"Soil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entitled "The Book of Wonders," ascribed to Aristotle, contains the following: "When the Carthagenians, who were masters of the western ocean, observed that many traders and other men, attracted by the fertility of the soil and the pleasant climate, had fixed there their homes, they feared that the knowledge of this land should reach other nations, a great concourse to it of men from the various lands of the earth would follow, that the conditions of ...
— Prehistoric Structures of Central America - Who Erected Them? • Martin Ingham Townsend
... packed and transported with their own hands this great treasure into the wood, and there entombed it. None else knew of that night's work. No other eye saw what was done. They worked the whole night through, and by the tardy dawn all was done, and even the soil of the forest so cleverly arranged that none could guess at the existence of that deep grave. And who would guess the secret of that tangled forest? Even were it thought that the gold and silver had been hid, who would have such skill as ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... meeting came what may be reckoned the only really notable aviation meeting on English soil, in the form of the Bournemouth week, July 10th to 16th, 1910. This gathering is noteworthy mainly in view of the amazing advance which it registered on the Rheims performances. Thus, in the matter of altitude, Morane reached 4,107 feet and Drexel came second with 2,490 feet. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... at one time they were believed to be such. Probably in some of those places, if not in all, water existed millions of years ago; but ages since they must have lost it either by evaporation or by absorption into the soil. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... understood that they had driven all the lords of his blood from him, they were not pleased with that rule, but then they thought to have more, as ever it is an old saw: Give a churl rule and thereby he will not be sufficed; for whatsomever he be that is ruled by a villain born, and the lord of the soil to be a gentleman born, the same villain shall destroy all the gentlemen about him: therefore all estates and lords, beware whom ye take about you. And if ye be a knight of King Arthur's court remember this tale, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn nourishment from the soil of Eternal Judea. ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... into past or future, but he was fully as much perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession, divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate or geography or soil. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... and when at last the fact became known to Brullof that the monarch who had honored him through an intelligent appreciation of art had dishonored him through a guilty passion for his wife, he left St. Petersburg, swore never again to set foot on Russian soil or be recognized as a Russian subject, and, plunging headlong into a wild career of dissipation, was thenceforth a wanderer up and down the continent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... that my roots stick in your soil, and the old wounds are beginning to break open. You are a dangerous ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... let me know it immediately— 'twould give me such satisfaction. Concerning the Unitarian chapel, the salary is the only scruple that the most rigid moralist would admit as valid. Concerning the tutorage—is not the salary low, and absence from your family unavoidable? London is the only fostering soil for Genius. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... tastes for small birds in full force; and consider beccafichi, ortolani, &c. as the most agreeable dainties: it must be confessed that they dress them incomparably. The sheep here are all lean and dirty-looking, few in number too; but the better the soil the worse the mutton we know, and here is no land to throw away, where every inch turns to profit in the olive-yards, vines, or something of much higher value than letting ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... on which it is to run. Cars while running are exposed to circumstances which boards on the wall are not subjected to. The cars under my charge run through two different countries and three different States, and therefore subjected to such a variety of climate and soil that the testing by stationary boards would completely fail to give the correct result. For example: I have placed two sample boards, prepared and varnished, and exposed them to all kinds of weather and to the constant and steady rays of the sun for an equal length of time, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... be said of the north applies with still more force to the south of Europe—Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Danubian States, Hungary, Turkey, etc. A climate of surpassing quality, a soil so luxuriant and fertile as is hardly found in the best regions of the United States, will some day furnish an abundance of food to unnumbered people. The decrepit political and social conditions of those countries cause hundreds of thousands ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the Egyptians were the most advanced of the nations of antiquity, since the fertility of their soil made the occupation one of primary importance. Irrigation was universally practised, the Nile furnishing water for innumerable canals. The soil was often turned up with the hoe rather than the plough. The grain was sown broadcast, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... cut down when the French were here; and see how fine and hardy the trees are now. I planted most of them myself. I was a little boy about eleven or twelve years old when the forester hired me. He had fresh soil brought for the whole place and covered the rocky spots with moss. In the spring I worked from six in the morning till seven in the evening, putting in the little plants. My left hand was almost frozen, for I had to keep putting it into a tub of wet loam, with which I covered the roots. I was scantily ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... made glad the hearts of those who had in faith dropped their seed into the brown soil, and the whole earth, down to the sun-kissed edge of the sea, rejoiced with a great joy. Nor was the sea less lovely, with the silvery sheen of early summertide on its placid bosom, and the white wings of many boats glistening in ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Ancient History). Modern authors have often used the name in a wider sense, as the designation of the whole eastern part of Iran. As there can be scarcely any doubt that it was in these regions, where the fertile soil of the mountainous country is everywhere surrounded and limited by the Turanian desert, that the prophet Zoroaster preached and gained his first adherents, and that his religion spread from here over the western parts of Iran, the sacred language in which the Avesta, the holy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... wrote to Sir Guy Carleton, commending in such warm terms the advantages of Shelburne, he took occasion at the same time to disparage the country about the river St John. 'I greatly fear,' he wrote, 'the soil and fertility of that part of this province is overrated by people who have explored it partially. I wish it may turn out otherwise, but have my fears that there is scarce good land enough ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... up the question. Twice he made a motion in favor of acting for the release of Lafayette. Fitzpatrick was the kind of man who could not bear to entertain the idea that there should exist "in any corner of British soil, in any English heart, conceptions so narrow as to wish to see the illustrious pupil of Washington perishing in a dungeon on account of his political principles." General Fitzpatrick's motion was seconded by General Tarleton, who had fought Lafayette through ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... the result, and was upbraided for his failure. In his chagrin he wrote angrily to the Elector not to soil his name and lineage by sheltering a heretic, but to surrender Luther at once, on pain of an interdict. The Elector was troubled. Luther had not been proven a heretic, neither did he believe him to be one; but he feared collision with ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... entered upon the fertile soil of France, it was groaning beneath the oppression of that cruel and cowardly tyrant Louis the Eleventh, who was the first that ever styled himself "the most Christian king." The Devil had determined not to give Faustus the slightest information ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... grain is in the furrow, the harvest will certainly be fine. He merely fears, and the reason may be seen in the second volume of this edition, that the sap may have been withdrawn from that ancient soil of architecture which has been for so many centuries the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends in this life. His sister's persistence in sticking to the soil of France began to seem to him extraordinary! However, at last, the monotony of the Etretat postmarks was broken by a postcard from Lyons. 'We are here for the night on some business of Paul's; to-morrow we hope to be at Turin, and two or three days later at Venice. By the way, where ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... their talk again became cheerfully impersonal. Truly she had done wonders in a small space and in a short time. Flower-beds glowed beside the towering rocks. Small ditches supplied the plants with water, and from the rich red soil luscious vegetables and ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... of the deserts, swamps, barrens and rocks that we have seen, we make the estimate that fully one-third of the total area of the United States is incapable of supporting the husbandman who depends for his existence upon tillage of the soil. People may talk and write about "dry farming" all they please, but I wish to observe that from Dry-Farming to Success is a long shot, with many limbs in the way. When it rains sufficiently, dry farming is a success; but otherwise it is not; and we ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... American-to-be, by using each bit of spare time for some useful purpose, became early in life the busy person that he has remained to the present day. Of Edward Bok it may truly be said that he began to work, and to work hard, almost from the day he set foot on American soil. He has since realized that this is not the best thing for a young boy, who should have liberal time for play in his life. Of course, Edward made the most of the short period that remained each afternoon after his household duties or his extra studies at school, and when he played it was ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... these things. It is true that a few astronomers believe that they see signs of some sort of feeble life or movement on the moon. Professor Pickering thinks that he can trace some volcanic activity. He believes that there are areas of vegetation, probably of a low order, and that the soil of the moon may retain a certain amount of water in it. He speaks of a very thin atmosphere, and of occasional light falls of snow. He has succeeded in persuading some careful observers that there probably are slight changes of some kind taking place ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... still boiling with passion, "you are two to one, on your own soil besides, the odds you are best used to; and yet I repeat it, that he who asperses the character of General Humbert's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... himself, Mr. Atwood prepared to take his family to the white, tree-shadowed meeting-house, at which he seldom failed to appear, for the not very devotional reason that it helped him to get through the day. Like the crab-apple tree in the orchard, he was a child of the soil, and savored too much ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... heretics and idolaters, and that wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India, like precious seed scattered broadcast all over the world, still bear fruit a hundred and a thousand-fold in that soil which is the most precious before God and man, the soul of a child? No lawgiver, no philosopher, has made his influence felt so widely, so deeply, and so permanently as the author of these children's fables. But who was ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... supposed that where there is no QUOTATION, there will be found most originality. Our writers usually furnish their pages rapidly with the productions of their own soil: they run up a quickset hedge, or plant a poplar, and get trees and hedges of this fashion much faster than the former landlords procured their timber. The greater part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original, that no one cares to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, tawdry ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... in our house and seat her in state in the parlor! Don't fear, Andy, I will not let her soil her hands with anything. I will wait upon her, serve her, hand her everything she needs; all she has to do is to read French books and play on the piano, for that is what a lady is for!" his ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... occupiers and the first clamourers for agrarian laws. So, at the outbreak of the war, Umbria and Etruria, whence Philippus had summoned his supporters, because the farmer class had been annihilated and large land-owners held the soil, remained faithful to Rome. But where the farmer class still flourished, as among the Marsi, Marrucini, and the adjacent districts, discontent had been gathering volume for many years. No doubt the demoralisation of the metropolis contributed to this result; and, as intercourse with Rome became ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... of his brow; joyfully would he eat it, if the injustice of the government did not make it bitter in his mouth. By the insanity of governments, those who are swimming in plenty, without being any the happier for it, yet wring from the tiller of the soil the very fruits that his arms have won from it. Injustice, by reducing indigence to despair, drives it to seek in crime resources against the woes of life. An iniquitous government breeds despair in men's souls; its vexations depopulate the land, the fields remain untilled, famine, contagion, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the balcony into the neighbouring yard: there was not a soul to be seen, but children had been playing there. There was a little garden made of dry sticks: they were stuck down in the soft soil and had been watered; a broken pan, which had certainly served by way of watering-pot, lay there still. The sticks ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... of looking at life and labor. She had always thought so until this minute, and many a thrill of pride had she experienced in thinking of her parents and their days of struggling. They had been and were, the real Empire-builders who subdued the soil and made it serve human needs, enduring hardships and hunger and cold and bitter discouragements, always with heroism and patience. The farm on which they now lived, had been abandoned, deserted, given up for a bad job, and her people had redeemed it, and were making it one of the best in the ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... history. Knowledge of the history of the Greek philosophy of the first and second centuries after Christ is indispensable to the understanding of such a word as Logos—a word that grew up on Greek soil, and whose first roots reach far into the distant past of the Greek mind; and for that very reason not admitting of translation, either into Hebrew or into German. Like many other termini technici, it must be understood historically; just as logic, metaphysic, analytic, organon, ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... charter of the latter was revoked he was one of the Provisional Council for the government of Virginia. Nothing daunted by the ill luck of these companies, he tried colonizing on his account in 1620, in what was represented to him as the genial soil and climate of Newfoundland. Sending good money after bad, he was glad to get out of this venture at the end of nine years with a loss of thirty thousand pounds. In 1629 he sent home his children, and with a lady and servants and forty of his surviving colonists sailed for Jamestown, where ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... weather. Avoid speaking of persons or politics, for, if the individual is of the opposite party to yourself, you will be engaged in a controversy: if he holds the same opinions, you will be overwhelmed with a flood of vulgar intelligence, which may soil your mind. Be reservedly civil while the colloquy lasts, and let the acquaintance cease ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... in a funnel into some vessel placed underneath. Those who had no sheets hung up napkins or other clouts, which when thoroughly wet they wrung or sucked to get the water they had imbibed. Even the water which fell on the deck under foot, and washed away the filth and soil of the ship, though as dirty as the kennel is in towns during rain, was carefully watched and collected at every scupper-hole, nay, often with strife and contention, and caught in dishes, pots, cans, and jars, of which some drank hearty draughts, mud and all, without waiting ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Sea is a border of low Land surrounding the whole Island, except in a few places where the ridge rises directly from the Sea. This low land is of Various Breadths, but nowhere exceeds a Mile and a half. The Soil is rich and fertile, being for the most part well stock'd with fruit Trees and small Plantations. and well water'd by a number of small Rivulets of Excellent Water which come from the adjacent hills. It is upon this low Land ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... Japan herself. Although the influence of the government was always exerted against the admission of foreign ideas, not a few of the seeds of western civilization were by them planted in a fertile soil and bore abundant fruit. To Kaempfer and Baron von Siebold particularly we must always look for our knowledge of the Japan of the days of its seclusion. Many efforts were made at successive times to open intercourse ...
— Japan • David Murray
... Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now 'tis out and I am easy. We never can strike root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of gardener's mold, and if they take ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... beings who inspired veneration and love. Your residence appeared to beautify and consecrate this spot, and gave birth to an opinion that, if cities are the chosen seats of misery and vice, they are likewise the soil of all the laudable and strenuous ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... evidence which would turn their liking for her into contempt and suspicion would fade away from before her eyes, and the summer afternoon on Duncton Hill glow in its place. She had bidden Hillyard look at the Weald of Sussex, that he might carry the smell of its soil, the aspect of its blooms and dark woodlands and brown cottages away with him as a treasure to which he could secretly turn like a miser to his gold; and she herself, with them ever before her eyes, had forgotten them altogether. To sink back into the rank and file—how fine she ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... It is, I suppose, like my own county. We haven't a dozen free-soil voters. 'Bleeding Kansas' is a dead issue with us. It is bled to death, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... be said that these measures were made necessary by the war then going on. Nothing could be more baseless than such an objection. In this war the French soon became generally successful. It was quickly pushed mainly upon foreign soil. Numerous contributions were levied upon the subjugated countries to support the French armies. The war was one of those in which the loss, falling apparently on future generations, first stimulates, in ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... went out to Ted and Katherine. Not that he considered himself fit for their blameless society. Together with the vices he had acquired there had sprung up humility, that strange virtue, which has its deepest roots in the soil of shame. But all his old yearning after goodness revived in their presence. When he was with them he felt that the cloud of foul experience was lifted for a moment from his mind; they gave him sweet thoughts instead of bitter for a day ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... of the island. There were settlers here and there, but these settlers were not the folk who intermittently frequented Squitty Cove. The settlers stayed on their land, battling with stumps, clearing away the ancient forest, tilling the soil. Those to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest joy were tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown with seaweed, ringed with a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly head now to the one good, blue-gray eye of Jack MacRae, the same rock ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in which, as in our case, the division of the school for teaching purposes has no reference to the division into boarding-houses. It was proposed to pluck up the school by the roots and transplant it bodily to strange soil; to take with us the entire body of masters, with, probably, their families, and every boy who was ready to follow; to provide teaching for the latter, not only without loss in the amount, but without interruption of the existing system in any branch; and to guarantee ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... imagination, and to tell us that Neptune settled on this island, and that his posterity dwelt there for a period of nine thousand years in the midst of fertility and abundance. But, not content with their ample possessions and prolific soil, they went over to Africa and Europe, and even penetrated ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... Peloponnesus—vineyards that stretched down to the sea and were dotted with sentinel cypresses. The heat was much greater than it had been in Athens. Enormous aloes hedged gardens from which came scents that seemed warm. The sandy soil, turned up by the horses' feet, was hot to the touch. The air quivered, and was shot with a music ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... rutted lanes on its way from one village to another; for the ploughmen from many a surrounding thorpe, hamlet, and lonely farm-house united in the celebration of Plough Monday. It was nothing unusual for at least a score of the 'sons of the soil' to yoke themselves with ropes to the plough, having put on clean smock-frocks in honour of the day. There was no limit to the number who joined in the morris dance, and were partners with 'Bessy,' who carried the money box; and all these had ribbons ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... think the zest of the game was palling on us a little, strange as it may seem. We could dig gold from the soil almost at will. It would seem that this single fact would keep normally acquisitive men keyed to a high pitch of endeavour all the time; but it was not so. I suppose we needed a vacation. We began to discuss what we would do when we should ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... soil removed by these apparatus amounts to 350 cubic meters (12,360 square feet) per hour. Four plants of similar construction have been built for the new Baltic Sea Canal, besides a fixed elevator of the same power and disposition, with the exception that the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... the soil; but the tomahawk of the Comanche and the spear of the Apache have thinned off the descendants of the Conquistadores, until country houses stand at wide distances apart, with more than an equal number of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... both hands; open your mouth and shut your eyes! It is a draught of Troy's own vintage that I offer you; racy, fragrant of the soil, from a cask these hundred years sunk, so that it carries a smack, too, of the submerging brine. You know the old recipe for Wine of Cos, that full-bodied, seignorial, superlative, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in France. How many had come no one knew except those who would not tell. All that was announced was that England had sent help to her ally, and that English troops were again, as on so many occasions in the past, on French soil. But this time they came as friends, not as the enemies that Marlborough ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... underground tanks excavated in the retentive clay. These remarkable tanks are often as much as 30 ft. in diameter by 60 ft. in depth, and hold from 5,000 to 8,000 barrels. In the construction of the tanks the alluvial soil, of which there is about 18 ft. or 20 ft. above the clay, is curbed with wood and thoroughly puddled with clay. On the completion of the excavation, the entire vertical surface is then lined with rings ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... a heartache to see the terrible condition of the fair country that has been turned into a howling wilderness by the vandal German armies. Ah! I almost dread the day, much as I yearn to tread my native soil again." ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... government established and maintained an experimental station at Rio Piedras, for the purpose of promoting a technical knowledge of the native soil-products; and the results of this step have proved invaluable. The recent director of the station, Senor Fernando Lopez Tuero, wrote, while in office, several monographs on tropical agriculture; which I have been ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... with a sensibility, or a phlegm, which are nearly the same in every situation. They possess the shores of the Caspian, or the Atlantic, by a different tenure, but with equal ease. On the one they are fixed to the soil, and seem to be formed for, settlement, and the accommodation of cities: the names they bestow on a nation, and on its territory, are the same. On the other they are mere animals of passage, prepared ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... says one of them, "I don't like any peasants.... They are all dogs! They have provincial States, and they do for them.... They tremble, they are hypocrites, but they want to live; they have one protection: the soil.... However, we must tolerate the peasant, for he ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region, lifting up, as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long, of all customary responsibility for what they ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... other wood, since at that season the rank vegetation was in full growth. Also the fearful thunderstorms which broke continually and in a few minutes half filled their canoe with water, made the reeds and the soil on which they grew, sodden with wet. ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... result of a whole year's patient care and labour. The land is cleared for cultivation by felling and burning, and it is then ploughed in primitive fashion and sown, but only one harvest is generally gathered on one spot. The latter is then deserted, and the following year another patch of virgin soil takes its place. There is thus a good deal of waste, not only in land, but also in trees, which are wantonly cut down for any trifling purpose, regardless of their value or the possible scarcity in the future of timber. Accidental ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... weathering and by attrition against the gravel in which they were rolled under glacial floods. They bear about the same relation in their roughness and shapelessness to the carefully-worked relics of the red Indian found on the surface, or in the accumulation of soil resulting from the decay of countless generations of forest and herbage which everywhere covers the old gravels, as the matchlock of the Pilgrim Fathers bears to our target-rifle. But they are of human origin, and assert the presence of humanity on the Atlantic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... thought-breeding thoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities, and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to be wrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful,—of these, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we may venture to say so, has not more or brighter examples ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... was, at that period, virgin soil sparsely inhabited by a Finnish population possessing neither cohesion nor historical consistency, and, consequently, docile and easily assimilated. Everywhere else—all along the Baltic coast, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the vacant professorships. Some of these candidates we shall certainly secure, and their names will be one by one made known. But I must tell you, in domestic confidence, that it is not an easy task to transplant a tree which is deeply rooted. It is especially hard to do so in our soil and climate. Though a migratory people, our college professors are fixtures. Such local college attachments are not known in Germany; and the promotions which are frequent in Germany are less thought of here. When we think of calling foreign teachers, we encounter other difficulties. ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... holding your present relation to the slave. We are bound to hem you in as by fire, till, like a scorpion so fenced about, you die by your own sting. We must proclaim liberty to your captives. Step but one foot with Kate on free soil, and our watchmen of liberty, set to break every yoke and help fugitives on their way from the house of bondage, will be around you in troops, and shout in her ear those electrifying and beatifying words, "You are a free woman!" There her chains will drop; she will cease to be a slave, and become ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... of lilacs, maples, wheat, Her own soil sings beneath her feet, Of springtime And ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... forms this disease, may take its origin from different accidents: a fever ill cured has often caused it; or the piles, which had been used to discharge largely, ceasing; a marshy soil, poisoned with stagnant water, has given it to some persons; and altho' indolence and inactivity are oftenest at the root, yet it has ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... root within this treacherous soil?" cried Media. "Away! thy Yillah is behind thee, not before. Deep she dwells in blue Serenia's groves; which thou would'st not search. Hautia mocks thee; away! The reef is rounded; but a strait flows between this isle and Odo, and thither its ruler must return. Every hour I tarry here, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... composed of trees; the mountains and rivers, though on a larger scale, were not associated in the mind with the exertions of patriotic valour, and the achievements of individual enterprize, like the Alps or the Danube, the Grampians or the Tweed. It is impossible to tread the depopulated and exhausted soil of Greece without meeting with innumerable relics and objects, which, like magical talismans, call up the genius of departed ages with the long-enriched roll of those great transactions, that, in their moral effect, have raised the nature of ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... knew too well that women would be either tyrants or slaves, and that he did not want to be a tyrant to any woman, nor to be under any woman's orders. He found some way of returning to his beloved Venice, in spite of the law forbidding any noble who has filled the office of doge to leave his native soil. Though he behaved to me in a very friendly manner he knew how to maintain an air of superiority which imposed on me. Nothing else could have given him the courage to ask me to dinner when Petri was to be present. I felt that I had been tricked, and I thought ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... various Ministries, there are a very large number who are also protecting patrons of the people; and, though ex officio, in many cases quite as popular and powerful, if not more so. Among the most important are the following: She-chi, Gods of the Soil and Crops; Shen Nung, God of Agriculture; Hou-t'u, Earth-mother; Ch'eng-huang, City-god; T'u-ti, Local Gods; Tsao Chuen, Kitchen-god; T'ien-hou and An-kung, Goddess and God of Sailors; Ts'an Nue, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... auctioneer's list that lies before me—a catalogue of live and dead farming stock to be sold at a homestead under the South Downs—is full of them. So blunt and sturdy they are, these ancient primitive terms of the soil: "Lot 1. Pitch prong, two half-pitch prongs, two 4-speen spuds, and a road hoe. Lot 5. Five short prongs, flint spud, dung drag, two turnip pecks, and two shovels. Lot 9. Six hay rakes, two scythes and sneaths, cross-cut saw, and a sheep hook. Lot 39. Corn chest, open tub, milking stool, and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of criticism. Some fell on the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of thought which ripened into a harvest of large and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... always the same, always calm, always rational, equally able to instruct and to soothe, with the intelligence of a confessor and the winning gentleness of a woman." It is peculiar to the sex there to escape outward soil, whatever may be their moral exposure; for one instinctively recognizes a Frenchwoman by her clean boots, even in the muddiest thoroughfare, her spotless muslin cap, kerchief, and collar. She retains also her individuality after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... colonies, Las Casas described the richness of the soil and the vast resources of the Indies, declaring that what was wanted there, were industrious, honest, and frugal emigrants, who would develop the agricultural sources of wealth, instead of the horde of rapacious adventurers and dissolute soldiery then engaged in depopulating and ruining ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... to eat it. Pen-se, however, does not need spoon or fork; she takes two small, smooth sticks, and, lifting the bowl to her mouth, uses the sticks like a little shovel. You would spill the rice and soil your dress if you should try to do so, but these children know no other way, and they have learned to do ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... faculty subsided. They appeared more convincing than before in the light of this later evidence. Ex pede Herculem—from the fellow who had confessed he interpreted the guilt of those who had not. The seed of suspicion sprang quickly in the soil that hungered for it. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... this work, an imitation of the original Basilica of St. Peter at Rome. Augustine's monastery was handsomely endowed. A large stretch of country was given to the monks, and they were the first who brought the soil into cultivation, and built churches and preached in them. "The monks," says Bede, "were the principal of those who came to the work of preaching." In the city itself there were thirty-two "mansurae" or ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... stood side by side at the foot of a hill near a little seaside resort. The two peasants labored hard on the unproductive soil to rear their little ones, of which each family ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... He had no children. We thought we were safe. Alas! news came that the Germans were always advancing. We had time to fly. All the farm-hands fled, except Pere Grigou, who loved him. But my uncle was obstinate. To a Frenchman, the soil he possesses is his flesh and his blood. He would die rather than leave it. And my uncle had the murder of my father and mother on his brain. He told Pere Grigou to take me away, but I stayed with him. It was Pere Grigou who forced us to ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... might spread over the whole country, to its eminent advantage. Some days afterward, when everything belonging to the ship had been removed from the shore, he set fire to the top-wood in order to dry a piece of ground, which he dug up, and sowed with several sorts of garden seeds. The soil, indeed, was not such as to promise much success to the planter; but it was the ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... the village communities, and in part the population of the few towns. Their chief occupation is with the soil. They form the core of the nation and the main part of the army. Nearly all own the land on which they live, and which they cultivate with their own hands or by hired labour. Roundly speaking, agriculture and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... him for some time. Tradition held that the trail they followed was an inheritance from Indian times; it was like an ineffaceable line drawn in the forest by the red men in assertion of their permanent title to the soil. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... rode back to Carteret Park beside the Indian officer and his daughter as a man might ride in a trance. Surely within an hour the whole world had been changed! He rode on air instead of solid soil, and the sunshine of heaven was not half so ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... its occupation inconvenient and insecure, by rendering it inaccessible to the British fleet. With this design, works had been erected on a low marshy island in the Delaware, near the junction of the Schuylkill, which, from the nature of its soil, was called Mud Island. On the opposite shore of Jersey, at a place called Red Bank, a fort had also been constructed which was defended with heavy artillery. In the deep channel between, or under cover of these batteries, several ranges of frames had been sunk, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... death, no one would do for him but Donal; nobody could please him but Donal. His mind as well as his body was much weaker. But the intellect, great thing though it be, is yet but the soil out of which, or rather in which, higher things must grow, and it is well when that soil is not too strong, so to speak, for the most gracious and lovely of plants to root themselves in it. When the said soil is proud and unwilling to serve, it must be thinned and ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... finished preparing the fields for the spring cultivation. He remembered how the young sun, in those fresh morning hours, had seemed to caress the long-deserted wintry earth with his kindling rays; and the black soil turned up by the harrow had exhaled a refreshing odour as of incense offered by nature's maternal heart. The daily increasing heat of the sun, the milder air, and the grateful receptivity of earth: all betokened the end of idle winter and the beginning of a new year ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Germany (says the Greek Chalcondyles) is of ample latitude from Vienna to the ocean; and it stretches (a strange geography) from Prague in Bohemia to the River Tartessus, and the Pyrenaean Mountains. [23] The soil, except in figs and olives, is sufficiently fruitful; the air is salubrious; the bodies of the natives are robust and healthy; and these cold regions are seldom visited with the calamities of pestilence, or earthquakes. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... have escaped the Blue Disease, but at any moment I may find myself a victim, and the fact does not disquiet me. For I am convinced that we are witnessing the sudden intrusion and the swift spread of an absolutely harmless organism—one that has been, perhaps, dormant for centuries in the soil, or has evolved to its present form in the deep waters of the Elan watershed by a process whose nature we can only dimly guess at. Some have suggested a meteoric origin, and it is true that some meteoric stones fell over Wales recently. But that is ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... breast, And opens to sunset its gateway of gold! The land of the mountain, the land of the lake, And rivers that roll in magnificent tide— Where the souls of the mighty from slumber awake, And hallow the soil ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... was in no long time ready to return Jeroboam's wicked actions, and the punishment they deserved, upon his own head, and upon the heads of all his house. And whereas a soil of his lay sick at that time, who was called Abijah, he enjoined his wife to lay aside her robes, and to take the garments belonging to a private person, and to go to Ahijah the prophet, for that he was a wonderful man in foretelling futurities, it having been he who told me that I should be ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Clark in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The older school had sought the explanation of value and the theory of distribution in objective factors,—partly in the chemical qualities of the soil, partly in labor, partly in the costs (or outlays) of the employing class. The psychological factor in value had been almost eliminated from this older treatment of value and price, or at best was imperfectly recognized under the name of "utility." The newer school made the psychological ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... time when the laboring population of England occupied a position in respect to the proprietors of the soil there, very analogous to that now held by African slaves in our country. But the system has been changed. From being serfs, compelled to toil for masters, under the influence of compulsion or fear, they have become a free peasantry, working in the employment of landlords, for wages. ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... years, when it was first printed at London in an English translation by the Hakluyt Society, in 1859. It is an exceedingly interesting and valuable tract, containing a lucid description of the peculiarities, manners, and customs of the people, the soil, mountains, and rivers, the trees, fruits, and plants, the animals, birds, and fishes, the rich mines found at different points, with frequent allusions to the system of colonial management, together with the character and sources of the vast wealth which these settlements were annually ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... this was put into effect hastily and during the intense heat of a Washington summer, it was an enormous success and now at the close of the campaign contributions are still coming in and we consider that the top soil of melting pot possibilities has not been ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... in the piping tune of peace We trod the sacred soil of Greece, Nor thought, where the Ilissus runs, Of Teuton craft or ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... threads of a woof underrunning a majestic warp. He adored his country with a fervor that savors of the heroic, and when he said, "There are no Alleghanies in my politics," he spoke the truth. The intense passion for the soil which animated him at Marshfield was only a fragment of that higher passion for his country—feeling never tainted by sectionalism or local prejudice. It was this profound love for the Union, coupled ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... O hand of cloud, and vanish away in the ether! Roll thyself up like a fist, to threaten and daunt me; I heed not Either your warning or menace, or any omen of evil! There is no land so sacred, no air so pure and so wholesome, As is the air she breathes, and the soil that is pressed by her footsteps. Here for her sake will I stay, and like an invisible presence Hover around her for ever, protecting, supporting her weakness; Yes! as my foot was the first that stepped on this rock at the landing, So, with the blessing of God, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and everything laid waste; and we hear that half their number are laid up with sickness, and that a great number have died. I wish that I were younger, that I, too, could help to destroy the insolent foes who have dared to set foot on our sacred soil." ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... venerable lamps of faith. And of these three houses of God, that one holds the most precious flame, the purest light, which treasures the holy fire that came from France. The English colonists, who sat in the other two congregations, came to Carolina's soil to better their estate; but it was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent and exalted prayer to God as their own conscience bade them, and not as any man dictated, that those French colonists sought the New World. No Puritan splendor of independence ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... of the hardships that are to be encountered in a journey over such a dry plain at the hottest season of the year. All vegetation seems utterly destroyed; not a blade of grass, not a green leaf, is anywhere to be seen; and the soil, a stiff loam, reflects back the heat of the sun with redoubled force; a man may congratulate himself that, being on horseback, he is raised some feet above it. Nor is any rest from these fatigues to be thought of, since to stop where there is neither shade, water, or grass, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the angels"—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity! Capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... what a country has previously produced, and that at present the grain has not been planted, will declare unfertile the soil which has been ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... great purpose in the endless construction and reconstruction of the world, will choose its own agency; and the imperial design in Canada has chosen the Liberal party, because the Liberal party in this country is the party of the soil, the land, the nation as it springs from that which makes it a nation; and imperialism is intensely and supremely a national affair. Ours is the policy of the fields. We stand for the wheat-belt and the stockyard, the forest and the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... probably formed the predominant motive only in regard to the acquisition of tropical lands. So long as Europe continued to be able to produce as much as she needed of the food and the raw materials for industry that her soil and climate were capable of yielding, the commercial motive for acquiring territories in the temperate zone, which could produce only commodities of the same type, was comparatively weak; and the European settlements in these areas, which we have come to regard ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... of the sun, and their scarcely less supportable reflection from the water. The melon-patch of Las Sandas is overflowed daring the rainy season, and probably the apparently bare, sandy surface hides rich deposits of soil below. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... relations with these creatures which live or die at his will. In this task his ancient savage impulses are slowly worn away, and in their place comes the enduring kindliness of cultivated men. When we compare the state of mind of the hunter with that of the care-taking soil-tiller, we see the vast scope and influence which this work of domestication has effected in our kind. To it perhaps more than to any other cause we must attribute the civilizable and ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it." And Curran, in words of burning eloquence, shall reply: "I speak in the spirit of the British law, which makes liberty commensurate with, and inseparable from, the British soil—which proclaims, even to the stranger and the sojourner, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of universal emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear. Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious dualism of their orthodox Christianity, in which love was carnal and therefore evil, and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but something to be deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by the miracle of grace. Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me) whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred to the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
