comes into the World. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... extraordinarily severe with me I made out in the end that affairs were not so bad as I had thought. The estate would have to be plastered with a mortgage, but some years of stiff economy and retrenchment, together with a ruthless pruning of the fine timber, would suffice to put me on my feet again. The expenditures of the household would have to be cut down, but Mr. Brief thought that a modest establishment befitting my rank might still be maintained. If I thought ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... That is, the Sabbatical year or the year of release (ha-shemittah). See Ex. XXIII, 10 et seq., and Lev. XXV, 1-7. It is commanded that the land be allowed to lie fallow during that year, that there be no sowing, nor reaping, nor pruning of the vineyards, and that the servants, strangers, and animals, as well as the owner, shall share in the spontaneous growth of the fields and the vineyards. See also Deut. XV, 1-11, and Tractate Shebiit ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... rude old plough of the Georgics, dragged by great gray oxen, turns up the rich loam, that "needs only to be tickled to laugh out in flowers and grain." In the olive-orchards, the farmers are carefully pruning away the decayed branches and loosening the soil about their old roots. Here and there, the smoke of distant bonfires, burning heaps of useless stubble, shows against the dreamy purple hills like the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... land productive with a minimum amount of care and attention. They realize that the difficult operation of grafting has been successfully accomplished and that they need only prepare the ground for planting according to the character of the soil and with a little pruning and cultivation within a few years may be assured of a new type of crop for which there is a growing demand. They recognize the value of these trees over ordinary fruit trees which require numerous sprayings a year and whose extremely perishable crop must ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... and, moreover, this wild stock is the source whence we have, by culture, obtained the rich varieties which now grace our gardens. The cherry is a very prolific tree. We have heard of one, the fruit of which sold for L.5 per annum for seven successive years; but it requires care in pruning, as it produces its fruit generally at the points of the branches, which should therefore never be shortened. Phillips says: 'Cherries bear the knife worse than any other sort of fruit-trees, and we would therefore impress on the pruner, that though the fruit was won by the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... save him. Some tree bears no fruit, except much dung be laid about it; and justice comes not from some till they be richly manured: some trees require much visiting, much watering, much labour; and some men give not their fruits but upon importunity: some trees require incision, and pruning, and lopping; some men must be intimidated and syndicated with commissions, before they will deliver the fruits of justice: some trees require the early and the often access of the sun; some men open not, but upon the favours and letters of court ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... stood aghast. Some of the older ones shook their heads and wondered what old Colonel Selden Phelps would say if he could say anything. And the spirit of progress and improvement reached even to the grounds. Zenas Third toiled with spade and pruning-knife and bundles of shrubs and plants came from Boston and were set out with lavish prodigality. In the matter of alterations to the house Eve was consulted on every possible occasion, while garden improvements were placed entirely in Miss Mullett's capable hands. ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... his pruning knives and scissors which he had let fall, and stalked down the path. What was it? he wondered. She was a princess in all things save her lack of coldness toward the people. It was wrong to meet them in this way, it was not in order. Her highness had lived too ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... Andrea's portrait in our National Gallery—Piero di Cosimo. Piero carried oddity to strange lengths. He lived alone in indescribable dirt, and lived wholly on hard-boiled eggs, which he cooked, with his glue, by the fifty, and ate as he felt inclined. He forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... territory was, however, of little moment. The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning. Adrian acted judiciously when he abandoned the conquests of Trajan; and England was never so rich, so great, so formidable to foreign princes, so absolutely mistress of the sea, as since the loss of her American colonies. The Spanish ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the perfection of detail common to the Dutch, as the first horticulturists of the world, we realise the far-reaching wisdom, which in a few decades transformed the face of the island, clearing vast tracks of jungle, and pruning that riot of tropical nature which destroys as rapidly as it creates. A lengthened survey of Java's political economy and past history would be out of place in a slight volume, written as a "compagnon de voyage" to the wanderer who adds a cruise in the Archipelago to his Eastern ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... clearly, from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... goddess of plenty. Single parts of her province were taken over by various other divinities, among whom was Pomona (pomorum patrona, "she who cares for fruits"). She is represented as a maiden with fruit in her arms and a pruning-knife ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathen look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as firewood—not merely these, but the seeming death of the Vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... the equanimity of Scott, no man ever received less pleasure from the adulation of unknown and often vulgar and ignorant admirers. His real amusements were his trees and his friends. "Planting and pruning trees," he said, "I could work at from morning to night. There is a sort of self-congratulation, a little tickling self-flattery, in the idea that while you are pleasing and amusing yourself, you are seriously contributing to the future welfare ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... length and breadth of France, there sounded again the ominous throbbing of the drums calling for the general mobilization of the nation. At its sound the French industrial army melted into a military one. Ploughshares and pruning-hooks were beaten into machine-guns and Lebel rifles. The civilian straightway ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... Edwards, who was continually intent upon increasing the comforts and happiness of his slaves, sent his carpenter, while Caesar was absent, to fit up the inside of his cottage; and when Caesar returned from work, he found his master pruning the branches of a tamarind tree that over-hung the thatch. "How comes it, Caesar," said he, "that you have not ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Italian gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works. True, he doesn't know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is in the picture. When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate—the temptation to snip seems ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... would be capable of second-hand descriptions only, so I resolved to approach the fountain-head and interrogate Aleck in person. I found the youth in the garden of Fanellan farm, evidently just passing the time by a cursory pruning of berry bushes. He had on his Sunday suit, and was unusually smartened up for a weekday; for it was but natural that neighbors might be expected to drop in for information as to the supernatural manifestations he had experienced, ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... at the sunny side of the house; the auctioneer, at the window, was selling pots and candles and pruning-shears and kitchen chairs. Felicia felt somehow curiously aloof, and almost like an intruder, in this crowd of people, all of whom had known each other for long years in Asquam. They shouted pleasantries ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... some men, even among those who have chosen the task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience. They become less nervous, but more sympathetic. They have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of science. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid monotony in the wit of ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to send out a whaler from Havre, and had secured almost a monopoly of the oil-trade. Some years afterwards I made a passage with his brother, and learned from him the history of this Yankee enterprise, which had filled two capacious purses, and substituted the harpoon for the pruning-knife, the whale-ship for the olive-orchard, in the very stronghold of the emblem of peace; and now the collier with his pickaxe has driven them both from the field. But the Petit Hotel Montmorenci did not wait for the change. Its broad court was never enlivened by gas. Its tables ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... those expect me to believe they can frame laws!" He scowled over-shoulder. "Write down their names for me, somebody. The senate needs pruning! I will purge it the way Galen used to purge me when I had the colic! Cioscuri! But these leaky ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... visits with the obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend. Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening—not the pretty occupation of pruning—he was digging—and of necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as inferior, but has not however been niggard in its praise. The work is read, and always will be read, with high interest. This, perhaps, is capable of augmentation; and the Editor much deceives himself if he has not accomplished this effect by his labours, as well in pruning off the redundant moralizings and cumbrous ratiocinations of Dr Hawkesworth, as in contributing new but relevant matter to the mass of amusing and instructive information which that gentleman has recorded. He confesses that he has far less delicacy ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... entered it, for Kate had so beautifully proven her religious earnestness, and more than all had shown such a Christ-like spirit, that the "sword was beaten into a plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook." ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... I traded my right in this patent for six counties in Michigan and Indiana in a patent pruning shears, an old buck sheep, a knitting machine, an old dulcimer, a ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... very short time, the children acquired a kind of character. It was found easy to mold them into what was desired; and they went through their work not without a sort of manoeuvre. As they marched along, with their garden shears, their long-handled pruning-knives, their rakes, their little spades and hoes, and sweeping-brooms; others following after these with baskets to carry off the stones and rubbish; and others, last of all, trailing along the heavy iron ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... blue-bloused gendarmes guarding the woods and the fences skirting them. "Nothing is allowed to go to waste in this country," he said. "It looks as though they went over it once a month with a lawn-mower and a pruning-knife. I believe they number the trees ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... Next the Imperator (Emperor) caused himself to be invested with the authority of Censor. This enabled him to revise the list of Senators, and to restore to this body something of its ancient respectability. By judicious pruning he reduced the number to six hundred, and required a property qualification for membership. He placed himself at its head as PRINCEPS (prince), a title which implied that the Emperor was the first citizen, without claiming ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... nomenclature. But the use which I now have of language has taken me forty years to attain; and those forty years spent, mostly, in walking through the wilderness of this world's vain words, seeking how they might be pruned into some better strength. And I think it likely that at last I may put in my pruning-hook with effect; for indeed a time must come when English fathers and mothers will wish their children to learn English again, and to speak it for all scholarly purposes; and, if they use, instead, Greek or Latin, to use them ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... we have a worthy incentive in the doctrine of Restoration. If we can only realize that by faithful missionary effort the heathen will require a pruning and development when they pass out of this life, will not that be an effective and worthy incentive to the best efforts of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... With a little pruning in the proper season, these unshapely bushes might become things of beauty, and not only look better, but will do better, if given a severe trimming in the spring. Hedges of Privet, Purple Barberry, and Japan Quince, look much prettier along the walk than ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... the development of marketing associations. In doing these things we also aid the farmer and home owner, for whatever is best in the commercial orchard is best in the home orchard. Spraying, pruning and cultivation as practiced by the expert serve as models for the farmer who ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... helping in the more onerous tasks, but he followed Lubin about indefatigably, watching everything he did with eager vigilance, whether he was planting ranunculuses and anemones, or clipping hedges, or trimming evergreens; while he himself was fain to be content with pruning and budding, and directing how the plants should be most fitly set. He said he wanted the show of flowers next year to be a triumph of gardencraft. The garden was a sort of holy of holies to him, and he tended it, and planned for it, ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... bearing practically regular crops. Of course, it is impossible to keep any tree bearing practically regular crops, but, of course, it is impossible to keep any tree bearing a full crop regularly. Wonders can be done by this system of pruning." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... belonged to Queen Elizabeth. Inside she has written a note in which she says: 'I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... but who could ensure their lasting qualities? Watt shows good judgment in suggesting that Wilkinson, the famous foundryman, should be taken into partnership. He urges his enterprising partner to apply the pruning knife and cut down expenses naively assuring him that "he was practising all the frugality in his power." As Watt's personal expenses then were only ten dollars per week, a smile rises at the prudent Scot's possible contribution to reduction in expenditure. But he was on ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... for pruning Hybrid Perpetual Roses is in January or early February. Select the strong, well-matured, young shoots at sufficient distance apart to allow a free circulation of air and cut back to one and one-half to two feet, ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... kinds.... The Greeks hated all monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen of the Laestrygones—'She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her'—would have seemed to them most reasonable.... To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—of condensing—a perpetual protest against all that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose. To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.' We cannot all be writers ... ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... we are told of the glad day, which we are now trying to hasten, when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks—when nations shall not lift up the sword against nations or learn war ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... tasted by his children and grandchildren. Accordingly, in a French colony there is a tropical beauty in the cultivated trees and flowers which is seldom seen in our possessions. The fruits are brought to perfection, as there is the same care taken in pruning and grafting the finest kinds as in ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... is lifted up, He will draw all men after Him, and leave you naked and bare.... This Great Leveller, Christ our King of Righteousness in us, shall cause men to beat their swords into plough-shares, their spears into pruning-hooks, and Nations shall learn war no more. Everyone shall delight to let each other enjoy the pleasures of the Earth, and shall hold each other no more in bondage. Then what will become of your power? Truly he must be cast out as a murderer. ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... graveled drive between tall bushes which would have been the better for a pruning. Then the road made a sudden curve and they came out upon a crescent of lawn bordering upon a stone-paved terrace three steps above. And on the terrace stood the home a Ralestone had not set foot in for ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... that nature, such as "the Cow," "the Ass," "the Kid," "the Sow," "the Swine," "the Sick Boar," "the Farmer," "the Countryman," "Harlequin Countryman," "the Cattle-herd," "the Vinedresser," "the Fig- gatherer," "Woodcutting," "Pruning," "the Poultry-yard." In these pieces it was always the standing figures of the stupid and the artful servant, the good old man, the wise man, that delighted the public; the first in particular might never be wanting— the -Pulcinello- ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... hope has faded And sunk in deepest despair, Through lack of careful pruning That fruitage it ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... Dioscorides, Marinus, Pliny, Nicander, Macer, and Galen, and carried home to the house great handfuls of them, whereof a young page called Rizotomos had charge; together with little mattocks, pickaxes, grubbing-hooks, cabbies, pruning-knives, and other instruments requisite for herborizing. Being come to their lodging, whilst supper was making ready, they repeated certain passages of that which hath been read, and sat down to table. Here remark, that his dinner was sober and thrifty, for he did then eat only to prevent ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the cliffs yonder, the rock-doves were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and that it was time to bloom and love and nest. Soon it would be winter again, when things died, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... she was standing looking at me as I was pruning a rose-bush, she made a remark which startled me. I perfectly remember her words. 'It seems to me,' she said, 'that one who is so constantly engaged in observing and encouraging the growth and development of plants should himself ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... nothing, I feed the sparrows with hemp-seed and prune a rose-tree a day. After my pruning, the roses flower magnificently. I am not looking ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... from the chaise and lay it on the grass. Then they saw him hacking at the harness with his pruning-knife until the pony was free, when the man led it to another gate-post and tied it there. Then Kink hacked again, and drew the carriage away from the pony that was lying on the ground; and then he and the man lifted the bundle once more and came with it very ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... that way you would get nut production and at the same time, a timber growth. If pruned you get a good log at the base. The small, ten-foot logs from these trees pay as much as you would get for an 18 foot log of a taller tree. For forestry purposes, pruning is a ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... our object. Fruit, grain, pulse, herbs, flax, and other vegetable products, receiving assiduous attention, will afford ample manual occupation, and chaste supplies for the bodily needs. It is intended to adorn the pastures with orchards, and to supersede the labor of cattle by the spade and the pruning-knife. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... "Catholic" as any one. She noticed that Father Ademar gave her fewer penances than Father Dominic used to do; that he treated her mistakes as mistakes only, and not as sins; that generally his ideas of sin had to do rather with the root of evil in the heart than with the diligent pruning of particular branches; that he said a great deal about Christ, and not much about the saints. So Maude's change of opinion came, over her so gradually and noiselessly that she never realised herself to have undergone any change at all until it ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... the chapter on Grape Pests and their Control and for furnishing most of the photographs used in making illustrations of insects and fungi; to F. E. Gladwin for similar help in preparing the two chapters on pruning and training the grape in eastern America; to Frederic T. Bioletti for permission to republish from a bulletin written by him from the Agricultural Experiment Station of California almost the whole chapter on Grape Pruning on the Pacific Slope; and to O. M. Taylor and to ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... get that back on the roof!" Alix looked up to assure him discouragingly. "I told you, when you were pruning it," she added vivaciously, "that you were cutting too deep. No—you knew it all! Now the first wind brings it down all over the place, and you get exactly what ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris |
