"Soil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not the Scots, were the party making war upon him; that they had conquered his armies, and hemmed him in, and reduced him to the necessity of submission; and that he had been taken captive on English soil, and ought, consequently, to be delivered into the hands of the English Parliament. The Scots replied that though he had been taken in England, he was their king as well as the king of England, and had made himself their enemy; ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... of Pamphlets on Corn By "Farmers" and "Landholders"—(worthies whose lands Enclosed all in bow-pots their attics adorn, Or whose share of the soil maybe seen ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... treasure. Little may he have imagined what thoughts may have distracted the reverence of some of his humble fellow-worshippers in Groton Church who whispered the nature of his errand one to another. Our honored Governor and his son of Connecticut had been near a score of years on this soil before Charles I. was beheaded. Mr. Savage informs us that he was once asked by a descendant of the father whether he had received before his death tidings of the execution of his old master. The annotator is able to quote ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... perfection that it hath not actually in itself, or at least in a higher degree' (Locke). To this argument Mill answers, 'How vastly nobler and more precious, for instance, are the vegetables and animals than the soil and manure out of which, and by the properties of which, they are raised up! But this stricture is not worthy of Mill. The soil and manure do not constitute the whole cause of the plants and animals. We must trace these and ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... That on French soil he seemed in anything but a subsidiary position, that he appeared to rule rather than to obey, could in no way appear to Marguerite ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was Holland. A rude climate, with long, dark, rigorous winters and brief summers,—a territory, the mere wash of three great rivers, which had fertilized happier portions of Europe only to desolate and overwhelm this less-favored land,—a soil so ungrateful, that, if the whole of its four hundred thousand acres of arable land had been sowed with grain, it could not feed the laborers alone,—and a population largely estimated at one million of souls: these were the characteristics of the province which already had begun to give its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Buchanan was early informed that if the Union Government desired to hold them, troops and ships of war should instantly be sent. Congressmen from South Carolina remaining in Washington came to him and represented that their State regarded these forts upon its soil as their own; they gave assurances that there would be no attack on the forts if the existing military situation was not altered, and they tried to get a promise that the forts should not be reinforced. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... These are days when our relations with Mexico are of an extremely delicate nature. If we send an armed party on shore, and its members fight, it will be difficult, indeed, for our government to make the claim that an act of war was not committed on the soil of a nation that is, at present, at peace with us. The consequences of a fight are likely to be grave indeed. Therefore, the officer in command of each landing party is especially warned that the rescue of the American prisoners ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... island of Jersey and the other Channel Islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Dukedom of Normandy that held sway in both France and England. These islands were the only British soil occupied by German troops in ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is that of "youthful genius"—in fact, genius of any age, for that matter, for genius itself seems to be out of the category of the ordinary cause of heredity and environment, and to have its roots in some deeper, richer soil. It is a well-known fact that now and then a child is born which at a very early age shows an acquaintance with certain arts, or other branches of mental work, which is usually looked for only from those of advanced years, and after years of training. In many cases these children are ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... is true, but they existed as exceptions even in their own party. It was the English feeling that was natural, hearty, dependent, and deep; the other having been, as has just been stated, rooted as much in opposition, as in any other soil. ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... fresh water, and wood for fuel; but, except these little tufts of bushes, the whole country is a barren rock, doomed by nature to everlasting sterility. The low islands, and even some of the higher, which lie scattered up and down the sound, are indeed mostly covered with shrubs and herbage, the soil a black rotten turf, evidently composed, by length of time, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... Constitution, though a blessing to Englishmen, is very ill-suited to nations not accustomed to the climate and its variations. Every country has peculiarities of thought and manners resulting from the physical influence of its sky and soil. Whenever we lose sight of this truth, we naturally lose the affections of those whose ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in the level of the soil at that spot will be concealed by terraces on three sides of the stately pile. At the foot of the tower the design shows a basin 115x42 feet embraced within the walls of the inclined plane, to receive the water of a fountain in ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... been a miner as a youth, with no experience whatsoever on the soil. However, the virgin lands project had been his pet. He envisioned hundreds upon thousands of square miles of maize, corn as the Americans called it. This in turn would feed vast herds of cattle and swine so that ultimately the United Balkan ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... site is no easy matter. The shaft descends to a depth of nearly three feet in a compact soil, either vertically or horizontally. The spade and pick, wielded by stronger but less expert hands than mine, are indispensable, for which reason the process of excavation is far from satisfying me fully. At the end of this long tunnel, which the straw which I use for sounding despairs of ever reaching, ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... he said, "the spirit of the age. We are highly irreligious in France; impiety is deeply rooted in our soil. You do not know the progress achieved by the ideas of Montesquieu, Raynal and Rousseau. Public worship is abolished; veneration is a thing of the past. You must have seen this from the scandalous talk my officers indulged in just now at ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a house there and have carried your books there, and wear Hampstead grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) to prove yourself of the soil. