"Quern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and sixteenth centuries. We find a passage of St. Matthew thus rendered by Wicliffe: "Two wymmen schulen (shall) be grinding in one querne," or hand-mill; and Harrison the historian, two centuries later, says that his wife ground her malt at home upon her quern. Among the Romans poor freemen used sometimes to hire themselves out to the service of the mill when all other resources failed; and Plautus is said to have done so, being reduced to the extreme of poverty, and to have composed ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... must love the light so well That no darkness will seem fell. Love it so you could accost Fellowly a livid ghost. Whish! the phantom wisps away, Owns him smoke to cocks of day. In your breast the light must burn Fed of you, like corn in quern Ever plumping while the wheel Speeds the mill and drains the meal. Light to light sees little strange, Only features heavenly new; Then you touch the nerve of Change, Then of Earth you have the clue; Then her two-sexed meanings melt Through ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Quern-biter of Hakon the Good, Wherewith at a stroke he hewed The millstone through and through, And Foot-breadth of Thoralf the Strong, Were neither so broad nor ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Where coffined actors postured out their dreams, And harlot Folly changed her thousand gowns. This corner-shop was Bull's Head Tavern, When names now dead on marble lived in clay; Its rooms were like a sanded cavern, Where candles made a sallow jest of day, And drovers' boots came grinding like a quern, While merchants drank their steaming ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... human heads, carved in stone; bits of sandstone, marked with patterns, and so forth. Mixed with these are the common rude appliances, quern stones for grinding grain; stone hammers, stone polishers, cut antlers of deer, pointed bones, such as rude peoples did actually use, in early Britain, and may have retained into the early middle ages, say ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang |
