"Bucolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... called a peaceful retirement. The same fiery-tongued eloquence and full-breasted chivalry which had in turns thrilled and overawed freemen at the polls were no less fervid and embattled before a jury. Yet the Colonel was counsel for two or three pastoral Ditch companies and certain bucolic corporations, and although he managed to import into the simplest question of contract more or less abuse of opposing counsel, and occasionally mingled precedents of law with antecedents of his adversary, his legal victories were seldom complicated by bloodshed. He was only ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... princely friends when they came to do annual homage and to share in periodical sacrifice; declaring the penal laws (there were no other laws) for all his vassals; compassionating and conciliating the border tribes living beyond those vassals. But this peaceful bucolic life, in the course of time and nature, naturally produced a gradual increase in the population; the Chinese cultivators spread themselves over the expanse of loess formed by the Yellow River and ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... nauseating mess, which my companions devoured in large quantities. A man opposite to me had the dir- tiest fingers I ever saw; a collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him from a farmers' ordinary. The conversation was mainly bucolic; though a part of it, I remember, at the table at which I sat, consisted of a discussion as to whether or no the maid- servant were sage, - a discussion which went on under the nose of this young lady, as she carried about the dreadful gras-double, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... naturally, a few gifted narrators who, with a nice touch, drew vivid pictures of the happiness, the prosaic simplicity, the bucolic robustness, and all the well-being which floods the quarters of children, scholars, and peasants. With picture-books of this class in their hands, these smug ones now once and for all sought to escape from ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... but there is nothing whatever immoral in either. Innocence and beauty are so apparent that no one can think of evil. When we look at the antique statues of the Greek sculptors; when we read Homer, especially the story of Ares and Aphrodite; when we read the bucolic idyll of Daphnis and Chloe, we can no longer have any doubt on the point. It is not nudity, it is not the natural description of sexual life, but the obscene intention of the artist, his improper and often venal object, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... in the style of Claudian—a 'Meleagris,' a 'Hesperis,' and so forth. Still more curious were the newly-invented myths, which peopled the fairest regions of Italy with a primeval race of gods, nymphs, genii, and even shepherds, the epic and bucolic styles here passing into one another. In the narrative or conversational eclogue after the time of Petrarch, pastoral life was treated in a purely conventional manner, as a vehicle of all possible feelings and fancies; and this point will be touched on again ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... stable where some fifty horses protruded brown and dappled haunches on either hand. It was all wonderfully clean and sweet, and the cobbled pavement, the straw beds, the hay tumbling in sweet-scented bunches into the stalls from the loft overhead, made you forget that around this bucolic enclosure swarmed and rotted the foulest slums of the city, garrets where coiners plied their amateur mints, and cellars where murderers lay ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... stream was ever used for sewerage purposes. It is a survival from old times, once meaning a drain or water course. Commissioners of sewers were appointed by Henry VIII. under the “Statute of Sewers.” But the same bucolic mind which can see in the most graceful church tower in the kingdom “Boston Stump,” gives the name of “Sewer” to a stream pellucid enough to be a fount ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... catching a hare is the surest, and that travelling on a theological canal is the safest plan in the long run. He is more cut out for a country rectory, where the main duties are nodding at the squire and stunning the bucolic mind with platitudes, than for a large circuit of active Methodists; he would be more at home at a rural deanery, surrounded by rookeries and placid fish ponds, than in a town mission environed by smoke and made up of screaming children and thin-skinned ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... poetry, giving us Theocritus, with his charming "Idyls," or scenes of rural life, and his songful dialogues, with their fine description and delightful humor. Following him came Bion and Moschus, two other bucolic poets, whose finest productions are elegies ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... smith loafed out of his shop and, after an exchange of bucolic banter with the three of them, he took a hand in their game himself. He wore no coat or waistcoat and, as he poised a horseshoe for his first cast at the stake, Mr. Trimm saw, pinned flat against the broad strap of his suspenders, a shiny, silvery-looking disk. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... natural selection, there can be none about artificial selection; and the breeder who should attempt to make, or keep up, a fine stock of pigs, or sheep, under the conditions to which the children of the poor are exposed, would be the laughing stock even of the bucolic mind. Parliament has already done something in this direction by declining to be an accomplice in the asphyxiation of school children. It refuses to make any grant to a school in which the cubical contents of the school-room are inadequate to allow ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information where ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... cheek, the mark of which latter wound he bears to this day. At one time he seems to have all but decided to embrace the military career but for family reasons he became a country gentleman, and if Europe had remained undisturbed by revolution he might have lived and died a bucolic squire, "Dyke Captain" of his district, with a seat in the Provincial Diet, a liking for history and philosophy, a propensity to rowdyism and drinking bouts of champagne and porter, and a character which defined itself in his local appellation of "Mad Bismarck." Dis aliter visum. The Revolution ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience—the pen still behind your ear, the ink stains on your fingers—and then and there shall pour out the torrent of your inspiration. You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the city—bucolic and open-mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance of the spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... smallest provincial towns one is rarely out of hearing of the insistent note of some itinerant musician. And no matter how far one penetrates into the recesses of the country, he is always within reach of some bucolic rendering of the popular music-hall ditty of the year before last. But never during our stay in Versailles, a stay that included what is supposedly the gay time of the year, did we hear the sound of an instrument, or—with the one exception of ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... here level against the bucolic idyl cannot be understood of the sentimental. The simple pastoral, in fact, cannot be deprived of aesthetic value, since this value is already found in the mere form. To explain myself: every kind of poetry ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... question that affected the absolute quantity of loaves to be consumed by the graceless mouths that fed upon him, the milk of human kindness—with which Providence has so bountifully supplied that class of the mammalia called the "Bucolic," and of which our Squire had an extra "yield"—burst forth, and washed away all the indignation of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... work on a first-class swell-front residence in the very heart of the city of tents and booths. Even the locomotive, being associated with quieter days and scenes, appealed, as it whistled to and fro upon the Providence Railroad, to some soft bucolic sentiment in the listener, and sending its note, ordinarily so discordant, across that human uproar, seemed to "babble of green fields." And at last it wooed us away, and the Jubilee was again swallowed ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... marching against the foreign invaders. That the 'people' of Reims thus aroused should only have killed 'about eight persons' really seemed to him, one would say, hardly worthy of a truly 'Titanic' and 'transcendental' epoch. There is something essentially bucolic in the impression which mobs and multitudes always seem to make upon Mr. Carlyle's imagination. Of what really happened at Reims in September 1792 he plainly had no accurate notion. He obviously cites from some second-hand contemporary accounts of the transactions ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... would have filled her place in society admirably, and there would have been nothing to distinguish her either for better or worse from other women in a similar position. But it happened that round Thurwell Court the people were singularly uninteresting. The girls were dull, and the men bucolic. Before she had spent two years in the country, Helen was intensely bored. A sort of chronic languor seemed to creep over her, and in a fit of desperation she had permitted herself to become engaged to Sir Geoffrey Kynaston, for the simple reason ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is broken open with a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone, would perform this trick to perfection; and the toad might easily be relegated accordingly to the secondary ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... "The Maiden All Forlorn," bowed down with burdens scarce to be borne, Waiting a blast on Hope's clarion horn, loud as the "Cock that crew in the morn." Bucolic, wheat-crowned, she—Micawber seems she, waiting for something to turn up—somehow. Poor Agriculture! Care's merciless vulture has harried her vitals, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... half in amusement. "How do you ken, Bailie?" said he; "what are yearlings at Fa'kirk Tryst?" And then, waiting no answer to what demanded none, he put the flageolet to his lips again and began to play a strathspey to which the company in the true bucolic style beat time with feet below the table. He changed to the tune of a minuet, then essayed at a melody more sweet and haunting than them all, but ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... any thankfulness, for most of them had expected a more pompous procession than the bucolic tastes of the King cared to indulge in; and one old man said grimly that that sight of dusty old leather coaches was not worth waiting for. Anne looked hither and thither in the bright rays of the day, each of her eyes having a little sun in it, which gave her glance a peculiar ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... were not unfounded was shortly made evident by the appearance of Sylvanus Starr with a bland, bucolic smile upon his wafer-like countenance and his scant foretop tied in a baby-blue ribbon which had embellished the dainty ham sandwiches provided by Mrs. Terriberry. By the time the dance was well under way eyes had brightened perceptibly and ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... wall-flower down to the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed, gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one of these ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it was known throughout the town that Zaidee Hooker had sued Adoniram Hotchkiss for breach of promise, and that the damages were laid at five thousand dollars. As in those bucolic days the Western press was under the secure censorship of a revolver, a cautious tone of criticism prevailed, and any gossip was confined to personal expression, and even then at the risk of the gossiper. ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... corpse, and the glasses and other objects, accompaniments of long illness, are so minutely reproduced that even their contents may be distinguished. In looking at these pictures, which excite the appetite and inspire gay bucolic ideas, one may perhaps be led to think that the malicious host is well acquainted with the characters of the majority of those who are to sit at his table and that, in order to conceal his own way ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the Place du Dome. You can get from one place to the other in about five minutes. Few people were on this street in mid-afternoon. None were going into the shops. I chose the department store, and asked the only saleswoman in sight for a collar. She brought down two styles, both of which were bucolic. Matched with a beflowered tie, either would have gone perfectly around the neck of a Polish immigrant in New York on his wedding day. I suggested that I be shown some other styles. The saleswoman ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... were bucolic visitors from up country, but the majority, it was plain to see, hailed from the city. No steam carousel shrieked, no ballyhoo blared, no steam pianos shrieked, no barker barked. Upon the piers, stretching out into the surf, bands played soothingly softened airs and along the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... They were grazing with bucolic tranquillity on the maritime pasture lands, contemplated from afar by the mussels, the oysters, and other bi-valves, attached to the rocks by a hard and horny hank of silk that enwrapped their enclosures. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Bucolic paradise of Battus and Bombyce, of Corydon and Daphnis, may it please the hierophants of Sanskrit lore, of derivative Aryan philology, of iconoclastic euhemerism, to spare us yet awhile the lovely myths that dance across the asphodel meads of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson |
