"Ploughshare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Preacher—but coming with the commendations which you have brought me, I doubt not but your meaning was good. But we are a wilder folk than you inland men of Fife and Lothian. Be advised, therefore, by me—Spur not an unbroken horse—put not your ploughshare too deep into new land—Preach to us spiritual liberty, and we will hearken to you.—But we will give no way to spiritual bondage.—Sit, therefore, down, and pledge me in old sack, and we will talk ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... At the call of his country he laid aside the plow and seized the sword. But having wielded it with success, when his country was no longer endangered, and public affairs needed not his longer stay, "he beat his sword Into a ploughshare," and returned with honest delight to his ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... you are cultivating the soil to its utmost capacity, I shall not meddle; but if it seems to me that you are letting it lie fallow while I can draw a furrow to some purpose, you need not warn me off with your old title-deeds; in my ploughshare shall drive. To a better farmer I will yield right gladly, but I will not be scared away by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... I, for right ahead of us, as if an invisible gigantic ploughshare had passed over the woods, a valley or chasm was suddenly opened down the hill—side with a noise like thunder, and branches and whole limbs of trees were instantly torn away, and tossed into the air ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and spoke with all the zeal of the convert. Among his most appreciative listeners were the occupants of the Peers' Gallery—the Duke of MARLBOROUGH, who has transformed the sword of Blenheim into a ploughshare, and Viscount CHAPLIN, to whom the announcement of State bounties for wheat-growing seems like the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... spacious summit of Mount Acra; and a part of the hill, distinguished by the name of Moriah, and levelled by human industry, was crowned with the stately temple of the Jewish nation. After the final destruction of the temple by the arms of Titus and Hadrian, a ploughshare was drawn over the consecrated ground, as a sign of perpetual interdiction. Sion was deserted; and the vacant space of the lower city was filled with the public and private edifices of the AElian colony, which spread themselves over the adjacent ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to the world that after ages of wars and conquests there comes at last to the troubled earth the glorious reign of peace. But no new steel cruisers, no standing army. These are the devil's tools in monarchies; the Republic's weapons are the ploughshare and ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... eighteen inches. The spreading out of the moraine is here very striking.] Now I submit that this is not the Place to seek for the scooping power of a glacier. The opinion appears to be prevalent that it is the snout of a glacier that must act the part of ploughshare; and it is certainly an erroneous opinion. The scooping power will exert itself most where the weight and the motion are greatest. A glacier's snout often rests upon matter which has been scooped from the glacier's bed higher up. I therefore ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod, And spread the furrow for the seed we sow; This is the field and Acre of our God, This is the place ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... when compared with this, which was in fact neither more nor less than an old Roman Farmhouse, of that innocent and unsophisticated day, when the Consulars of the Republic were tillers of the soil, and when heroes returned, from the almost immortal triumph, to the management of the spade and the ploughshare. ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... vertebrae, each of which supports a single pair of quill-feathers. In the flying Birds of the present day, as before mentioned, the terminal vertebrae of the tail are amalgamated to form a single bone ("ploughshare-bone"), which supports a cluster of tail-feathers; and the tail itself is short. In the embryos of existing Birds the tail is long, and is made up of separate vertebrae, and the same character is observed in many existing Reptiles. The tail of Archoeopteryx, therefore, is ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... them, this gradually gave the furrow a turn towards the left, thus accounting for the slight curvature. Lastly, while the oxen rested on arriving at the end of the furrow, the ploughmen scraped off the earth which had accumulated on the coulter and ploughshare, and the accumulation of these scrapings gradually formed ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the Lord, Willebrord with eleven others did irrigate the said land with the waters of their holy preaching. Moreover, with the help of his companions he did busy himself with breaking up the ground with the ploughshare of discipline, yet not without much difficulty; and in a short space the task of spreading the faith did prosper wondrously beneath their hands; for God worked with them, and did confirm ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... Crustacea in general. The embryos of birds have a long tail containing almost or quite as many vertebrae as that of archaeopteryx. But most of these never reach their full development but are absorbed into the pelvis, or into the "ploughshare" bone supporting the tail feathers. Thus older forms may be said to have retained throughout life a condition only embryonic in their higher relatives. And the natural classification gave the order not only of geological succession but also of stages of embryonic development. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... strips of sunlight shining in, down the long perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages in the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside, his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, "Each of us was a passing ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... ploughshare is the Sabre: Here's the harvest of our labour; For behind those battered breaches Are our foes with all their riches: There is Glory—there is plunder— Then away despite ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... broad light bark, which served to cover those lowly huts, propped up with rough-hewn stakes, that were first built as a shelter against the inclemencies of the air. All then was union, all peace, all love and friendship in the world. As yet no rude ploughshare presumed with violence to pry into the pious bowels of our mother earth, for she without compulsion kindly yielded from every part of her fruitful and spacious bosom, whatever might at once satisfy, sustain, and indulge ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... had been a stick. His look was terrible. He put his right hand on the muzzle, his left hand on the breech; he pulled with this, he pushed with that, and wheeled it round, as if it had been a plaything: it furrowed the ground like a ploughshare. He tore the sheet-lead from the touch-hole; then the powder-monkey rushed up with the fire, when the cannon went off, making the bark fly from the trees, and many an Indian send up his last yell and ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... and gems. And it stood on his standard, as if in the act of crowing, and always adorned the van of the army. With that peacock, the car of the high-souled Vrishasena shone, like the car, O king, of Skanda (the celestial generalissimo) shining with his peacock unrivalled and beautiful ploughshare made of gold and looking like flame of fire. That ploughshare, O sire, looked resplendent on his car. Salya, the ruler of the Madras, we saw, had on his standard-top an image like the presiding goddess of corn, endued with beauty and producing every seed. A silver boar ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it. But since no one accused you or even suspected you, why could you not have been less aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions? But we will plough no longer in that field. The ploughshare has struck against a rock and grits, denting its edge in vain. My veil is gone,—my ample, historic, heroic veil. There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered through—I will not say stolen tissue, but certainly through tissue which was obtained without rendering its owner any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... heart leaped with joy. We all slept in the one flea-infested, windowless room of the "tavern" that night; and before dawn I was up and untethered the horses, and Polly Ann and I together lifted the two bushels of alum salt on one of the beasts and the ploughshare on the other. By daylight we had left Hans and his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... once more, my friends, who so long have been friendless and homeless, Welcome once more to a home, that is better perchance than the old one! Here no hungry winter congeals our blood like the rivers; Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of the farmer; Smoothly the ploughshare runs through the soil, as a keel through the water. All the year round the orange-groves are in blossom; and grass grows More in a single night than a whole Canadian summer. Here, too, numberless herds run wild and unclaimed in the prairies; ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... triumph was with him. Out of the jaws of death he had rescued the leader whose freedom he considered essential to the success of a patriotic undertaking, and he was satisfied to pay the cost of the venture. He had set his foot upon the ploughshare, and would not shrink from the ordeal ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... same time the guardian of animals, tempered the air to the shorn flock and brought the springs out of the rocks for the supply of the herd. Tliebse had the care of smiths and all the cunning workmanship of forges, and at his fete libations were poured in honor of him upon the hatchet and the ploughshare. Domestic happiness and good-fellowship among neighbors were presided over by the three sisters denominated fates in the mythology of the Greeks, and who besides interfered on the field of battle to throw their invisible shield ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... return tomorrow night. And then begins our great quest. But first I shall have much to say, so that you may know what to do and to dread. Then our promise shall be made to each other anew. For there is a terrible task before us, and once our feet are on the ploughshare we must ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... was the disposition and nature of the ground. This, indeed, was his real discovery, not to mention the layer of humus which he felt certain would be found amassed on the plateau, and the wondrous fertility which it would display as soon as a ploughshare had passed through it. And so with his pick he now began to open the trench which was to drain the damp soil above, and fertilize the dry, sterile, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... ground, that needed only to be spaded up to become a promising garden-spot. Then, swiftly running to the top of the little bluff beyond, they gazed over the smiling panorama of emerald prairie, laced with woody creeks, level fields, as yet undisturbed by the ploughshare, blue, distant woods and yet more distant hills, among which, to the northwest, the broad river wound and disappeared. Westward, nothing was to be seen but the green and rolling swales of the virgin prairie, broken here and there by ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... applying the pressure to the wheel unevenly and at an angle to the direction of the cut (fig. 10A). Not that you can make the wheel move sideways in the cut actually; it will keep itself straight as a ploughshare keeps in its furrow, but it will press sideways, and so break down the edges of the furrow, while if you exaggerate this enough it will actually leave the furrow, and, ceasing to cut, will "skid" aside over the glass. As to pressure, all cutters begin by pressing much too hard; the tool having ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... and harnessed in part by his own loving faithfulness towards others. Ellen had often reflected that, if it hadn't been for her and her mother, her father would not have been obliged to work so hard. Now in Granville she saw another man whom love would hold to the ploughshare. A great impulse of loyalty as towards her own came ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... still-expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist, and, like Fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living Valor; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war-chariot, but with the steam engine and ploughshare? ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... fault with him, Rachel. Doubtless he followed his light, as thee says; but he followed it in better ways too. He cleared land and built a homestead and a meeting-house. Why don't his grandson hang up his old broad-ax and ploughshare, and worship them, if he must have idols, instead of that symbol of strife and bloodshed. Does thee want our Dorothy's children to grow up under the ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, That fate is thine—no distant date; Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight Shall be ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... was able to forget the lofty dreams to which a smooth career had pointed, and which fate, at his first steps, had mocked. He had given up the idea that the world should acknowledge this title: "a great patriot, who is the holder of a high office." He who does not desire this should keep to the ploughshare. Ambition should only have well-regulated roads, and success should only begin with a lower office in the state. But he whose hobby it is to murmur, will find a fine career in field labor; and he who wishes ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... superseding the use of the more cumbrous wood and stone, and other substances which were once in great demand. Iron furnishes most of the multifarious instruments required in the mechanical and agricultural arts—it ministers alike to war and to peace, by furnishing the sword and the ploughshare. It supplies some of the most useful domestic apparatus for the kitchen, the parlour, and the bed-room, and now even the bedstead itself may be formed of iron. It has been long used in some of our great public works: we have iron roads—iron bridges—iron statues—steam-boats of iron—houses ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... shines with golden gleam The silver ploughshare cleaves its hard-won way Behind the patient team, The slow black oxen toiling through the day Tireless, impassive still, From dawning dusk and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... been the sources from whence its channel was filled. Some convulsion of nature at a remote period, by raising the waters above their natural level, might have caused a disruption of the banks, and drained their beds, as they now appear ready for the ploughshare or the spade. In the month of June these flats are brilliant with the splendid blossoms of the Castilegia coccinea, or painted-cup, the azure lupine (Lupinus perennis), and snowy Trillium; dwarf roses (Rosa blanda) ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... a little thing, hardly worth a few pence, and yet how much I have paid for it!" said the inventor, with a sigh, and a far-away expression in his eyes. "Many a time it has reminded me of the mouse's nest that was turned up by the ploughshare. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... been, in her time, as unprincipled as beautiful, and that she had 'gone the pace' more openly than most of her class. They beheld her now without spectacles,—an enormously fat woman, with a large round flaccid face, scarred all over by Time's ploughshare with such deep furrows that one might have sown seed in them and expected ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... many ancient empires. All this had been done, too, not by disorderly and barbarous hordes, seeking in other lands the abundance that was wanting at home; but with system and regularity, by men who had turned the ploughshare into the sword for the occasion, quitting abundance to encounter fatigue, famine, and danger. In a word, the Senor Montefalderon saw all the evils that environed his own land, and foresaw others, of a still graver character that menaced the future. ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... lest we should frighten the grey goose as it passed. No harm in that; no harm in doing so now. And so I do. A quiet sense of mystery steals through me; I hold my breath and gaze. There it comes, the sky trailing behind it like the wake of a ship. Gakgak, high overhead. And the splendid ploughshare ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... pendant. Then, for the first time, did men enter houses; {those} houses were caverns, and thick shrubs, and twigs fastened together with bark. Then, for the first time, were the seeds of Ceres buried in long furrows, and the oxen groaned, pressed by the yoke {of the ploughshare}. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... remained in ruins until the Israelites built them up again under taskmasters. Also Judah's brethren, who had kept quiet up to that moment, fell into a rage, and stamped on the ground with their feet until it looked as though deep furrows had been torn in it by a ploughshare.[275] And Judah addressed his brethren, "Be brave, demean yourselves as men, and let each one of you show his heroism, for the circumstances demand that ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... yet can I read the inscription; A veil hath enveloped my sight, What though through the painted windows Glows brightly the sunbeam's light. Thus gleams, O hall of my fathers, Thy image so bright in my mind, From the earth now vanished, the ploughshare Leaves of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... The interpretation of this proverb is not obvious, and later writers do not appear to have adopted it from Fergusson. It is quite clear that sok or sock is the ploughshare. Seil is happiness, as in Kelly. "Seil comes not till sorrow be o'er;" and in Aberdeen they say, "Seil o' your face," to express a blessing. My reading is "the plough and happiness the best lot." ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... army's, not for his country but for his pay and places; and for fear of his wife at home, that only being in life whom he dreaded. I have asked about men in my own company, (new drafts of poor country boys were perpetually coming over to us during the wars, and brought from the ploughshare to the sword,) and found that a half of them under the flags were driven thither on account of a woman: one fellow was jilted by his mistress and took the shilling in despair; another jilted the girl, and fled from her and the parish ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... employed herself in making ready the food which the distress of yesterday had induced them both to dispense with for an unusual number of hours. She placed it on the board before her son so soon as it was prepared, with the words of a Gaelic poet, "Without daily food, the husbandman's ploughshare stands still in the furrow; without daily food, the sword of the warrior is too heavy for his hand. Our bodies are our slaves, yet they must be fed if we would have their service. So spake in ancient days the Blind Bard to the warriors ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... against nation rise, Nor ardent warriors meet with hateful eyes, But useless lances into scythes shall bend, And the broad falchion in a ploughshare end. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... also possessed imagination, and could thereby see the motive idea at work behind the facts. At first it has a repellent sound, but we quickly learn how clumsy and prejudiced have been our views of the despised worm thrown up by every ploughshare. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... CIII. AEneas with a ploughshare marks the town, And, homes allotting, gives each place a name, Here Troy, there Ilion. Pleased to wear the crown, A forum good Acestes hastes to frame, And laws to gathered senators proclaim. Rear'd high on Eryx, to the stars ascends A temple, to Idalian Venus' fame. A priest ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... in living on terms of friendship with one of the worst landlords in Ireland, but in obtaining many concessions from him. When he came to live in Culloch the landlord had said to him that what he would like to do would be to run the ploughshare through the town, and to turn "Culloch" into Bullock. But before many years had passed Father O'Hara had persuaded this man to use his influence to get a sufficient capital to start a bacon factory. And the town of Culloch possessed no other advantages except an energetic and foreseeing parish ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... not in numbers equal to those which attest the long duration of the Roman power. While Captain Smyth was engaged in his survey of the coast, a farmer in the island of St. Pietro, successively a Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman station, passed his ploughshare over an amphora of Carthaginian brass coins, of which Captain Smyth purchased about 250. “They were,” he states, “with two exceptions, of the usual type: obverse, the head of Ceres; and reverse, a horse or palm-tree, or both.” Some presented to me by Carlo ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the rude Abyssinian ploughshare, and washed down by the rain from the hills of Ethiopia which man has stripped of their protecting forests, contributes to raise the plains of Egypt, to shoal the maritime channels which lead to the city built by Alexander near the mouth of the Nile, to obstruct ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... remedies. He could with truth declare that he felt no lust for power, but wished with as much fervency as any man upon this wide extended continent, for an opportunity of turning the sword into a ploughshare; but his feelings as an officer and a man had been such as to force him to say, that no person ever had a greater choice of difficulties to contend ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... woodman's arm, and with the last stroke the axe in his hands became a hammer, with whose lusty blows, ere long, every anvil in the neighboring province echoed, till with the last blow the hammer in his hands became a ploughshare; and thus, through each province, beginning at the foot and leaving at the head, until there was not an acre in that vast domain which he did not know better than those who tilled it; no forge or ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... landlord in company with Souter John and Tam O'Shanter. As to most of his poems, Burns was really of no distinct school, but seems to stand alone, the creature of circumstance rather than of the age, in an unnatural and false position, compared by himself to the daisy he uprooted with his ploughshare: ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... little craft as I could wish for, but," he added, "the commander is one of the oddest fish I ever fell in with. He has not been to sea for a number of years, and having, as he says, turned his sword into a ploughshare, has devoted his mind to farming and rural sports. Unwilling to tear himself altogether from his beloved beeves and sheep, and pigs and poultry, he has brought them along with him, and has converted ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon it was short, thick, and delicate. On the opposite side of the river lay a field for bleaching the linen, which was the chief manufacture of that country. Hence it enjoyed the privilege of immunity from the ploughshare. None of its daisies ever met the fate ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep, Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come; To see the wearied oxen, as they creep, Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home! ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... in the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men,' said he, Were slain in ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... one of these few, and no revelations can prevent his interesting us. He was not quite finished in his parental existence. The bricklayer's mortar of his father's calling stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns. We do not wish either to have been other than what he was. Their breeding brings them to the average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a simpler expression of our common humanity. As we rolled in the cars by Ecclefechan, I strained ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not concerned about his latter end; all that troubles him about his future, is the billet he yearns for, the food he hopes to get, the rest he is sure is due to him, his leave and the time when—how he longs for that!—he may turn his sword into a ploughshare and have done with war and the soldier's ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... how the year before, Mr. Harrison had his house broken open between eleven and twelve o'clock at noon, upon Campden market-day, whilst himself and his whole family were away, a ladder being set up to a window of the second story, and an iron bar wrenched thence with a ploughshare, which was left in the room, and seven score pounds in money carried away, the authors of which robbery could never be found. After this, and not many weeks before Mr. Harrison's absence, one evening in Campden garden his servant Perry made a hideous outcry, whereas some who heard ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... beyond the confines of my own dear land, and I see this spirit of brotherhood among the nations has broken down international barriers, and international hatred is no more. The sword is beaten into a ploughshare, the spear into a pruning-hook, and the peoples of all lands are one, each freely sharing of its special bounties to add to the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... past— Our once dear love, whose rain lies Like a fair flower, the meadow's last. Which feels the ploughshare's edge and dies! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to or betrayed by the Popes, from their castles of Umbria or the Campagna to their castles in town; and their feuds meant battles also between the citizens who obeyed or thwarted them. Houses were sacked and burnt, and occasionally razed to the ground, for the ploughshare and the salt-sower to go over their site. A few years later, when Pope Borgia dredged the Tiber for the body of his son, the boatmen of Ripetta reported that so many bodies were thrown over every night that they no longer heeded ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... foot, and imagine them all laid down suddenly with gray cinders. Then pass beyond the common into the country, and pause at the first ploughed field that you see sweeping up the hill sides in the sun, with its deep brown furrows, and wealth of ridges all a-glow, heaved aside by the ploughshare, like deep folds of a mantle of russet velvet—fancy it all changed suddenly into grisly furrows in a field of mud. That is what it would be without iron. Pass on, in fancy, over hill and dale, till you reach the bending line of the sea ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... and pure in its green as to seem to shine with colour. It is not brilliant—not a surface gleam or an enamel,—it is stained through. Beside the moist clods the slender flags arise filled with the sweetness of the earth. Out of the darkness under—that darkness which knows no day save when the ploughshare opens its chinks—they have come to the light. To the light they have brought a colour which will attract the sunbeams from now till harvest. They fall more pleasantly on the corn, toned, as if they mingled with it. Seldom do we realise that the world is ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... illumined with a fitful flicker the dark interior, showing the rod across the corner with its jingling weight of horseshoes, a ploughshare on the ground, the barrel of water, the low window, and casting upon the wall a grotesque shadow of Jube's dodging figure as he ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... had defended. His wounds were dressed by his mother; his confession was whispered to the friendly priest who had heard and absolved the follies of his youth; his last sigh was breathed upon the lips of the lady of his love. Surely there is no sword like that which is beaten out of a ploughshare. Surely this state of things was not unmixedly bad; its evils were alleviated by enthusiasm and by tenderness; and it will at least be acknowledged that it was well fitted to nurse poetical genius in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... primal goad to growth, Stood shrunken; Youth and Age appeared as one; Like Winter Summer; good as labour sloth; Nor was there answer wherefore beamed the sun, Or why men drew the breath to carry pain. High reared the ploughshare, broken lay the wain, Idly the flax-wheel spun Unridered: starving ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... twenty-odd policemen, aligned in a triangular formation about Mallard and his sponsors and, with Captain Bull Hargis of the Traffic Squad as its massive apex, this human ploughshare literally slugged a path through the mob to the side entrance of the hall. By sheer force the living wedge made a furrow in the multitude—a furrow that instantly closed in behind it as it pressed forward. Undoubtedly the policemen saved Congressman Mallard ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Dominion: Knowledge, Will,— These two are strong, but stronger yet the third,— Obedience, the great tap-root, that still, Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred, Though the storm's ploughshare spend ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... appear so much an object as exercise. Possibly it was neither; may be they were engaged in digging for specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets which are continually coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the ploughshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or domestic utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held this domain—an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn descendant of which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book, down ...
— Our New Neighbors At Ponkapog • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a similar line of conduct: the officer turns his sword into a ploughshare, and his lance into a sickle; and if he be seen ploughing among the stumps in his own field, or chopping trees on his own land, no one thinks less of his dignity, or considers him less of a gentleman, than when he appeared upon parade in all the pride ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... which weepeth, Carved in marble rich and rare; Even now time's ploughshare creepeth Through the grass which groweth there. O'er the place where he is sleeping Soon will roll oblivion's wave: Still God's angel will be keeping ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... pagan; but wait till you feel it,— That jar of our earth, that dull shock When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Hiding the Future, ope your doorways! Earth, the blood-drenched, yields palms and olives. Sword that hath cleft on bone and muscle, Spear that hath drunk the hero's lifeblood, Furrow the soil, as spade and ploughshare. Blasts that alarm from blaring trumpets Laws of fair Peace anon shall herald: Heaven's shame, at ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... imbecility, seldom or never insanity. The reason is patent—they lack the psychic function, that peculiar element, whatever it may be, which raises civilized man so high above them. That this element can be developed in savages I do not for one instant deny. The ploughshare of evolutionary civilization will bring it to the surface sooner or later, and when it does insanity follows. I have only to point to the American negro to prove the truth of my proposition; even he is partially ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... which rolled its silver tide from the interior lakes to mingle with the waters of the ocean. The footsteps of civilized man seemed scarcely to have pressed the soil, which the hardy native had for ages enjoyed as his birthright; and the axe and ploughshare had yet rarely invaded the hunting grounds, where he pursued the wild deer, and roused the wolf from his lair. A few French settlers, who adhered to D'Aulney, had built and planted around the fort, which stood on a point of land, jutting into the broad mouth of the river, and ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... glaciers. Types of surface. (Thrust mark? Rippled, snow stool, glass house, coral reef, honeycomb, ploughshare, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... object for which he was placed at the head of our armies, we have seen him convert the sword into the ploughshare and sink the soldier ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... of daisies have shone forth in flower Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour Have passed away; less happy than the one That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove The tender charm ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... excavators. Grasped in the closed hand, they insinuate themselves through the interstices of the fingers and plough up your skin in a fashion to make you very quickly loose your hold. With his head, a robust ploughshare, the Beetle might very easily push the ring off its short support. He is not able to do so because he does not think of it; he does not think of it because he is devoid of the faculty attributed to him, in order to support its thesis, by the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... seemed to require a good deal of manure; and this necessary article from the paucity of domestic animals is extremely scarce. Very few sheep or cattle were observed, yet there was an abundance of land that did not seem for many years to have felt the ploughshare. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and splintered marked the borders of it, and a friendly shoal ran out to the northward, and turned aside the rush of the heaviest ice, exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam. There was danger, of course, that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up the beach, and plane off the top of the islet bodily; but that did not trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-house and began to eat, and heard the ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... terrestrial orb and its teeming inhabitants, may be more speedily brought about than by a concussion with these celestial agents. A single principle of motion annihilated, evaporation suspended, or a component part of the atmosphere abstracted, and "final ruin would drive her ploughshare o'er creation;" universal conflagration would instantly ensue from the separation of the oxygen from the nitrogen of the atmosphere,—the former exerting its native energies without control wherever it extends,—solid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... chains, misted in the blue smoke of battle, rise unpityingly over heaps of unburied dead from the Potomac to the Mississippi. Maxime Valois knows at last the penalty of the fatal conspiracy. A sacrificed generation, ruined homes, and the grim ploughshare of war rives the fairest fields of the Land ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... it with the spade, and came to a layer of black burnt ashes of bones. Beneath these, which he scraped away, was the large flat stone on which his pick had struck. It was a wide slab of red sandstone, and Randal soon saw that it was the lid of a great stone coffin, such as the ploughshare sometimes strikes against when men are ploughing the fields in ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... the former class is Duport, once a counselor in the parliament, who, after 1788, knew how to turn riots to account. The first revolutionary consultations were held in his house. He wants to plough deep, and his devices for burying the ploughshare are such that Sieyes, a radical, if there ever was one, dubbed it a "cavernous policy."[1233] Duport, on the 28th of July, 1789, is the organizer of the Committee on Searches, by which all favorably disposed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Sadler's Wells would tear up the benches if they dared to murder out of sight, without being told what is going on. Accordingly, we hear a scream, and the sister of the screamer exclaims,—"Ah, horror! He draws the knife across her throat! (Great applause.) But no; she takes up a broken ploughshare and escapes! (A slight tendency to hiss.) Now he seizes her hair, he throws her down. Ah! see how the blood streams from her——." (Intense delight as the woman falls flat upon the boards, supposed to be overcome with dread.) A bloody knife, of course, next enters, grasped by the villain; who, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... years The ploughshare of a Century to-day Runs peaceful furrows where a crop of Spears Once stood in ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... still presents, as it did in the primeval time, rivers which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned. In this state it is offered to man, not in the barbarous and isolated condition of the early ages, but to a being who is already in possession of the most potent secrets of the natural world, who is united to his fellow-men, and instructed by ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Let the ploughshare of repentance make the land ready for the seed, and then there will be some hope of lasting success. Some other time we may have something to say about the birds, which pick up the seed; but for the present let it suffice that we insist upon the ploughman doing his work before the ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... intention, lieutenant," said Uncle Jeff; "and I speak honestly when I say that, if you wish at any time to turn your sword into a ploughshare, as the saying is, I shall be happy to have you for a neighbour; and come when you may, you shall always be welcome at Roaring Water. I hope that it will not be long before I am back there again. I only wish I knew what has become of Bartle and Gideon; if they are ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... in the middle, with Bellona crouching at her feet—was said to be an easy winner. I was Peace, of course, in chiffon draperies, with my hair down. I hadn't the faintest notion what sort of thing a ploughshare was, but I'd clever people to help me, and so it was all right. But oh, my best one! the difficulty I had in getting a Bellona! They all wanted to be Peace, and some of them were so absolutely horrid about it that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... occupied by Roman farms. Many nations have gained victories and made conquests as the Romans did; but none has equalled the Roman in thus making the ground he had won his own by the sweat of his brow, and in securing by the ploughshare what had been gained by the lance. That which is gained by war may be wrested from the grasp by war again, but it is not so with the conquests made by the plough; while the Romans lost many battles, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... hands, consecrating the double seedtime and the double harvest of the year. Yonder is a field of ripened grain. And there is the Indian laborer, near his cabin of thatch and clay, guiding the rude ploughshare through ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... discussed whether women are moral and responsible beings, and whether there is such a thing as male and female virtues, male and female duties, etc. My opinion is that there is no difference, and that this false idea has run the ploughshare of ruin over the whole field of morality. My idea is that whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights. I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... vast continents many thousands of feet above the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that day time icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel nor of Shakespeare; the works of Rembrandt and Bellini fossilise ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... the grain and the furrow, The plough-cloven clod And the ploughshare drawn thorough, The germ and the sod, The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at battles on the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, that the same weak half-blind ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... who this day dies, was seiz'd Within our bounds, in rustic garb disguis'd. He offer'd bribes to tempt the band that seiz'd him; But the rough farmer, for his country arm'd, That soil defending which his ploughshare turn'd, Those laws, his father chose, and he approv'd, Cannot, as mercenary soldiers may, Be brib'd to sell the ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... country. A peasant coming home from working in the fields had seen him appear and vanish again like a shadow, taking the direction of a lonely house. An old woman declared that she had seen him go into this house. But the next night the house was gone, as though by enchantment, and the ploughshare had passed over where it stood; so that none could say, what had become of her whom they sought, far those who had dwelt in the house, and even the house itself, were ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the water, offers no resistance, and the hoe easily turns it up; elsewhere it is hard, and only yields to the plough. While one of the farm-servants, almost bent double, leans his whole weight on the handles to force the ploughshare deep into the soil, his comrade drives the oxen and encourages them by his songs: these are only two or three short sentences, set to an unvarying chant, and with the time beaten on the back of the nearest animal. Now and again he turns round towards his comrade and encourages ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... we are! How low has fallen our race! Because our fathers lived in their service, must we too toil? Shall we submit ourselves to man, and spend our youth in servile tasks; with straining sinews drag the ploughshare through the heavy soil, or draw the carrier's heavy load in winter cold or beneath the sun of summer? See how strong we are, how weak man is! Shall we subdue our strength, and champ a bit, and serve his pride? Not so. Away with bit and bridle, ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... cows in the heat of the day, and its comparative freedom from mosquitoes was a haven to the horses in the evenings. Then there was more land to plough, and Harris's soul never dulled to the delight of driving the ploughshare through the virgin sod. There was something almost sacred in the bringing of his will to bear upon soil which had come down to him through all the ages fresh from the hand of the Creator. The blackbirds that followed at his heel in long, respectful rows, solemnly seeking the trophies ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... for the ground is yielding up its memories. The spring when it comes will not restore this fullness, nor these deep and ample recollections of the earth. For the earth seems now to remember the drive of the ploughshare and its harrying; the seed, and the full bursting of it, the swelling and the completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the woods throughout the weald the earth has borne fruit; the barns are full, and the wheat is standing stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all around. It is ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the ploughshare of justice is ever drawn through and through the field of the world, uprooting the savage plants. Ever we see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. The injustice of England lost her America, the fairest jewel of her crown. The injustice of Napoleon bore him to the ground more ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... This will warrant my assuring you that, whether in the character of an officer at the head of a corps of gallant Frenchmen, if circumstances should require this; whether as a major- general, commanding a division of the American army; or whether, after our swords and spears have given place to the ploughshare and pruning- hook, I see you as a private gentleman, a friend and companion, I shall welcome you with all the warmth of friendship to Columbia's shores; and, in the latter case, to my rural cottage, where homely fare and a cordial ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... unchangeable. All his suffering came from his own fault; but from the suffering has sprung another crop, not of evil but of good; the seeds of which had lain unfruitful in the soil, but were brought within the blessed influences of the air of heaven by the sharp tortures of the ploughshare ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows black under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can fancy for a superior ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the revolutionary ploughshare cut deeper than among the clergy and the religious orders. Nearly forty monasteries and convents were suppressed in Paris, and strange scenes were those when the troops of monks and friars issued forth ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... feet sheer to the tops of the sugar-pines below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visible heads of the horses, drawn wedge-wise together by the tightened reins, appeared to cleave the darkness like a ploughshare, held between his rigid hands. Even the hoof-beats of the six horses had fallen into a vague, monotonous, distant roll. Then the ridge was crossed, and we plunged into the still blacker obscurity of the brush. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... West. The methods employed were of the debilitating, paternal character long familiar to Canada. All emigrants with families were to be carried thither at the King's expense; and every settler was to receive in free gift a gun, a hoe, an axe, a ploughshare, a scythe, a sickle, two augers, large and small, a sow, six hens, a cock, six pounds of powder, and twelve pounds of lead; while to these favors were added many others. The result was that twelve families were persuaded ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... priests amongst the Egyptians. But the reason why the hog is had in so much honor and veneration amongst them is, because as the report goes, that creature breaking up the earth with its snout showed the way to tillage, and taught them how to use the ploughshare, which instrument for that very reason, as some say, was called HYNIS from [Greek omitted], A SWINE. Now the Egyptians inhabiting a country situated low and whose soil is naturally soft, have no need of the plough; but after the river ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... prevent? But "Curiosity"! He may be there from mere "curiosity"! Curiosity to witness the success of the execution of his own plan of murder! The very walls of a court-house ought not to stand, the ploughshare should run through the ground it stands on, where such an argument could ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... in Mexico, were found at war strength and ready to double themselves overnight. These guard regiments represented the cosmopolitan Negro populations of New York, Chicago, Washington, Baltimore and the State of Ohio. Everywhere the Negro dropped the mattock, left the ploughshare, poised himself at erect stature, passionately saluted Old Glory, answered "Here am I!"—counted fours, and away! Pro-German cried: "White man's war!" Propagandist yelled: "Cannon fodder!" Reactionary declared: "It must not be." The Negro burst the gate and entered the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... September of the just expired year, my daily quantum was sixty grains—half taken the instant I awoke, the other half at six o'clock in the evening; and I could no more have avoided putting into my body this daily supply than I could have walked over a burning ploughshare without scorching my feet. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of nails, a wagon-tire, an anchor, a cable, a cast-iron stove, pot, kettle, ploughshare, or any article made of cast-iron—a yard of coarse cotton, a gallon of beer, an ax, a shovel, nor a spade, should be sent east for. There ought to be in full operation before the completion of our canal, at least one steam ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... soul, or refinement of aspect existed in the first of the Canadian dynasty of Duchatel, it had not been transmitted to the living representative of the line. As the long hung-up sword or unused ploughshare, lose their brightness and edge from want of use, perhaps these qualities of mind and body had disappeared for want of a fitter field for their display. Andre Duchatel, seigneur of Montboeuf, was a vulgar looking, short, broad-set, florid figure, of fifty years or so; material in his tastes, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... other contact with the earth is like ploughing. You may play upon it, travel over it, delve into it, build your house down on it; but when you strike into the bosom of the fields with your ploughshare, wounding and healing as your feet follow deep in the long fresh cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life through the oaken handles as you never felt it before; you are conscious of a closer union,—dust with dust,—of a more mystical union,—spirit with spirit,—than any other ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... from which he came, and flung it into one heap and mixed it all together. They call this pit by the same name as the heavens, Mundus. Next, they drew the outline of the city in the form of a circle, with this place as its centre. And then the founder, having fitted a plough with a brazen ploughshare, and yoked to it a bull and a cow, himself ploughs a deep furrow round the boundaries. It is the duty of his attendants to throw the clods inwards, which the plough turns up, and to let none of them fall outwards. By this line they define the extent of the fortifications, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... bride comes to her husband's house, she finds at the door a broom; or, if he takes possession of her's, a ploughshare is placed there: both allegorical of their duties. The distaff of the bride is carried by an ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... gold that slept in its ashen furrows. A shining undulation passed through it, and broke, at the ends, as it were, into a curling golden foam. Then Anne stood up and tossed it backwards. Her brush went deep and straight, like a ploughshare, turning up the rich, smooth swell of the under-gold; it went light on the top, till numberless little threads of hair rippled, and rose, and knitted themselves, and lay on her head like a fine gold net; then, with a few swift swimming movements, upwards and outwards. It scattered ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... tenantless mansion, Haunted by vain regrets, and pallid, sorrowful faces. Still he said to himself, and almost fiercely he said it, "Let not him that putteth his hand to the plough look backwards;[35] 245 Though the ploughshare cut through the flowers of life to its fountains, Though it pass o'er the graves of the dead and the hearths of the living, It is the will of the Lord, ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... am a man of the ploughshare and not of the sword. I want to get back to my quiet farming life again, and that is impossible ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... is our mother, and it is sweeter to lie on her bosom amid blooming flowers or beneath bending elms and sighing pines in God's Acre." He noticed how rapidly the railways were breaking down caste. "The locomotive, like a ploughshare turning the sward of the prairies, is cutting up a faith whose roots run down deep into bygone ages.... The engine does not turn out for obstructions, such as in former days impeded the car ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... political influence, they are liberal and kindly landlords. Under their sway fens and sands become fertile; agricultural experiments are tested on a large scale; cattle and sheep improve in breed; national capital augments, and, springing beneath the ploughshare, circulates indirectly to speed the ship and animate the loom. Had there been no Woburn, no Holkham, no Montfort Court, England would be the poorer by many a million. Our great Houses tend also to the refinement of national ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to consider him as a god of vegetation, and a great many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to show his agricultural character. But the more primitive a community is, the more intense is its struggle for existence, and the more rife its rivalries with its neighbours. Alongside of the ploughshare there must always have been the sword or its equivalent, and along with Flora and Ceres there must always have been a god of strife and battle. That Mars was this god in early as well as later times is shown above all things by the fact that he was always ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... spake the Oracle? 'Care for no name at all! Say but just this: We praise one helpful whom we call The Holder of the Ploughshare. The great deed ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... rang out the clanging peal of the tocsin. Thought of no danger to come restrained their furious anger. Quick into weapons of war the husbandman's peaceful utensils All were converted; dripped with blood the scythe and the ploughshare. Quarter was shown to none: the enemy fell without mercy. Fury everywhere raged and the cowardly cunning of weakness. Ne'er may I men so carried away by injurious passion See again! the sight of the raging wild beast would be better. Let not man prattle of freedom, as if himself he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... happily inspired when, in reminding the farmers of their duty to put more land under the plough, he compared the compulsory powers of the Board of Agriculture to a sword in its scabbard, and hoped there would be no necessity to rattle it. Everybody knows that the sword in question is a converted ploughshare, and that it rests with the War Office to turn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... not the most severe form of execution. In Flanders, monastic ingenuity had invented another most painful punishment for Waldenses and similar malefactors. A criminal whose guilt had been established by the hot iron, hot ploughshare, boiling kettle, or other logical proof, was stripped and bound to the stake:—he was then flayed, from the neck to the navel, while swarms of bees were let loose to fasten upon his bleeding flesh and torture him to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... turn to meet it, strike him about halfway down his length, with a crashing rending sound, like that of the breaking-up of vast sheets of ice. In sank the great wedge, into his heart, and as it cut its way hundreds of horsemen were thrown up on either side of it, just as the earth is thrown up by a ploughshare, or more like still, as the foaming water curls over beneath the bows of a rushing ship. In, yet in, vainly does the tongue twist its ends round in agony, like an injured snake, and strive to protect its centre; still farther in, by Heaven! right through, and so, amid cheer after cheer from our watching ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... the moment broken up roughly by the hot ploughshare of civil war. It might have been better prepared for the reception of the good seed by the slower process of social evolution. But the guiding spirits of that era had no choice. The tide of an immense historic opportunity had risen. It was at its flood. Then ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... soldiers have been sent for to be sharpened, and not at all to be beaten into ploughshares. I permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my earnest writings—"Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of the Sword"—and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope, namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the national passions towards ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... so?" he asked, and glanced down the hill to his ploughshare lying in the ripped-up field. "But it is not beauty that some of us want, you see—it's success, action, happiness, call ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... further still beyond the original pea; from the wild seeds confided to the soil by the first man who thought to scratch up the surface of the earth, perhaps with the half-jaw of a cave-bear, whose powerful canine tooth would serve him as a ploughshare! ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... known, while the forest trees dripped with the abundance of honey and the lakes and rivers were alive with fish. So much game was there, too, that the folk could have lived on that alone and never put a ploughshare in the soil. In Cormac's time the autumn was not vexed with rain, nor the spring with icy winds, nor the summer with parching heat, nor the winter with whelming snows. His rule in Erinn, it is said, was like a wand of gold laid on a ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... but, as it has been gradually dried by drainage, it has considerably shrunk in thickness, and buried trees, which only a few years ago were beyond the reach of plough or spade, are now not uncommonly caught by the ploughshare. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... but keep that one line away! It drives me mad, mad. "He took her by the lily-white hand."—I could strangle myself for thinking of such things, but they will come!—I won't go mad. I should never get to Garibaldi, and never be rid of this red-hot ploughshare ploughing up my heart. I will not go mad! I ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... chain? Consider, friends, your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumb'rous is the gilded coach! The pride of man is our reproach. Were we designed for daily toil; To drag the ploughshare through the soil; To sweat in harness through the road; To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legged kind! What force is in our nerves combined! Shall, then, our nobler jaws submit To foam, and champ the galling bit? Shall haughty man ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the ploughshare yields The unreaped harvest of unfurrowed fields, And bakes its unadulterated loaves Without a furnace in unpurchased groves, And flings off famine from its fertile breast, A priceless market for ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... great shyness she appraised his hands and his feet—those strong forceful hands that had dominated the lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood—that remote, incredible time—was on ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller |