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... to eradicate the doctrines which he had implanted. The idea of friendship for the black man was particularly tenacious, and perhaps annoying to the new and controlling denominational interest. It clung to the very soil, like "pusley" in a garden. It had gained a strong hold throughout the county. The managers of the institution could not openly oppose it. They were compelled to endure it. And so it continued to be true that if a bright colored ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and amiable, and yet they were strangers and had never seen each other before. Perhaps what most appealed to the prince's impressionability was the refinement of the old man's courtesy towards him. Perhaps the soil of his susceptible nature was really predisposed to receive ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... can foresee and provide for," Craig promised. "I'm quite as eager as you to discover how the transplanting of the hothouse plant into the hardy outdoor soil of the country has worked out. There are two results about equally probable in such cases—hardly equally probable, either. The natural result, I should fear, would be the dwindling and stunting of the growth, unless protected by expedients not common to the country, and fertilized ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... the employees' building, commonly called the mess house, are laid off into walks and gardens. Owing to the quantity and quality of the soil being superior to that around El Tovar (which is near the rim and therefore on almost naked rock), the grass, and the domestic and wild flowers, which are cared for by the men, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... were leaving Pigeon Creek. One day a letter had arrived from John Hanks, a cousin, who had gone to Illinois to live. The soil was richer there, the letter said. Why didn't Tom come, too, and bring his family? He would find it easier to make a living. Even the name of the river near John's home had a pleasant sound. It was called the Sangamon—an Indian word ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... furnished by the remarkable discoveries made beneath the soil of Mesopotamia since the year 1842. In that year the French consul at Mosul, P. E. Botta, aided by a government grant, began a series of excavations in the mounds that line the banks of the Tigris opposite Mosul. The artificial character of these mounds had for some time been ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... all animals that were offered up in sacrifice, were offered up in one way, viz. slain. Therefore it does not seem to be suitable that products of the soil should be offered up in various ways; for sometimes an offering was made of ears of corn, sometimes of flour, sometimes of bread, this being baked sometimes in an oven, sometimes in a pan, sometimes on ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... "younger brother of the Orinoco," first claims attention. The mouth has rather the appearance of a vast lake than a river, its shores bordered by thick groves of that tree of curious structure, the mangrove, whose roots or seeds, borne on the ocean wave, strike wherever they can find a muddy soil, throughout every part of the tropics. Rising upwards on the roots, which it shoots downwards as it grows, the base of its stem is often six or eight feet from the ground—the stem itself seldom more than a foot in diameter, and from fifteen to twenty feet in height. Its ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice's sake, they both understood that they were going home experimentally, and not with the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unless they liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had no illusions in regard to it. She had learned from her former visits home that it was frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... settle for a brief vacation in the county of England from which the wife's family originally came. Gradually the old house and the English landscape take hold of them; ancestral feelings rise to dominate them; and they remain forever after in enforced habitation on the ancient soil. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... slavery, would go on as freely as in the palmiest days of the chivalry; Parson Brownlow would be driven from Knoxville, his press and dwelling burned, Casey and Green and Adams exiled forever, and the same old war would have to be fought over again, with all its blood and horror, on Kentucky soil.' ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... uniform correctness. It should also be made known that these doctrines and sentiments, though written with the most evident haste, follow each other, page after page, without an erasure or a correction. The truths which had dropped upon his mind were, indeed, rudimentary, but so well adapted was the soil to receive the seed that the fruit was instant and mature. Seldom has spontaneity so well approved itself by ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always had a feast at a funeral—else why the ashes in such a place; and showing, also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soil —else why these ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and overpowering danger, with the enemy on all sides. Now I was in the midst of a friendly host. But though much was altered some things remained the same. The Boers still held Colenso. Their forces still occupied the free soil of Natal. It was true that thousands of troops had arrived to make all efforts to change the situation. It was true that the British Army had even advanced ten miles. But Ladysmith was still locked in the strong grip of the invader, and as I listened I heard the distant ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... more brought me to the foot of the steep ascent, where I had counted on overtaking her. I was too late for that, but the dry, baked soil had surely been crumbled and dislodged, here and there, by a rapid foot. I followed, in reckless haste, snatching at the laurel branches right and left, and paying little heed to my footing. About, one-third of the way up I slipped, fell, ...
— Who Was She? - From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874 • Bayard Taylor
... Sujah Dowlah—that prince who with a savage heart had still great lines of character, and who, with all his ferocity in war, had, with a cultivating hand, preserved to his country the wealth which it derived from benignant skies and a prolific soil—if, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval, and observing the wide and general devastation of fields unclothed and brown; of vegetation burned up and extinguished; of villages depopulated and in ruins; of temples unroofed and perishing; of reservoirs broken ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... a very barren soil, and the people I had to labour amongst were greater and mightier than myself. They already had possession of the ground, and were perfectly content with their own way. Moreover, they did not desire any change, and were ready even to resist ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... held three hundred prisoners, and the United States only a paltry hundred, the Pasha was to receive sixty thousand dollars. Derne was to be evacuated and no further aid was to be given to rebellious subjects. The United States was to endeavor to persuade Hamet to withdraw from the soil of Tripoli—no very difficult matter—while the Pasha on his part was to restore Hamet's family to him—at some future time. Nothing was said about tribute; but it was understood that according to ancient custom ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... taken place in Germany, and the authorities who had imprisoned Moretz no longer ventured to proceed as they had before done. The peasants, oppressed for centuries by the owners of the soil, and treated like slaves, had long been groaning for the blessings of civil liberty. On several occasions they had revolted against their lords, but their rebellions had always been put down with bloodshed and fearful cruelties. Once more the same desire to emancipate themselves had sprung up ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... kinds, while the entire shore, for miles in either direction, was thickly fringed with coconut trees. Strangely enough, for some unknown reason, the ground between the narrow fringe of coconut trees bounding the shore-line and the base of the hills, was bare of trees, the soil being covered with a dense growth of guinea-grass, with a few bushes and flowering shrubs sparsely dotted about here and there—it therefore ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... a violent transplanting must require, Nora had sufficient imagination to fully appreciate. But if Mrs. Sharp, herself, were conscious of having not only survived her uprooting but of having triumphantly grown and thrived in this alien soil, she gave no sign of it. Everything, to employ her own favorite phrase with which she breached over inexplicable chasms, "was ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... ballad is innocent; certainly it is innocent in design. A fresher national song of a beautiful incident of our country life has never been written. The sentiments are natural, the imagery is apt and redolent of the soil, the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear. It has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched about it, but is just what it pretends to be, the carol of the native bird. A sample will show, for the ballad is much too long to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fortune more often than anyone else in the last four years—Chitral, Matabeleland, Samana, Tira, Atbara, and Omdurman—and fifty others who are only names to me, but are dear and precious to many, all lying under the stony soil or filling the hospitals at Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Two thousand Boers killed! I wish I could believe ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... court etiquette which to republican eyes seem extremely irrational and foolish. Louis could not cross the river to take his Spanish bride, neither could Maria Theresa cross the stream to be married on French soil; therefore Don Luis de Haro, as the proxy of Louis XIV., having the French Bishop of Frejus as his witness, was married to Maria Theresa in the church at Fontarabia. The ceremony was conducted with the most punctilious observance of the ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... certain portion is uniformly reserved and appropriated for the use of schools. And, finally, have not these new States singularly strong claims, founded on the ground already stated, that the government is a great untaxed proprietor, in the ownership of the soil? It is a consideration of great importance, that probably there is in no part of the country, or of the world, so great call for the means of education, as in these new States, owing to the vast numbers of persons within ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... 1860. Henderson & Co. describe it as the finest kind in cultivation; pure white; size of head over two feet in circumference, and as large as thirteen inches diameter; very dwarf, the stem not more than two or three inches from the soil, but with ample foliage; one of the hardiest varieties known, and said to withstand well the variable climate of the United States. C. G. Anderson & Sons of England, in 1880, claimed it to be earlier, white, ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... soil seemed specially adapted to the crop; the great yellow murphies rolling out of the hills ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... movement, the expression of whose every feature, whose questioning voice and burning eye betrayed the one fact, that they were seekers, and that they sought that which the Culture-Philistine had long fancied he had found—to wit, a genuine original German culture? Is there a soil—thus they seemed to ask—a soil that is pure enough, unhandselled enough, of sufficient virgin sanctity, to allow the mind of Germany to build its house upon it? Questioning thus, they wandered through the wilderness, and the woods ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... bigger. It appeared to be a hole or burrow, rather than a cave, and ran under a great pine-tree, among whose roots, no doubt, was the den of the bear. The tree itself grew up out of the sloping bank; and its great rhizomes stretched over a large space, many of them appearing above the surface soil. In front of the aperture was a little ledge, where the snow was hacked by the bear's paws, but below this ledge the bank trended steeply down—its slope terminating in the bed of deeper ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... and was usually covered with hieroglyphics. The architecture of Egypt, of which the principal forms are pyramids, sphinxes, obelisks, and temples, is characterized by massiveness of material, grandeur of proportion, and simplicity of parts—a style well suited to its flat, sandy soil, though it would look heavy and out of place in a country where nature had herself supplied the elements of grandeur and massiveness in the form of lofty mountains or mighty forests. Egyptian art greatly influenced all the succeeding styles, and to this time is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... that our poetry is a splendor of the world when we remember that it is rooted in these grand old tales, and that it awoke to life through the singing of a strong son of the soil, a herdsman and a poet. We know very little of this first of English poets, but what we do know makes us love him. He must have been a gentle, humble, kindly man, tender of heart and pure of mind. Of his birth we ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... lie comfortable with that same under his gouty toe. But the trouble I had to get out that stone! I du assure you, sir, it took me nigh half the day.—But this be one of the nicest places to lie in all up and down the coast—a nice gravelly soil, you see, sir; dry, and warm, and comfortable. Them poor things as comes out of the sea must quite enjoy the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... has been directed—not, however, before a fortunate chance had procured the liberation of all the prisoners who had fallen into the power of the Affghans in January last; and ere this time, we trust, not a single British regiment remains on the bloodstained soil of Affghanistan. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... individual, or the domination of an alien people over one that obstinately refused to be assimilated. Sometimes the spark that kindled vital consciousness was the flash of a poet's genius, or the heroism of some sturdy son of the soil. The causes of awakening have been infinitely various, and have never wholly died away; but it is the special glory of the Nineteenth Century that races which had hitherto lain helpless and well-nigh dead, rose to manhood as if by magic, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... later we were mounted, and an hour's easy riding brought us to the plain. It was as pathless as the ocean, yet Carmen, guided by the sun, went on as confidently as if he had been following a beaten track. The grass was brown and the soil yellow; particles of yellow dust floated in the air; the few trees we passed were covered with it, and we and our horses were soon in a like condition. Nothing altered as we advanced; sky and earth were ever the same; the only thing that moved was a cloud, sailing slowly between us and the sun, ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... foundations of the Church were laid in that colony on to the outbreak of the Revolution, the benefactions that came from England were abundant and unceasing. With possibly a single exception, all the clergy in the colony were missionaries of the Society. They were also sons of the soil, who, because of convictions too strong to be resisted, went back to the Church from which their fathers had gone out, and in doing so incurred odium and reproach, scorn and contempt, the loss of much that gives earthly comfort and rejoicing, ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... land of shadows for awhile, And seek for truth and wisdom! Here below, In the dark misty paths of fear and woe, We weary out our souls and waste our toil; But if we harvest in the richer soil Of towering thoughts—where holy breezes blow, And everlasting flowers in beauty smile— No disappointment shall the labourer know. Methought I saw a fair and sparkling gem In this rude casket—but thy shrewder eye, WANGNER! a jewell'd coronet ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... they thus afar? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? They sought a faith's pure shrine! Ay, call it holy ground, the soil where first they trod: They left unstained, what there they found, Freedom ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... prepares to fall on the last dreary finale of Chopin's life, a life not for a moment heroic, yet lived according to his lights and free from the sordid and the soil of vulgarity. Jules Janin said: "He lived ten miraculous years with a breath ready to fly away," and we know that his servant Daniel had always to carry him to bed. For ten years he had suffered from so much illness that a relapse was not noticed by the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to [243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power. Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old pagan one, the primitive Italian ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... go!" cried Martin; and, so saying, he flung his spade with such force into the soil, that it ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... Ancient Egypt was unique, not in one, but in every sense. To begin at the very foundation of life in that country, we find that the soil was unlike any other on earth in its origin. Every acre of fruitful land between the first cataract and the sea had been brought from Inner Africa, and each year additions were made to it. Out of this mud, borne down thousands ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... all this, so far as I know, there is only one remedy- the improvement of the soil. The people are cultivating just the same ground their did, and most of the ground now cultivated has never rested in the memory of living man, or perhaps as long before. New earth is made to supply the yearly ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... attentions by private citizens. We were invited to attend a dinner on board of a great British war vessel, then lying at Esquimault. A canvass of our party disclosed the fact that our dress suits had been left at Vancouver, and being on foreign soil and under the domination of her British majesty's flag, we felt it was impossible to accept the invitation, and so, with a manifestation of great reluctance on the part of my associates, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... opportunity to punish his enemies. The opportunity came in the nomination of Van Buren by the Liberty Party Convention, which met later in the summer at Syracuse. The Van Buren wing of the New York Democracy approved the Syracuse Convention, and the Free-Soil party began its first and only campaign with the ex-President as its candidate. Van Buren received nearly 300,000 votes in November and prevented Cass from becoming President. He had avenged himself. The South found her alliance ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... the nation. In both capacities I owed duties to my constituents, to the government, to the people. I might interpret these duties narrowly or broadly. I might say: Perish the government, perish the Union, perish this people, rather than that I should soil my hands! Or I might say, as I did, and as I would say again: Be my fate what it may, this glorious Union, the last hope of suffering humanity, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... I live upon the soil as the hireling of another with a lordless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of the weather. On ledges where the rock is exposed to view its surface is more or less discolored and the grains are loose and may be rubbed off with the finger. On gentle slopes the rock is covered with a soil composed of sand, which evidently is crumbled sandstone, and dark carbonaceous matter derived from the decay of vegetation. Clearly it is by the dissolving of the cement that the rock thus breaks down to loose sand. A piece of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... as it was certain to be in a legislature which was still under the domination of old ideas. Had it passed, New Brunswick might at this time have had a large body of scientific farmers capable of cultivating the soil in the most efficient manner, and increasing its productiveness to an extent hardly dreamed of by those who only consider it in the light of ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... metamorphic changes. The solidest rocks are day by day disintegrated slowly, but none the less surely, by wind and rain and frost, by mechanical attrition and chemical decomposition, to form the pulverized earth and clay. This soil is being swept away by perennial showers, and carried off to the oceans. The oceans themselves beat on their shores, and eat insidiously into the structure of sands and rocks. Everywhere, slowly but surely, the surface of the land is being worn away; its substance is ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... property in land. No extremest Socialist ever went beyond me in proclaiming that the 'earth was bestowed by the Creator, not on any privileged class or classes, but on all mankind and on all successive generations of men, so that no one generation can have more than a life interest in the soil, or be entitled to alienate the birthright of succeeding generations.'[6] No one more fully recognises that property in land exists only on sufferance and by concession, and that society, which made the concession, may at any moment take it back on giving full ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... which, going forth over the face of the inhabitants of the globe, sought to bring under one broad and comprehensive view the destinies of the human race in the present life, and the perpetual rising and passing away of generation after generation who are nourished by the fruits of its soil, and find a resting-place in its bosom." We should like to know what lines in Southey and Kirke White suggested "Thanatopsis," that they might be printed in letters ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... natural seed changes soil into plants, so the living seed of the Word changes the character of the individual who comes in contact with it. For example, in the night of the Dark Ages when the Word of God was planted by the Holy Spirit ...
— The Key To Peace • A. Marie Miles
... no gambler and only mildly interested in games of chance, displayed so little evidence of interest in the scheme that Mrs. Cole-Mortimer groaned her despair, not knowing that she was expected to do no more than stir the soil for the crop which Jean Briggerland would plant ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... our pursuit two sets of treasures. The one may be had by the labours of the hands; the other by exercise of the intellect—the true self. And at once this may be said: that the treasures heaped by the hands soil the hands, and the stain sinks deep. The stain enters the blood and, thence oozing, pigments every part of the being—the face, the voice, the mind, the thoughts. For we cannot labour overlong in the fields without besweating the brow; and certainly we cannot ceaselessly toil after the material ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... when it is properly prepared; but when a village has soaked its soil-laden manioc tubers in one and the same pool of water for years, the water in that pool becomes a trifle strong, and both it and the manioc get a smell which once smelt is never to be forgotten; it is something like that resulting from bad paste with a dash of vinegar, but fit ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the Romans were excavated in the chalk, and this being naturally dry, their remains were preserved much longer there than if they had been buried in damp soil. Many graves of Roman soldiers had been unearthed from time to time, and it was discovered that the chalk had been scooped out in an oblong form to just the exact size of the corpse. The man was generally found buried on his side with his knees drawn ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... experience came to chill his hopes, than to see him scan his fellows with a too philosophical eye in boyhood. 'Tis said we are but clay at the best, but the ground, before it has been well tilled, sends forth the plants that are most congenial to its soil, and though it be of no great value, give me the spontaneous and generous growth of the weed, which proves the depth of the loam, rather than a stinted imitation of that which cultivation may, no doubt, render more useful if ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... from side to side, and from pool to pool, and by exclamations of sorrow for this misfortune. The search was fruitless: five sheep, pertaining to the flock which he conducted to pasture, were found drowned in one of the deep eddies; but the river was still too brown, from the soil of its moorland sources, to enable them to see what its deep shelves, its pools, and its overhanging and hazelly banks concealed. They remitted further search till the stream should become pure; and old man taking old man aside, began to ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... future husband, who has been previously selected for her.[102] Among the natives of the Pennefather River, in the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, when a girl menstruates for the first time, her mother takes her away from the camp to some secluded spot, where she digs a circular hole in the sandy soil under the shade of a tree. In this hole the girl squats with crossed legs and is covered with sand from the waist downwards. A digging-stick is planted firmly in the sand on each side of her, and the place is surrounded by a fence of bushes except in ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... to New York in person, instead of arranging to have the jewels taken to him at Halifax. He is an officer of high rank in the army. His trip across the ocean was known to the German secret service. The instant he landed on American soil, a demand would have been made by the German Embassy for his detention here for the duration ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... can redress itself of climate, can generate warmth in high latitudes, and cold at the equator; but in respect to mind and manners, from the law of latitude there is no appeal. Man, like the plants that grow for him, has a proper sky and soil: with them to flourish, without them to fade; through either kingdom, vegetable and moral, in situations that are aquatic, the alpine ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... casting shadows of new and unknown shapes through this strangely new and unknown forest. A thin white mist ascending everywhere from the soil tempered but could not obscure the white brilliance. The thermometer stood now only at 82 deg., but the dripping tropical sweat-bath in which our camp was pitched considerably raised the sensible heat. A bird with a most diabolical ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... overturns a thousand declarations, that we take the Royalists of France only as an instrument of some convenience in a temporary hostility with the Jacobins, but that we regard those atheistic and murderous barbarians as the bona fide possessors of the soil of France. It appears, at least, that we consider them as a fair government de facto, if not de jure, a resistance to which, in favor of the king of Prance, by any man who happened to be born within that country, might ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... control, which was the keynote of Charlemagne's system of administration, and was exercised in too arbitrary a manner; and that some check was necessary to curb the spirit and limit the independence of these local lords of the soil and the city who had little consideration for their inferiors, and who might at any time become a source of danger to their superiors. Such a check was found, in regard to the central authority, in the missi regii, and in reference to the general ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... the folly of admiring a French sonnet because the vowels are more sonorous than our own or of condemning Nietzsche's prose because it harbors in its texture combinations of consonants that would affright on English soil. To so judge literature would be tantamount to loving "Tristan und Isolde" because one is fond of the timbre of horns. There are certain things that one language can do supremely well which it would be almost vain for another to ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... imported from foreign countries, and were, by consequence, too dear for the luxuries of the vulgar. In time it was discovered, that it was practicable to draw from grain, and other products of our own soil, such liquors as, though not equally pleasing to elegant palates with those of other nations, resembled them, at least in their inebriating quality, and might be afforded at an easy rate, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... remarkably well, but Tom found that he had to turn on full power, for the big rubber wheels went deep into the soft soil. Along Tom rode, picking out the firmest places in the road. He was so intent on this that he did not pay much attention to what was immediately ahead of him, knowing that he was not very likely to meet other vehicles or pedestrians. He was considerably ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... development was a source of surprise and interest. She detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by day, like flowers in congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages. It was beyond her to realize that, out of his experience of men and women and life, his interpretations were far more ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... their ten by ten feet patches of common-age—where half a blade of grass had never grown before! Some enthusiasts, to enlarge their holdings, went even so far as to pull down their untenanted fowl-houses. The soil was not so favourable to horticulture as it might have been, but the best was made of it. Inspired by a determination to live as long as possible we ruthlessly uprooted our flowers, and conjured up visions ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... inner life of contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation and ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Troyon, and Dawkins. But a new era was beginning. In 1867 Worsaae called attention to the prehistoric implements found on the borders of Egypt; two years later Arcelin discussed such stone implements found beneath the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very focus of the earliest Egyptian civilization; in the same year Hamy and Lenormant found such implements washed out from the depths higher up the Nile at Thebes, near the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... marriage-law nowhere contains a clause to the effect that no man shall wed in a country house. Indeed, if you would know the truth, it is of far better omen for the expectation of offspring that one should marry one's wife in a country house in preference to the town, on rich soil in preference to barren ground, on the greensward of the meadow rather than the pavement of the market-place. She that would be a mother should marry in the very bosom of her mother, among the standing crops, on the fruitful plough-land, or she should ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... heard the back door of the house open, and saw the gleam of a lantern against the mill wall. For some agonizing minutes I hung by the ivy and prayed that whoever it was would not come round by the dovecot. Then the light disappeared, and I dropped as softly as I could on to the hard soil of the yard. ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... to her feet. "Giove!" she cried, "Baccho! that insipidity, that puritan. And I who have kept you from every soil. She speak of other ways. Oh, it ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... not soil my worship of you by even asking for your forgiveness,' so he wrote. 'I have told you what I had to tell. There is no longer any power in me to hide it And now I know that it is good-bye indeed. In the sorrow and the loneliness which are rightly mine—since I earned them with much foolish painstaking—I ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... begins by assuring Abraham that there is no truth in the rumour that the Pope has landed on English soil, and has been housed by the Spencers or the Hollands or the Grenvilles. "The best-informed clergy in the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is without foundation." Having set this fear at rest, Peter deals ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... western barrier of this upper lake, whose savage grandeur is rendered more striking by the scenes of fairy-like beauty left behind. But even here, in the midst of the mightiest desolation, the vegetative vigour of the numerous islands proves the wondrous productiveness of the soil in these regions. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... Dahomey, where all lives, all fortunes, all persons, are cooerdinated in one perfect 'system' of subjugation to one sable Jefferson Davis Gezo, who is de jure divino husband by a sublime fiction of law to every woman on the sacred soil of Africa, and master of the lives of all of both sexes. What to this stupendous and perfect theory is the impotent and imperfect scheme so lamely announced by the sociologists of the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the cleft doorway. Under his moccasins was a block pavement, yellow and green stone set in a simple pattern of checks. This, too, was level, unchipped and undisturbed, save for a drift or two of soil driven in by the wind. And nowhere could ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... groups changed and formed again as they rode forward, spread out on either side of the caravan-trail and covering the plain like a skirmish line of cavalry. But Kalonay kept close at Miss Carson's stirrup, whether she walked her pony or sent him flying across the hard, sunbaked soil. ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... half-way up the boys observed a fissure, like the entrance of a cave, on one side of the ravine and close to the trail. Around this the earthy colour of the rocks, the absence of herbage, and the paddled appearance of the soil, suggested the idea that some animal made its den there. They passed it in silence, climbing as quickly as the nature of the ground would allow them, and looking backwards with fear. In a few minutes they had reached the escarpment of the butte; and, raising themselves by their ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... country but this to travel in. They had indeed carried water along with them from the land over which they had traveled before, as their conductor had bidden them; but when that was spent, they were obliged to draw water out of wells, with pain, by reason of the hardness of the soil. Moreover, what water they found was bitter, and not fit for drinking, and this in small quantities also; and as they thus traveled, they came late in the evening to a place called Marah, [1] which had that name from the badness of its water, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... under what seemed to be folly, designed the temples, managed the mines of gold and other metals and followed the arts. They were the real masters of the land, the rest were but slaves content to live in plenty, for in that fertile soil want never came near them, and to do ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Dartmoor. I thought that they intended a covert sarcasm at their own projects. Their institution was a literary Dartmoor scheme;—a plan for forcing into cultivation the waste lands of intellect,—for raising poetical produce, by means of bounties, from soil too meagre to have yielded any returns in the natural course of things. The plan for the cultivation of Dartmoor has, I hear, been abandoned. I hope that this may be an omen of the fate of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be off, eager for her new career, eager that he should stand on a soil where he could once more face his fellow- creatures without shame. She panted to put thousands of leagues of ocean between him and ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... and tender, but he forced his hands to dig, dig, dig, cursing and crying to hide the pain, and biting his lips, ignoring the salty taste of blood. The soft earth crumbled under his hands until he had a small cave about three feet deep in the bank. Beyond that the soil was held too tightly by the roots from above and he ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... much of my higher and better self is indeed unmarried—doomed either to harden and sour in the sunless shade of solitude, or to quite degenerate and fall away for lack of nutriment in this unwholesome soil! But, I repeat, I have no right to complain; only let me state the truth—some of the truth, at least,—and see hereafter if any darker truths will blot these pages. We have now been full two years united; the 'romance' of our attachment must be worn away. ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... me conclude my speech. As subjects share no portion in the conquest Of their true sovereign, other than the merit That from the sovereign guerdons the true subject; So the good emperor, in a friendly league Of amity with England, will not soil His honor with the theft of ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... inexplicable cruelties I leave to other pens. I have drawn attention to them to make it clear that it was not without good cause that children joined the commandos. Some of these little ones became a prey to the bullets of the enemy, and the South African soil is stained by the blood of ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... deck, Daniel watched the monotonous scenes which they passed,—a landscape strange in form, and exhaling mortal fevers from the soil, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into the soil like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without turning aside ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... "seems wearing still the first fresh fragrance of the world," the fadeless traces of character, peculiar to the dwellers of the olden climes, are brought into close contrast with the more original feelings of the "sons of the soil," both white and red, and are there more fully displayed than in the mass of larger communities. Of political, or depth of topographical information, the writer claims no share, and much of deep interest, or moving incident, cannot ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... the soil vary greatly in different localities. On the lower lands, especially in the Vale of Aylesbury, about the headwaters of the Thame, it is extremely fertile; while on the hills it is usually poor and thin. The proportion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... invasion, Arthur. I hope that if there is war we shall stay out of it. But Belgium has always been exposed to war when her great neighbors fought. Some of the greatest battles in the history of the world have been fought on our soil." ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... countenance of all science. Emphatically may be said of the poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, "that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defense of human nature, an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... participation in industrial, as now in political decisions. If some of the tougher strains of character, grit, push, endurance, etc. would be less fostered, the gentler and more social aspects of character would find better soil. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Robespierre in April, 1793. (Reprinted in McCarthy, page 324.) Shelley used to seal this pamphlet in bottles and set it afloat upon the sea, hoping perhaps that after this wise it would traverse St. George's Channel and reach the sacred soil of Erin. He also employed his servant, Daniel Hill, to distribute it among the Somersetshire farmers. On the 19th of August this man was arrested in the streets of Barnstaple, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment for uttering a seditious pamphlet; ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... for the coast," he said promptly. "Dover, Ostend, Boulogne,—whichever proves handiest, no matter which, so long as it gets us on English soil without undue delay." ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... a creature not unlike a miniature monkey in that it had hind legs on which it walked erect and forepaws, well clawed for digging purposes, which it used with as much skill and dexterity as a man used hands. Its body was hairless and it was able to assume, chameleon-like, the color of the soil and rocks where it denned. The head was set directly on its bowed shoulders without vestige of neck; and it had round bubbles of eyes near the top of its skull, a nose which was a single vertical slit, and a wide mouth fanged for crushing the shelled creatures on which it fed. All in all, to ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... was observed taking up bits of soil, which he carefully wrapped up and deposited in one ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... place as well as destroying lice and vermin. Everything spoke of thrift. The manure was not thrown out in the barnyard but stored under sheds. The straw was kept in the barns. Noticing these things we began to learn that aside from good soil it was also good sense that made this the garden spot of the United States. Tobacco, so impoverishing to the soil, is still raised here on farms that have known ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... stood. Above this rich volume of sound fluted the piercing thin sopranos of the women, piping higher, higher, until the ancient hymn resolved itself into something that was neither human nor animal, but so elemental, so primeval, that it was like a voice imprisoned in the soil—a dumb and inarticulate music, rooted deep, and without consciousness, in the passionate earth. Over the mass of dark faces, as they rocked back and forth, I saw light shadows tremble, as faint and swift ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... old Tom Collins from the parish ouses," the sore place on the pony's shoulder, the "ole that mummy's orse had kicked in the stable door," and a host of other curiosities. By way of linking the child with the soil and its people, Marcella had taken care to give him nursemaids from the village. And the village being only some thirty miles from London, talked in the main the language of London, a language which ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it will appear by their summing up."—Macpherson's Ossian, Prelim. Disc., p. xviii. "This is reducing the point at issue to a narrow compass."—Ib., p. xxv. "Since the English sat foot upon the soil."—Exiles of Nova Scotia, p. 12. "The arrangement of its different parts are easily retained by the memory."—Hiley's Gram., 3d Ed., p. 262. "The words employed are the most appropriate which could ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... swiftly back from Italy; and instead of wasting strength in a doubtful attack on the allies in Picardy, by a sudden stroke of genius he assaulted and took Calais (January, 1558), and swept the English finally off the soil of France. This unexpected and brilliant blow cheered and solaced the afflicted country, while it finally secured the ascendency of the House of Guise. The Duke's brother, the Cardinal de Lorraine, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... son of Psammetichus, and afterwards continued by Darius, king of the Persians, who made some progress with the work, but abandoned it when he learned that, if the isthmus was dug through, all Egypt would be inundated, as the level of the Red Sea is higher than that of the soil of Egypt. At last Ptolemy II. (Philadelphus) completed the undertaking; having adapted an ingenious contrivance to the ingress of the canal, which was opened when a vessel was about to enter, and afterwards closed. Experience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Contemporary travelers mention this fact with wonder. "There is," says Ryan, "very little land under cultivation in the vicinity of Monterey. That which strikes the foreigner most is the utter neglect in which the soil is left and the indifference with which the most charming sites are regarded. In the hands of the English and Americans, Monterey would be a beautiful town adorned with gardens and orchards and surrounded with picturesque walks and drives. The natives are, unfortunately, too ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... does not take a machine to make a machine out of a man. Anything will do it if the man will let it. Even the farmer who is out under the great free dome of heaven, and working in wonder every day of his life, grows like a clod if he buries his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried many thousands of years, and the other kind of farmer is known by everybody—the farmer who is master over the soil; who, instead of becoming an expression of the soil himself, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee |
