"Plowman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strain and stress is fully expressed in the earlier forms of The Vision of Piers Plowman, which were composed before the death of Edward III. Its author, William Langland, a clerk in minor orders, debarred by marriage from a clerical career, came from the Mortimer estates in the march of Wales: but his life was mainly spent in London, and he wrote in the tongue of the city ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... The servingman the plowman would invite To leave his calling and to take delight; But he to that by no means will agree, Lest he thereby should come to beggary. He makes it plain appear a country life Doth far excel: and so they ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... officer, and his Ass-sociats We arose to goe, but Fortune bade us stay: The Constable had stolne our oares away, And borne them thence a quarter of a mile Quite through a Lane beyond a gate and stile; And hid them there to hinder my depart, For which I wish'd him hang'd with all my heart. A plowman (for us) found our Oares againe, Within a field well fil'd with Barley Graine. Then madly, gladly, out to sea we thrust, 'Gainst windes and stormes, and many a churlish Gust, By Kingston Chappelle and by Rushington, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... if then such earths become hard, firme, and not to be seperated, then are those soyles tearmed fast and binding soyles, for if there ardors be not taken in their due times, and their seede cast into them in perfect and due seasons, neither is it possible for the Plowman to plow them, nor for the seede to sprout through, the earth being so fastned and as it were stone-like fixt together. Now sithence that all soyles are drawne into these two heads, fastnes, and loosenesse, and to them is annexed the diuersitie of all tillage, I will now show the simple Husbandman ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... star came that bids the shepherd bring his flock to the fold, that brings the wearied plowman to his rest. But no rest did that star bring to the Argonauts. The breeze that filled the sail died down; they furled the sail and lowered the mast; then, once again, they pulled at the oars. All night they ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... on foot one morning, dressed in his gray riding-coat, and accompanied by General Duroc, on the road to Marly. Chatting as they walked, they saw a plowman, who turned a furrow as he ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... looked through an essay on "Piers Plowman," which she was to take to her English Literature tutor on the following day, went aimlessly upstairs and put her head into Connie's room. The old house was panelled, and its guest-room, though small and shabby, had yet absorbed from its oaken walls, and its outlook on the garden ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the reaper. Some may think that all these persons ought to be considered as employing their labor directly about the thing; the corn, the flour, and the bread being one substance in three different states. Without disputing about this question of mere language, there is still the plowman, who prepared the ground for the seed, and whose labor never came in contact with the substance in any of its states; and the plow-maker, whose share in the result was still more remote. We must add yet another kind of labor; that ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, and it appears to have been still there in the fourteenth century. It was given by William Fulman, who was a fellow of this college, to the college library. The same donor gave them their "Piers Plowman" and their famous manuscript of the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... Munday, next after that twelf tide is past, Bids out with the plough—the worst husband is last. If plowman get hatchet, or whip to the skrene, Maids loseth their cocke, if no water ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... to have a talk with Jonas Hicks, who, if he were at home, might be engaged in plaiting a whip or mixing batter for pancakes or taking a stitch in his clothes, the iron seat of a "prairie-busting" plow being particularly hard on the seat of a man's trousers. It was to this place that the plowman was ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... with pleurisy, is getting some better. I had a talk on these liliputian thesises before I could get a siphon in the fountain of knowledge that I was after. And there's a bank there called the Lumberman's Fidelity and Plowman's Savings Institution. It closed for business yesterday with $23,000 cash on hand. It will open this morning with $18,000—all silver— that's the reason I didn't bring more. There you are, trade and capital. Now, will you ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge proboscis, the geese, the old woman—the old woman, in person, with her red cloak and black bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside her decent, placid cheeks—the towering plowman with his white smock-frock, puckered on chest and back, his short corduroys, his mighty calves, his big, red, rural face. We greeted these things as children greet the loved pictures in a story book, lost and mourned and found again. It was marvelous how well we knew them. Beside the road ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... to publish them, and what is more to the point, they subscribed in advance for a number of the copies. John Wilson of Kilmarnock was to do the printing. During May, June, and July of 1786 the printer was doing his work. At the end of July the volume appeared, and soon the fame of the Ayrshire Plowman was established. Let us hear Burns himself give his account of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... on I rode, and greater was my thirst. Then flashed a yellow gleam across the world, And where it smote the plowshare in the field, The plowman left his plowing, and fell down Before it; where it glittered on her pail, The milkmaid left her milking, and fell down Before it, and I knew not why, but thought "The sun is rising," though the sun had risen. Then was I ware of one that on me moved In golden ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... crafty man may bothe entende to his craft & to fighte/ how may a crafty man entende to hys werke sewrely in tyme of warre but yf he be kept And right in suche wyse as the knyghtes shold kepe y'e peple in tyme of peas in lyke wise the peple ought to pourveye for theyr dispensis/ how shold a plowman be sewre in the felde/ but yf the knyghtes made dayly wacche to kepe hem/ For lyke as the glorye of a kynge is vpon his knyghtis/ so hit is necessarye to the knyghtes that the marchantis craftymen and comyn peple be defended ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... word of the Pottawatomies meaning land of plenty. It was the name of a river in Illinois draining "boundless, flowery meadows of unexampled beauty and fertility, belted with timber, blessed with shady groves, covered with game and mostly level, without a stick or a stone to vex the plowman." Thither they were bound to take up a section ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... pipes at 4s; 12 bushells & halfe of malt (dryed on purpose) put into another great canary pipe at 2s; 3 pipes, & for one other pipe, 2 hoggsheads &, 2 lesser casks to put the said pease in, & caryage in 2 waynes from Nibley to Berkeley, with 12s spent by the plowman there, & to the couper to head & ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... of some hoar hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill; Sometime walking, not unseen, By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great Sun begins his state, Robed in flames and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight, While the plowman near at hand Whistles o'er the furrowed land, And the milkmaid singing blithe, And the mower whets his scythe, And every shepherd tells his tale, Under the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... progressive school with refined students and plenty of air and sunshine. Stacpoole thoroughly enjoyed his new surroundings, which he associated with the description of Malvern Hills in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857): "Keepers of Piers Plowman's visions / Through the sunshine and the snow." This environment encouraged his interest in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Stokes and the Butterick Company for The Country Cat by Grace McGowan Cooke, and appearing in Sonny Bunny Rabbit and His Friends. Lucy Wheelock for The Little Acorn. Julia Darrow Cowles for The Plowman Who Found Content from The Art of Story Telling. The D. C. Heath Company for The Story of the Laurel by Grace H. Kupfer. Ginn and Company for The Story of the First Thanksgiving, and Doll-in-the-Grass. Doubleday, Page and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... bending the prairie grasses for miles and miles! Glimpses of cool water in little ponds, in small lakes, in the brook! The whispering of rushes and the song of thrushes, so varied, so melodious! The call of the plowman far afield, urging the horses ahead in the great work of bringing forth the corn! The great moon at night, and the spectacle of the stars in the hush of ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... I see it praised and prized By all, from plowman unto peer; It's pencil-marked and memorized, It's loaned (and not returned, I fear); It's worn and torn and travel-tossed, And even dusky natives quote That classic that the world has lost, The Little Book I ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... looking long and sadly at Holbein's plowman, and was walking through the fields, musing on rustic life and the destiny of the husbandman. It is certainly tragic for him to spend his days and his strength delving in the jealous earth, that so reluctantly ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... the decree of the Roman Council of 1078, which indicated Saturday as the day of the week appropriated to the honour of the Blessed Virgin. This usage was as well understood in the British Isles as elsewhere. Thus, in "Piers Plowman": ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... years, though but four of the women and nine of the men, including Quashy the "head driver" or foreman, were past forty years. The gang included a "head home wainman," a "head road wainman," who appears to have been also the sole slave plowman on the place, a head muleman, three distillers, a boiler, two sugar potters, and two "sugar guards" for the wagons carrying the crop to port. All of the gang were described as healthy, able-bodied and black. A considerable number in it were new negroes, but ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a specialist, yet Forrest was the proved master of their specialties. As Paulson, the head plowman, complained privily to Dawson, the crop manager: "I've worked here twelve years and never have I seen him put his hands to a plow, and yet, damn him, he somehow seems to know. He's a genius, that's what he is. Why, d'ye know, I've seen him tear by a piece of work, his hands full ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... they got their style. Where did he get his grasp upon affairs and his knowledge of men? Ask the Lord God, who created miracles in Luther and Bonaparte!... Where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music? Whose hand smote the lyre of the Scottish plowman, and stayed the life of the German priest? God, God, and God alone; and as surely as these were raised up by God, inspired by God, was Abraham Lincoln; and a thousand years hence, no drama, no tragedy, no epic poem, will be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with deeper feeling, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... upon which the legend represents Judas as having hanged himself, or of which the cross was made at the crucifixion. In Pier's Plowman's Vision it ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... attired in a new suit that day for visiting, and, as I rose to leave, he said to me: "I am going up into London and I will walk wi' ye." We sallied out and he strode the pavement with long strides like a plowman. I told him I had just come from the land of Burns, and that the old man at the native cottage of the poet had drunk himself to death by drinking to ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... with gentle earnestness replied: "Full well I know how blindly we grope on In doubt and fear and ignorance profound, The wisdom of the past a book now sealed. But why despise what ages have revered? As some rude plowman casts on rubbish-heaps The rusty casket that his share reveals, Not knowing that within it are concealed Most precious gems, to make him rich indeed, The hand that hid them from the robber, cold, The key that locked this rusty casket, lost. The past was wise, else whence that wondrous tongue[3] ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... the liberality with which he rewarded their discovery. He edited four of our monkish historians; was the first publisher of that interesting specimen of early English satire and versification, Pierce Plowman's Visions; composed a history in Latin of his predecessors in the see of Canterbury, and encouraged the labors of many private scholars by acts ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... best to dine with the laird." In both cases he was capable of vigorous, common-sense expression; in neither was he likely to exhibit the imagination, the tenderness, or the humor which characterized the plowman clad ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... land, if numbers be the test of greatness—but in Edward III's time as in that of Henry V, who inherited so much of Edward's policy and revived so much of his glory, there stirred in this little body a mighty heart. It is only of a small population that the author of the "Vision concerning Piers Plowman" could have gathered the representatives into a single field, or that Chaucer himself could have composed a family picture fairly comprehending, though not altogether exhausting, the chief national character-types. In the year of King Richard II's accession (1377), according to a trustworthy ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... was poor now. One would suspect the articles in his pockets to be meager and of poor quality—the things you might find in a peasant's coat. That which he called home was a peasant's house in the Bosk hills—the house of the plowman of Liaoyang, whose children he fathered. Annually, however, he went abroad, telling the story of the underdog, usually making the big circuit from the East to the West, and stopping at a certain little cabin within hearing distance of the whistles of Manhattan, where his first disciple worked ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... slipped by all too quickly, and if the lad's presence did not contribute to good plowing, it at least made a cheerful plowman. It was plain that Zen had sufficient confidence in her farmer neighbor to trust her boy in his care, and his frequent references to his mother had an interest for Grant which he could not have analyzed or ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a freak of courage, a drunken man's deed, wholly beyond the ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... lasting, what an unspeakable satisfaction would it be to know that the Ballads, the Plowman Stories, and the "Broken Crutch" of your father would eventually contribute to lighten your steps to manhood, and make your own crutch, through life, rather a memorial of affection than ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... me the economic conditions of Cyprus. The population, he said, comprised no class that in England would be called rich, and very few of the peasants, though mostly their own landlords, lived a life which an English plowman would tolerate. The inhabitants as a whole were certainly exceptionally liable to a class of diseases the cause of which is malnutrition, and I came, as I talked to Sir Henry, to see in Cyprus a very useful refutation of the doctrine that the masses are only poor when ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... provinces," says a contemporary,[3357] "are not up to the level of the Revolution; it opposes old habits and customs and the resistance of inertia to innovations which it does not understand." "The plowman is an estimable man," writes a missionary representative, "but he is generally a poor patriot."[3358] Actually, there is on the one hand, less of human sediment in the departmental towns than in the great Parisian sink, and, on ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... school, and books, A happy girl with rosy looks Young Plowman wooed and won; despite Her pretty, pouting prejudice, Her deep distaste for rural bliss Or ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... "learning" about Robin Hood, but no real knowledge. He is first mentioned in literature, as the subject of "rhymes," in Piers Plowman (circ. 1377). As a topic of ballads he must be much older than that date. In 1439 his name was a synonym for a bandit. Wyntoun, the Scots chronicler, dates the outlaw in the time of Edward I. Major, the Scots philosopher and master ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... not going through the fyre. The mother of Edward confessor passed over nine burnynge shares. The ordeal taken away by the court of Rome, and after by Henry III. The stork bewrayeth not adultery but wreaketh the adultery of his owne mate. The plowman's tale is wrong placed. Chaucer's proper works should be distinguished from those adulterat and not his. There were three editions of Chaucer before William Thynne dedicated his to Henry VIII. The first editions being very corrupt, William Thynne augmented ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... clock, in stately-measured chime, That from the messy tower tremendous tolled, No more the plowman counts the tedious time, Nor distant ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... first shown you is of a plowman plowing at evening. It is Holbein's object, here, to express the diffused and intense light of a golden summer sunset, so far as is consistent with grander purposes. A modern French or English chiaroscurist would have covered ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... Poet, who intended to taxe the common abuses and vice of the people in rough and bitter speaches, and their inuectiues were called Satyres, and them selues Satyricques. Such were Lucilius, Iuuenall and Persius among the Latines, & with vs he that wrote the booke called Piers plowman. Others of a more fine and pleasant head were giuen wholly to taunting and scoffing at vndecent things, and in short poemes vttered pretie merry conceits, and these men were called Epigrammatistes. There were others that for the peoples good instruction, and triall ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... man, with eyes opened to a sense of his own tragedy, was speaking for Chesterton's people of England who "have not spoken yet." Yes, they have spoken through the mouth of English genius: as Langland's Piers Plowman, as Dickens's Sam Weller, but not least as Kipling's Tommy Atkins. It was a pity Chesterton was deaf to this last voice. With a better understanding of Kipling he might in turn have made Kipling understand ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... served to make it difficult for a poet of the plowman type, like Robert Burns, or for an author from the general working class, like Benjamin Franklin, to arise in the South. Labor was thought degrading, and the laborer did not find the same chance as at the North to learn from close association ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... adjusted, it does beautiful work, and leaves a flat, smooth ridge, in fine condition for the seed. The wheels pass along on the leveled ridge, making the dots, as shown in figure 2. Handles are fixed to the implement to enable the plowman to keep it in proper place, and for convenience in turning. One horse is fastened to this implement, and two rows are prepared for planting at the same time. This utensil would be troublesome to use in an orchard, or on ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones |
