"Scythe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terrific Scythe of Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was it likely to stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came. It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused. At one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Howell, who, devoting their amusing pens to subjects which deeply interested their own busy age, will not be slighted by the curious.[143] We have nearly outlived their divinity, but not their politics. Metaphysical absurdities are luxuriant weeds which must be cut down by the scythe of Time; but the great passions branching from the tree of life are still "growing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... fences like dead game; twelve thousand farms lay tenantless; by thousands the widows and orphans gathered at the blockhouses, naked, bewildered, penniless. There remained in all Tryon County but eight hundred militia capable of responding to a summons—eight hundred desperate men to leave scythe and flail and grist-mill for their rifles at the dread call to arms. Two dozen or more blockhouses, holding from ten to half a hundred families each, were strung out between Stanwix Fort and Schenectady; these, except for a few forts, ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... root two scion-demons dwell, Breathe the faint hiss, or try the shriller yell; Rise, fluttering in the air on callow wings, And aim at insect-prey their little stings. 255 So Time's strong arms with sweeping scythe erase Art's cumberous works, and empires, from their base; While each young Hour its sickle fine employs, And crops the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... the developed or normal type of the Irish halberd blade is slightly but distinctly curved, so that they have been called "scythe-shaped." They vary from about 9 inches to 15 or 16 inches in length, and from about 3 to 4 inches in breadth at the widest part; with few exceptions they have three rivets with large heads. The various ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... Berlin in old King Friedrich's time; had thrown powder in the eyes of men there, and been appointed to Professorships in the Ritter-Academy, to Chief-Heraldships,—"Historiographer Royal," and perhaps other honors and emoluments. The whole of which were cut down by the ruthless scythe of Friedrich Wilhelm, ruthlessly mowing his field clear, in the manner we saw at his Accession. Whereby learned grandiloquent Gundling, much addicted to liquor by this time, and turning the corner of forty, saw himself cast forth into the general wilderness; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the Earth, they turned and looked through the gleaming folds of the twilight for the last time at their city; and they looked half in anger and half in regret, then turned and went away for ever. But they sent back a Death, who bore a scythe, saying to it: 'Slay half in the city that forsook us, but half of them spare alive that they may yet ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the top of the druidical stone, watches the progress of the day. Her red, parted mouth twitches as she follows the efforts of the men. Behind her, the gars of Savenaye, grasping with angry clutch, some a new musket, others an ancient straightened scythe, gaze fiercely on the scene from under their broad felts. Now and then a flight of republican bullets hum about their ears, and they look anxiously to Their Lady, but that fearless head ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... irrepressible vitality, stood looking at the rich, warm human life which she had renounced for ever. A young wife, with an infant on her arm, had brought her husband his midday meal, and he had flung down his scythe to kiss her under the trees. Those two faces, browned with the sun, flushed with the bloom of the flower, seemed the natural product of the beautiful earth. You could almost hear the myriad sounds of summer; waters trickling through the moss and roots of the wood, the hum of bees, the birds' ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... all are!" said Helen. "What can they be doing inside?" Margaret, who was growing less talkative, made no answer. The noise of the cutter came intermittently, like the breaking of waves. Close by them a man was preparing to scythe out one ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... for the men were not soldiers, but Grandpa Smith and his fourteen-year-old grandson. They stopped at the well to get a drink, and when we opened the window, the old man said, "We're just on our way to mow the back lot and stopped to grind the scythe on your ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... began he was everywhere in request, and entered with much energy into the work of the harvest. Early and late he was out with the mowers, and, at a push, with his strong shoulders and brawny arms could use the scythe as well as any of the men. The Vicar paid occasional visits to the hayfields, and Betto was busy from morning to night filling the baskets with the lunch of porridge and milk, or the afternoon tea for the haymakers, or preparing the more substantial ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... a promptitude that fulfilled all that her lady's heart could wish. She found Joshua whetting his scythe. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... the car and it shot suddenly forward. "Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the road there," he cried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into the darkness through which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe, and on the back seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight and as the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. "The damn fools!" he cried. "They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try. They want to go on in their old hand-made way. Let 'em look ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... of the ninth, with the weak end of Place's hitting strength to face Ken. Griffith, Conroy, Salisbury went down before him as grass before a scythe. To every hitter Ken seemed to bring more effort, more relentless purpose to baffle them, more wonderful speed and control of ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... faint; and they carried him out into a hay-field, and there, with his head pillowed on the hay, with the soft blue sky above him, and the scent of flowers in the air, with the low of cows and hum of bees in the distance, and the sweet scythe music sounding near him, and the touch of the girl's fair soft hand on his brow, my little heir passed away without even a moan, only a little sigh of relief, of ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... appliances so numerous and so deft as to make each of these domestic departments a sort of factory in itself. The spinning-wheel has been abandoned for the sewing and the knitting machine, and the hand-plough for the steam-plough, and the scythe for the mowing-machine, and the rude kitchen knife and spoon for an endless variety of contrivances, from the apple-parer, the egg-beater, and the bean-shelters, to the lemon-squeezers, ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... it was "evident that General Sherman was moving with his main body to destroy the Macon road, and that the fate of Atlanta depended on our ability to defeat this movement." During the fateful pow-pow at the house of Dudley Field, Sherman's army like a colossal scythe was swinging round Atlanta, from the west and south, across Flint River, through the vital railway, on toward the city. On the second of September, the news that Atlanta was taken "electrified the people of ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... compelled to do so. You know my mode of living here, and it is far worse in this cold stormy weather. My continued solitude only still further enfeebles me, and really my weakness often amounts to a swoon. Oh! do not further grieve me, for the scythe of Death will grant me ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid, Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... the marriage of Francoise to Jean Macquart that it was carried out. An entire estrangement between the two families followed, and constant quarrels took place. After a shameful assault by Buteau upon Francoise, his wife threw her upon a scythe which lay upon the ground near by, and the unfortunate girl received injuries from which she died a few hours later. A sense of loyalty to her family induced her to conceal the cause of these injuries, which were attributed ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... loss. A grown-up son or daughter is so much capital to the parents. But this poor fellow really loved that boy of his. 'Nothing cam comfort me for my loss,' he said one day when I came across him out in the fields. He had forgotten all about his work, and was standing there motionless, leaning on his scythe; he had picked up his hone, it lay in his hand, and he had forgotten to use it. He has never spoken since of his grief to me, but he has grown sad and silent. Just now it is one of his ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... infidelity, and to fly to its destruction with all his power. Amid continual risks of losing his life, he exercised his gigantic charity for many years in directing the souls of those islands to God, without any fear of death whose scythe he saw upon him many times. The Moros with their stealthy attacks, the infidels or apostates with open malice, and the evil Christians with their subterfuges and deceits made him almost continually suffer for justice. But he worked on manfully as one who had the refuge of his life in God, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... with leaf and flower, to the undercliff of soft blue lias and the very roof ridges of King's Cobb, whose walls and chimneys, now snowed with light, fretted a scallop of the striding bay that swept the land here like a scythe. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... outlightens the sun. 1340 From the springs of the morning it thunders and lightens across and afar To the wave where the moonset ends and the fall of the last low star. With a trampling of drenched red hoofs and an earthquake of men that meet, Strong war sets hand to the scythe, and the furrows take fire from his feet. Earth groans from her great rent heart, and the hollows of rocks are afraid, And the mountains are moved, and the valleys as waves in a storm-wind swayed. From the roots of the hills to the plain's dim ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... their country. For there is an untamed strength even in all that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with corn, and fragrant with deep grass, but it is not subdued to the plough or to the scythe. It gives at its own free will; it seems to have nothing wrested from it, nor conquered in it. It is not redeemed from desertness, but unrestrained in fruitfulness,—a generous land, bright with capricious plenty, and laughing from vale ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... the Natives in Divine things, conducted the worship, and taught them much by his good example. His influence was increasing, when one morning a Sacred Man threw at him the kawas or killing-stone, a deadly weapon like a scythe stone in shape and thickness, usually round but sometimes angular, and from eighteen to twenty inches long. They throw it from a great distance and with fatal precision. The Teacher, with great agility, warded his head and received ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... reserve—cowering behind the bank. They could almost see the whole thing—the grey dots crawling over the crest of the hill, the shots that announced their detection, the uprising of them in a solid mass, sweeping towards the trenches; the withering fire, reaping in its victims like a scythe. They were wondering every second of the time, "How far have the Germans got? Have they pushed us out?" But no order came to advance to re-capture the trenches, so they presumed ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... steel Fork steel Pivot steel Gin saw steel Plane bit steel Granite wedge steel Quarry steel Gun barrel steel Razor steel Hack saw steel Roll turning steel High-speed tool steel Saw steel Hot-rolled sheet steel Scythe steel Lathe spindle steel Shear knife steel Lawn mower knife steel Silico-manganese steel Machine knife steel Spindle steel Magnet steel Spring steel Mining drill steel Tool holder steel Nail die shapes Vanadium tool steel Nickel-chrome ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... bell of the great cathedral; some, tardily begin three, four, half a dozen, strokes behind it; all are in sufficiently near accord, to leave a resonance in the air, as if the winged father who devours his children, had made a sounding sweep with his gigantic scythe in ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... overflowing field,— Over the glimmering field, And bleeding furrows with their sodden yield Of sheaves that still did writhe, After the scythe; The teeming field and darkly overstrewn With all the garnered fulness of that noon— Two looked upon each other. One was a Woman men called their mother; And ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... Grecian fable, is the parent of Power, Power is the father of Genius and Wisdom. Time, then, is grandfather of the noblest of the human family; and we must respect the aged sire whom we see on the frontispiece of the almanacs, and believe his scythe was meant to mow down harvests ripened ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... unresisted, the red and blue of the Union, mixed with the stars and bars of the rebellion; but, worse than all, the ranks of gray were sweeping in overwhelming masses quite behind the lines of blue, cutting them down as a scythe when near the end of the furrow. To the eastward Sherman still clung desperately to the crests he had won, but Jack saw with agony that, slipping between him and the river, a great wedge of gray was hurrying forward. His last despairing glance caught a body of jet black ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... phrase, Tally-ho]—for which he had the hearty curses of the huntsman, as well as of the baron, who entered into the spirit of the chase with all the juvenile ardour of twenty. "May the foul fiend, booted and spurred, ride down his bawling throat, with a scythe at his girdle," quoth Albert Drawslot; "here have I been telling him that all the marks were those of a buck of the first head, and he has hollowed the hounds upon a velvet-headed knobbler! By Saint Hubert, if I break ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Each in his several melancholy walk Stringed like a poor man's heifer at its feed, 240 Led through the lanes in forlorn servitude; Or rather like a stalled ox debarred From touch of growing grass, that may not taste A flower till it have yielded up its sweets A prelibation to the mower's scythe. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Odysseus firmly, "I would that I could prove my manhood against thine in any trial of strength and endurance. Let it be a match of mowing, in a rich meadow-land, on the longest day in spring, and let us ply the scythe together, fasting, from dawn till eve. Or give me a stout pair of oxen, mighty beasts, equal in strength, and both well filled with fodder, and set me to plough a field of four acres, of rich, deep soil—then wouldst thou see if ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... much from a ravenous appetite, as from the rage of destroying every vegetable substance that lies in the way; and their work of destruction is frequently so regular in a field of corn, as to have the appearance of being cut with a scythe. Where they are bred, from eggs that are deposited in the earth the autumn before, they stop during the months of April, May, and June; towards the latter end of July, they get strong, and have wings, when they rise together, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... spear in his hand, he roams up to the rock, and then he hears from that high hill beyond the brook a wondrous wild noise. Lo! it clattered in the cliff as if one upon a grindstone were grinding a scythe. It whirred like the water at a mill, and rushed and re-echoed, terrible to hear. "Though my life I forgo," says Gawayne, "no noise shall ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... that? It is the mower in the field whetting his scythe. He is going to cut down the grass. And will he cut down all the flowers too? Yes, everything. Now we must make hay. Where is your fork and rake? Spread the hay. Now make it up into cocks. Now tumble on the haycock. There, cover Harry up with hay. How sweet the hay smells! Oh, it is very hot. ...
— Harry's Ladder to Learning - Horn-Book, Picture-Book, Nursery Songs, Nursery Tales, - Harry's Simple Stories, Country Walks • Anonymous
... the tent beside the spring, fashioned a rude fork out of a pronged willow, and fitted a handle to the scythe he had brought for the purpose. From dawn to dark he swung the keen blade in the heavy grass which carpeted the bottom. Behind him Hazel piled it in little mounds with the fork. She insisted on this, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... mantel, he stirred the balsam logs into a fierce blaze, starting a myriad of sparks in their flight up the chimney. Dorothy was looking above, and Paul, following the direction of her eyes, observed a model of Father Time reclining upon a shelf near the ceiling. The figure's scythe was broken; his limbs were in shackles, and his body covered with chains. It was an original conception, and Henley could not help asking if Time had really been checked in his onward ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... hand to shake, And oh, man, here's good-bye; We'll sweat no more on scythe and rake, ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good thing to lay ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... plants, each one fifteen feet wide. Some different from the ornamental wreath 'round our clock face, that hain't more'n half an inch wide, if it is that. Our clock has a picture underneath of old Time with his scythe a mowin' down the hours and minutes as his nater his. And I told Josiah how beautiful and symbolical it wuz to think old Time had laid down his scythe for a spell, and wuz measurin' off the hours here in this Fairy Land with ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... Ferrara a blow which it would not get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate in heaven, since earth was not worthy of her; truly the angel of Death did not come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained scythe, but fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every fear was allayed.' But we meet, also, with sympathy of a different kind. Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell us the love stories of the prince, even before his death, in a way ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Destiny are said in our imagination to lay our glories low. Thus, even, the calm and silent air of Oblivion has been thought of as an unsparing Power. Time, too, though in moral sadness wisely called a shadow, has been clothed with terrific attributes, and the sweep of his scythe has shorn the towery diadem of cities. Thus the mere sigh in which we expire, has been changed into active power—and all the nations have with one voice called out "Death!" And while mankind have sunk, and fallen, and disappeared ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... and although the flash died away at once, he was happy for that moment. She glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexey Alexandrovitch looked at Vronsky with displeasure, vaguely recalling who this was. Vronsky's composure and self-confidence here struck, like a scythe against a stone, upon the cold self-confidence of ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... down in his path like grain before the scythe. Reaching the altar, he seized the priest whose knife was already upraised, and, lifting him bodily, flung him full into the ugly snout of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... our gin-house and press, with 125 bales of cotton, seven cribs containing 600 bolls of corn, our logs, stables, and six stacks of fodder, a waggon, and four negro cabins, our lumber-room, fine spinning-machine and 500 dollars' worth of thread, axes, hoes, scythe-blades, and all other plantation implements. Then they came with their torches to burn our house, the last remaining building they had left besides the negro quarter. That was too much; all my pride, and the resolutions that I had ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... at him, his left arm swinging like a scythe, and, with the impact of a club, the blow caught the burglar ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was only the place where the linseed came from,—the more the better,—making grist for the great vertical millstones with their scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and carefully sweeping as if an informing soul were in them. The Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade were the three evils mankind had to fear; even the floods had not been great of late years. The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... of the towers have been cut away, completely adapting them for transepts, the towers being supported on great pointed arches. In the large east window the stained glass commemorates St. Sidwell, a lady murdered in the eighth century at a well near Exeter by a blow from a scythe at the instigation of her stepmother, who coveted her property. The cathedral is rich in monumental relics, and it has recently been thoroughly restored. Little remains of the ancient convent-buildings beyond the chapter-house, which ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... reasoning power possible to his age, he has been as happy and as free as his nature allowed. If the fatal scythe is to cut down in him the flower of our hopes, we shall not be obliged to lament at the same time his life and his death. Our grief will not be embittered by the recollection of the sorrows we have made him feel. We shall be able to say, "At least, he enjoyed his childhood; ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... May. Old Father Time just measured the days off with his hour-glass in the first place, and marked them down with the point of his scythe. The world has known ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... stood with his fellow gunners on the parapet of Rodriguez Canal and looked out across the field—smoke-hung under the cloudless morning sky. The British dead, in their scarlet uniforms, were lying row on row, one behind the other, like grain cut down by the mower's scythe. The boy's heart sickened. But a prolonged cheer came ringing ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... afford to the citizen to obey every call of duty! At the first summons of the note of war you would find him leaving his plow in the half-finished furrow, taking his only horse and converting him into a war-steed: his scythe and sickle would be thrown aside, and with a heart full of valor and patriotism he would rush with alacrity to the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of that old fire of inspiration flamed up within him as he lay on the hard bed in his little room, with the summer scents floating in and the out-of-doors sounds,—a woman's voice calling a child afar off, the lowing of cattle, the rhythmic whetting of a scythe-blade, the echoing strokes of an axe, the mellow fluting of a robin,—all coming to him a little muted, as if he were ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... repair; All at large tables, in long order set, A ram their off'ring, and a ram their meat. Above the portal, carv'd in cedar wood, Plac'd in their ranks, their godlike grandsires stood; Old Saturn, with his crooked scythe, on high; And Italus, that led the colony; And ancient Janus, with his double face, And bunch of keys, the porter of the place. There good Sabinus, planter of the vines, On a short pruning hook his head reclines, And studiously surveys his gen'rous ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... wits' end had not the cyclone confined its fury to exceedingly narrow limits. All its prodigious force was spent in and directly along the stream. Twenty yards away, the forest was undisturbed, so that the elemental scythe had made a clean ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... you," said he, "you'll have lots of servants now. Take my word for it, the best of them are good for nothing; but something may be made of them for all that. He who would have his servants mow well, must take the scythe in hand himself. And since you got your riches so quickly, don't forget the proverb: 'Light come, light go.' Keep steady, or ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... But some of the Swedish soldiers who had been watching the duel rushed forward, and, raising their fallen king, carried him off on board another of his ships, while Olaf Triggvison went aft along the crowded decks, and men fell beneath his blows, as the ripe grain falls before the mower's scythe. It happened to the Swedes, as to the Danes, that notwithstanding their superior numbers they found that they were ill matched in skill and prowess with the Norsemen. Their picked champions were speedily killed or wounded, their best ships were disabled, and although they ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... it shadowed and brought out the slight irregularities of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, which came at and passed me with a prodigious clatter as I dragged myself forward. In the cart were two nuns, each with a scythe; they were going out mowing, and were up the first in the village, as Religious always are. Cheered by this happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a very old man leading out a horse, and asked him if there was anywhere where I could ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... horses which were feeding in a shed, were driven, with their manger, into the ditch on the opposite side of the lane; and that a loaded cart was torn from the shafts and wheels, and wafted into an adjoining field. A crop of turnips were mowed down as with a scythe, and a double row of twenty or thirty full-grown elms, which stood on the sides of the lane, were torn up by the roots. One man was killed in the barn, and six others were wounded, or so severely shocked as to require relief ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... Nor light upon the land whither I go. Live thou and take thy fill of days and die When thy day comes; and make not much of death Lest ere thy day thou reap an evil thing. Thou too, the bitter mother and mother-plague Of this my weary body—thou too, queen, The source and end, the sower and the scythe, The rain that ripens and the drought that slays, The sand that swallows and the spring that feeds, To make me and unmake me—thou, I say, Althaea, since my father's ploughshare, drawn Through fatal seedland ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... her, he stared moodily at Uncle Boaz, who was trimming the lawn beyond the miniature box hedges of the garden. Furrows of mown grass lay like golden green wind-drifts behind the swinging passage of the scythe, and the face of the old negro showed scarred and wistful under the dappled sunshine. June beetles, coloured like emeralds, spun loudly through the stillness, which had in it an almost human quality of hushed and expectant waiting. All ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... around him, "Remember the state in which Louis of Bourbon enters the fight for Christ and his country." Immediately sounding the charge, like a whirlwind his little band plunged into the midst of their foes. For a moment the shock was irresistible, and the assailed fell like grass before the scythe of the mower. Soon, however, the undaunted band was entirely surrounded by their powerful adversaries. The Prince of Conde, with but about two hundred and fifty men, with indomitable determination sustained himself against the serried ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... meadows, on which scythe of mower has never cut sward, nor haymaker set foot; meadows loaded with such luxuriance of vegetation—lush, tall grass—that tons of hay might be garnered off a single acre; meadows of such extent, that in speaking of them you may not use the word acres, but miles, even this but faintly conveying ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... into two-foot lengths with his axe, to the sad injury of its cutting edge. These sods were then built into a wall like bricks, resting gently against the framework of poles, from which, however, they were separated by a padding of grass, which Harris cut in a sleugh with his scythe, and small willows from the ravine. This mattress of grass and willows prevented any earth shaking through into the house itself. A framework made of a hewn log was inserted in the south wall to leave space for a window, which should be bought ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... having ripened apace, the latter end of December, which was my second harvest, I reaped it with a scythe, made of one of my broad swords. I had no fatigue in cutting down my my first crop it was so slender. The ears I carried home in a basket, rubbing it with my hands, instead of threshing it: and when ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... or swarth (so rarely, but cf. Twelfth Night, II. iii, where Maria calls Malvolio 'an affectioned ass, that cons state without book and utters it by great swarths') is as much hay as the mower can cut at one movement of the scythe. So, an unsubstantial thing compared with ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... in the morning sun: over meadow and hillside and Indian-named river the summer light fell in all its beauty. Dewdrops glittered on waving grain and mown grass; labourers in their shirt-sleeves made another gleaming line of scythe blades, or followed the teams of red and brindled oxen that bowed their heads to the heavy yoke. Through all this, past all this, the Pequot train flew on towards Pattaquasset; sending whole lines of white smoke to scour the country, despatching ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... conventions, no lies graven on marble, nor statues of bronze, can change the truth, that the True Makers of Canada were those who, in obscurity and poverty, made it with ax and spade, with plow and scythe, with sweat of face and ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... if I know of a sword that nought on earth or under resisteth, and before the keen edge of which all Illusions and Identicals are as summer grass to the scythe?' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... savour, and stretched out grey-green ribbons along the emerald of the shorn meadows. Chown snuffled and sweated and sneezed, for the pollen always gave him hay fever; his master daily worked like a giant from dawn till the owl-light, drank gallons of cider, and performed wonders with the scythe. A great hay crop gladdened the moormen, and Will, always intoxicated by a little fair fortune, talked much of his husbandry, already calculated the value of the aftermath, and reckoned what number of beasts he might feed ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... reaper with his sickle and the cattle driver with lifted lasso. For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his art in such simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the well or a man leaning with his scythe, he will not find them anywhere at all. Gods and goddesses the Greek carved because he loved them; saint and king the Goth because he believed in them. But you, you do not care much for Greek gods and goddesses, and you are perfectly and entirely right; and ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... excellent rat poison); paper napkins with Corot landscapes printed on them; and plenty of gingersnaps and lady fingers, pretty thoroughly flyblown; the whole supplemented with sheaves of wild flowers cut in the fields with a scythe. It all looked grand and imposing for the money, but somehow lacked the substantial body (as well as fragrance) of beefsteak and onions. The piece de resistance however, really consisted of stewed kid and roast goat. I could not stomach ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... thick the grass is grown, Ready for the mower's care, When his scythe has laid it low, To the hay-field ...
— The Keepsake - or, Poems and Pictures for Childhood and Youth • Anonymous
... pain, and affording to the broken-hearted the rest, and to the slave the freedom, of the grave;—old Time, I say, who should be praised at all events for his perseverance and steadiness, swept onward with his scythe, and cutting his way through the frost and snow of winter, once more beheld the dust of that "brother of the east wind," March, converted into mud by the showers of April, and the summer was again ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... unnoticed) O, little ruby ocean that can drown all mortal sighs! Call buried hope to put life's garland on, and limping woes to trip like Nereids on a moonlit shore! For thee, frail sickness casts her pallid chrysalis and blooms a rosy angel! For thee, Death breaks his scythe and owns Life conqueror! (Drinks) Were this Antonius' cup.... Ha! Are you there, my devil? Another kiss, sweetheart! (Throws his arm about Mrs. Delormis. Helen cries out. Poe turns and ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... dexterously, but not much to increase them. The faults he hath he will learn how to hide and colour them, but not much to amend them; like an ill mower, that mows on still, and never whets his scythe. Whereas with the learned man it fares otherwise, that he doth ever intermix the correction and amendment of his mind with the use and employment thereof. Nay, further, in general and in sum, certain it is that Veritas and Bonitas differ but as ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Sir John Coniers," exclaimed Robin, rudely, "what honour had your gray hairs till the steel cap covered them? What honour, I say, under lewd Edward and his lusty revellers? You were thrown aside, like a broken scythe, Sir John Coniers! You were forsaken in your rust! Warwick himself, your wife's great kinsman, could do nought in your favour! You stand now, leader of thousands, lord of life and death, master of Edward and the throne! We have done this for ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... serve and work the effect." Remedies of the sort which Bacon deemed worthy of his attention are still in vogue in the eastern counties of England. Thus in Suffolk if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted thorn. A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... roar like the wind through high trees. Then a moment that shook and frightened me, but sweeter than anything I know of, so I cannot define it. Then a swift awful tragedy—I cannot recall the details of that, either. The whole dream was like a black mass of clouds, cut now and again by a scythe of lightning. But then, like a vision within a dream, I seemed to stand there and see myself, clad in a black gown, walking up and down this corridor, or one like it, up and down, up and down, never resting, never daring to rest, ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... frequenting the water. 2. Vo'cal, having a voice. 3. I-den'ti-fied, united. Cu-pid'i-ty, eager desire to possess something. 4. Tus'sock, a tuft of grass or twigs. 5. Cra'dler, one who uses a cradle, which is an instrument attached to a scythe in cutting grain. 6. U-surp'ing, seizing and holding in possession by force. 7. Af-fect', to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... knows everything, contains an abundance of important features of which we do not as yet know anything. With the same scientific exactitude the laboratory must investigate the milking, or the making of butter, the feeding of the cattle and the picking of the fruit, the use of the scythe and the axe, the pruning and the husking. The mere fact that every one, even with the least skill, is able to carry out such movements with some result, does not in the least guarantee that any one carries them out to-day with the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... a small man, but very neatly made. His hair was as white as spun glass. Perhaps he was sixty; perhaps he was seventy; perhaps he was fifty. His red biretta lay upon a near-by chair. His head bore no tonsure. The razor of the barber and the scythe of Time had passed him by. There was that faint tinge upon his cheeks that comes to those who, having once had black beards, shave twice daily. His features were clearly cut. His skin would have been pallid ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... consecutiveness along the Spanish Main. Things happen there intermittently. Even Time seems to hang his scythe daily on the branch of an orange tree while he takes ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... down, and had to finish it: it wus lodged so he had to cut it by hand,—the machine wouldn't work on it. And jest as quick as Elburtus had got so he could see out of that eye, nothin' to do but what he had got to go out and help Josiah cut that wheat. He hadn't touched a scythe for years and years, and it wasn't ten minutes before his hands wus blistered on the inside. But he would keep at it till the blisters broke, and then he ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... process of oiling her, as the marriage ceremony. They had built a cave on a rising mound in the swamp, and this was their home. This man's name was Picquilo. His only weapon was a sword made from a scythe which he had stolen from a neighboring plantation. His dress, his character, his manners, and his mode of fighting were all in keeping with the early training he had received in the land of his birth. He moved about with the activity of a cat, and neither the thickness of the trees nor ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... that to which, even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... shock and the four horses strained desperately at their traces. These contests had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy scythe.—Later we dug postholes and built fences but each day was ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... lent a sturdy helping hand in gathering in the harvest. It delighted him to be able, as of old, to reach up and put the sheaves on the top of the well-loaded waggons, and to find that he could still wield a scythe with the same vigorous strokes, mowing the scanty second crop of grass on the mountain meadows just as close to the ground as ever. While Klitzing lay down after his exertions and rested his weary limbs, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Mower stamp'd his heel, and struck His hurtful scythe against the harmless ground, Saying, "Ye foolish imps, when am I stuck With gaudy buds, or like a wooer crown'd With flow'ry chaplets, save when they are found Withered?—Whenever have I pluck'd a rose, Except to scatter its vain leaves around? For so all gloss of beauty I ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... where, when I was a boy, it was cascading always. That beautiful meadow, too, is gone, and the streets of a modern village, with blocks of houses, and stores, and shops, occupy the place where I swung my first scythe. The old log-house vanished years and years ago. A steamboat ploughs its way through that beautiful lake, and the things of my boyhood are but visions of memory, called up from the long, long past. Not one landmark of the olden time ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... there, And darted up and down the butterfly, That seemed a living blossom of the air. The flocks came scattering from the thicket, where The violent rain had pent them; in the way Strolled groups of damsels frolicksome and fair; The farmer swung the scythe or turned the hay, And 'twixt the heavy swaths his children ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... I, nor Burd so blithe Had driven them in this haste; But the old, old man, so lean and lithe, That afar behind us paced; So lean and lithe, with shoulder'd scythe, And a ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... I swung a scythe for a week for another Yankee farmer, on a marsh where the machine couldn't be driven in—which I was informed was King Phillip's ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... on to a platform on the top of the tower surrounded by a broken battlement. It was as though I had suddenly entered the last hiding-place of Aphrodite herself. On the floor sat an old and lame man sharpening a scythe, and beside him a little child lay among the broken corn that was strewn over the whole platform. Where the battlements had once frowned, now stood sheaves of smiling corn, golden and nodding in the wind and the sun. Suddenly the lad who had led me hither seized the flail ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they kept, invited the dewy-feathered ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... on that little trip without a good deal of moral cudgeling when it came to the point, although he threw down his scythe with a muttered curse on his lips for the man who was playing ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... in this up-to-date and efficient institution the biggest implement for cutting grass which was in use, a sickle of course, had a blade no longer than 8 inches. Hung up at the back of a shed I noticed a rusty scythe. When I tried to show what it could do it was suggested that the implement was "too heavy, too ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... If he only knows it as a bird of passage knows the country he soars over in his migrations? If, in the vigour of early youth, he has not followed the plough at dawn, and enjoyed mowing grass with a large sweep of the scythe next to hardy haymakers vying in energy with lively young girls who fill the air with their songs? The love of the soil and of what grows on it is not acquired by sketching with a paint-brush—it is only in its service; and without loving it, how paint it? This is why all that the best painters ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... an allusion carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet. Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies. One's fellow-mortals can afford to be as considerate and tender with him as Time ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the house for a lantern and we looked all through the barn and finally all around the barn. And pretty soon he saw her lyin' by the barn. She was dead—all over blood. Somebody had run a great knife like a scythe or a corn-cutter through her. And I never see a boy cry like Mitch did. He ran back and told Zueline and she and all the children came out and most of us cried. Then Mr. Miller came out, and Mrs. Miller, and Mr. Miller said he believed Doc Lyon had done it—that he had seen him in ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... pointed to the master of the horse, to young Beauvau, and to De Thou. "It is only in them that we can place our hope for the future. Such men are indeed very rare now, for the great leveller has swung a long scythe ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... recall life's tragedy again! Its piteous pageants bring not back, nor waken flesh upon the rack of pain anew to writhe, stretched in Disease's shapes abhorred, or mown in battle by the sword, like grass beneath the scythe! Even I am weary in yon skies to watch thy fading fire: test of all sumless agonies, behold not me expire! My lips, that speak thy dirge of death, their rounded gasp and gurgling breath to see, thou shalt not boast; the eclipse of Nature spreads my pall, the majesty of Darkness shall receive my parting ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... tame and uninteresting, but for a home-born feeling that comes over the kind heart as it approaches so close to the mowers on the meadow-field as to scent the fragrance of the hay; to hear the song of the Boblink, or the rhythmic whetting of the scythe; or passes the ends of those primitive, those pilgrim-fences of post and rail, that enter the brink of the river to mark the boundaries of the small, paternal, and though frequently sterile, the much loved fields into which this home of industry ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... to set you something very easy to do to-morrow,' said the old man when his servant entered. 'Take this scythe and cut as much grass as the white horse will want for its day's feed, and clean out its stall. If I come back and find the manger empty it will go ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... dyin', not a bit, only I don't want to die if I can help it. My time must be nigh at hand now, for I be aud, and a hundred years is too much for any man to expect. And I'm so nigh it that the Aud Man is already whettin' his scythe. Ye see, I can't get out o' the habit of caffin' about it all at once. The chafts will wag as they be used to. Some day soon the Angel of Death will sound his trumpet for me. But don't ye dooal an' ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Father Time swings round his scythe, Intomb me 'neath the bounteous vine, So that its juices, red and blithe, May cheer these thirsty ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... the papers about tornadoes in America, and how houses were sometimes bodily lifted with their contents and carried long distances, and how everything above the surface was swept away as if a scythe had passed over it. He had heard these accounts discussed by the fishermen, and the general opinion in Leigh was that there was mighty little truth in them. The Leigh men thought they knew what a gale was, and what it could do. They knew that chimney-pots ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... of stoic despair he had come to the seat of war. He had invited Destiny to sweep him up in her reaping, by placing himself in the ambit of her scythe; but the sharp reaping-hook had passed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
