"Soil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stillness came a sharply humming sound. Within a yard of the spot where Wellington sat his horse a handful of soil heaved itself up and fell in a tiny scattered shower. Immediately elsewhere in a dozen places was the phenomenon repeated. There was too much glitter about the staff uniforms and vindictive French sharpshooters were finding them an ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Parrots are also innumerable, and the natives are particularly partial to them and monkeys for food. Turtle have been caught in the bay, as well as fish, but these supplies are uncertain, and, therefore, not to be depended upon. The island is entirely mountainous, and contains a fine rich soil, capable of producing any thing required of it. Several small mountain streams fall into the sea, the largest of which are the two, named Hay and Horton Brooks, before mentioned. The principal vegetable cultivated by the natives is the yam, with ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... then. Let no more This leper haunt and soil thy door! Cure him, ease him, O release him! And let once more, by mystic birth, The Lord of life be ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... side of the bay being not so thick of wood as the other parts, and the soil being good, I fixed on it, at Nelson's recommendation, as the most proper situation for planting some of the fruit-trees which I had brought from the Cape of Good Hope. A circumstance much against anything succeeding here is that in ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... there to show it. But take a glance at this outside photograph. To reach that window even a tall man must have stood on a ladder or something. There are no marks of a ladder or of any person in the soft soil under the window. What is more, that window was cut from the inside. The marks of the diamond which cut it plainly show that. Scientific ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs whom the muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat, well-watered soil. Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song. But, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody—Auf den Alpen droben ist ein ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... had trusted, in the present more favorable season, to find easy travelling and abundant supplies. On these great wastes and wilds, however, each season has its peculiar hardships. The travellers had not proceeded far, before they found themselves among naked and arid hills, with a soil composed of sand and clay, baked and brittle, that to all appearance had never been visited by the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... and by savage ideas, and we ask no more than this colouring to explain the wildest Greek myths. What truly 'primitive' religion was, we make no pretence to know. We only say that, whether Greek religion arose from a pure fountain or not, its stream had flowed through and been tinged by the soil of savage thought, before it widens into our view in historical times. But it will be shown that the logic which connects Tsui Goab with the Red Dawn is far indeed ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... own part,—a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable, living from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son inherited the farm, and everything on it,—house, furniture, barns, cattle, tools. Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will provided that the son should give his mother ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... human nature can redress itself of climate, can generate warmth in high latitudes, and cold at the equator; but in respect to mind and manners, from the law of latitude there is no appeal. Man, like the plants that grow for him, has a proper sky and soil: with them to flourish, without them to fade; through either kingdom, vegetable and moral, in situations that are aquatic, the alpine nature ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... to rain again, and the roads were mire traps. As they struggled on into evening Kirby found a barn which appeared to be out by itself with no house in attendance. The door was wedged open with a drift of undisturbed soil and Boyd, exploring into a ragged straggle of brush in search of a well, reported a house cellar hole. The place must ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... other ordinary farm operations the chemical gas-engine will prove very handy; and the great point in its favour will be that instead of useless cinders the refuse from it will consist of the most valuable compost with which the farmer can dress the soil. Enamelled iron will be employed for the troughs in which the bones and acid will be mixed, and a cover similar to that placed over a "Papin's digester" will be clamped to the rim all round, the gases being liberated only in the form of a ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... we have laid down cold plates," the aunt said. "Some people lay down hot ones, as we did at luncheon, but the soup is so likely to soil them that it is really hardly safe. Besides, dinner is a more formal meal than the others, so we must be more particular. When Bridget brings in the tureen she will stand it on the sideboard with the hot soup-plates, and you are to dip a spoonful of soup carefully in ...
— A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl - Margaret's Saturday Mornings • Caroline French Benton
... add that they have shown that musical apprehension of the progress of Nature through her ascending gradations which entitled them so to do, but their attempts are frigid, though sometimes grand; in their strain we are not warmed by the fire which fertilized the soil ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... necessary, and General Grant began by regular approaches to invest the place, after making the three desperate assaults on the 16th, 17th and 18th. It had been indeed a bloody June; the soil of the Old Dominion, which for two centuries the negro had tilled and made to yield the choicest products, under a system of cruel and inhuman bondage he now reddened with his blood in defense of his liberty, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... her inability to revive Fan's interest in sacred things, for she had begun to notice an increasing indifference in the girl. All the religious teaching, over which she had spent so much time and labour, seemed to have failed of its effect. She had planted, apparently in the most promising soil, and the vicar and the vicar's wife had watered, and God had not given the increase. This was a new mystery which she could not understand, in spite of much pondering over it, much praying for light, and many ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... if you take my advice you will pitch your tent. You have grass and water for sheep and cattle, and timber to build your house, and barns, and fences, and to keep your fires burning. What more do you desire? the soil is good; you may grow corn and vegetables and fruit-trees. You think that we are now in a desert: in a few years you will find yourself ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... rose at length to dismiss the classes, and as the children piled out into the crisp air, the Marquess kid was first on the hard-trodden soil of the school-yard—for there triumph awaited his coming. Paul was less impulsive. He collected his books with the most deliberate care, dusting them off with an unwonted solicitude. Then he spent an indefinite period searching for a stub of slate-pencil, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... For what was in truth the meaning of this interview—of his pleading—and her agonized, reluctant judgment? No ordinary acquaintance, no ordinary friendship could have brought it about. Things unspoken, feelings sprung from the flying seeds of love, falling invisible on yielding soil, and growing up a man knoweth not how—at once troubled and united them. The fear of separation had grown, step by step, with the sense of attraction and of yearning. It was because their hearts reached out to each other that they ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what is it to win fame? Is it not to raise up foes, as it were, from the very soil, who, made with secret hate, seek to stab us in the back? Is it not to lose peace, and toil on from height to height only to be hurled down at last? Happy, then, is the man whom fame flies from, for ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac—twice beaten in an attack upon the South in the enemy's country—struggled as it had never done before,—and won. It had nowhere battled as when the foe was pushing it back upon its own soil ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... cheerfulness, originally foreign to Olive's nature, had sprung up there—one of those heart-flowers which Love, passing by, sows according as they are needed, until they bloom as though indigenous to the soil. To hear Miss Rothesay laugh, as she was laughing just now, you would have thought she was the merriest creature in the world, and had been so all her life. Moreover, from this blithe laugh, as well as from ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred; Which being through long wars left almost waste, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... experience before the Revolution had been that of a surveyor and land agent, and in this business he had apparently gone below the surface and had thought over that great nexus of social, political, and economic questions that centre on that of the proprietorship of the soil. The Revolution turned him into a collectivist, and with the Directoire in power, and a middle class reaction in full swing, Babeuf began to be an influence. The Revolution had so far produced popular leaders, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... torrents before they had accomplished one half of the distance. They were then in the midst of a tract of wooded land that was almost impassable for a lady in the darkness, on account of the yielding nature of the soil, and the numerous ruts and hollows that were soon transformed into miniature pools and streams. Oriana strove to treat the adventure as a theme for laughter, and for awhile chatted gaily with her companions; but it was evident that she was fast becoming ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... places her own seal upon them. Here she show me what can be done with ferns and mosses and lichens. The soil is marrowy and full of innumerable forests. Standing in these fragrant aisles, I feel the strength of the vegetable kingdom, and am awed by the deep and inscrutable processes of life going ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... morning I rambled with the dogs for many hours over the range of hills which bounds the plain upon the north, and from which the river issues. These are completely denuded of soil, and present a glaring surface of hardened chalk, in the crevices of which the usual prickly plants can alone exist. Some of the hill-tops exposed a smooth natural pavement where the rain had washed away all soluble ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... on the size of the strip, but on the number of the souls. The population in Russia has always had a great tendency to migrate, and serfdom in past ages is said to have been instituted to enable the lord of the soil to be responsible for the taxes. "It would have been impossible to collect these from peasants free to roam from Archangel to the Caucasus, from St. Petersburg to Siberia." It was therefore necessary to enforce the payments ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Canon are, the small space in which they are all contained; the profusion and variety of mineral salts, and the proximity of different minerals, almost flowing into each other, but never mingling; the number and different forces of the steam jets on every side; and the remarkable appearance of the soil. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was extended to the Holy Land in a way strikingly providential. After speaking at Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said, he went to Jaffa, and thence to Jerusalem, on November 28. With reverent feet he touched the soil once trodden by the feet of the Son of God, visiting, with pathetic interest, Gethsemane and Golgotha, and crossing the Mount of Olives to Bethany, thence to Bethlehem and back to Jaffa, and so to Haipha, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... then still thy farms restored, Enough for thee, shall bless thy frugal board. What tho' rough stones the naked soil o'erspread, Or marshy bulrush rear its wat'ry head, No foreign food thy teeming ewes shall fear, No touch contagious spread its influence here. Happy old man! here 'mid th' accustom'd streams And sacred springs, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... excellence in the plastic arts is the privilege of the earlier ages of the world. All that is now produced in this respect is mimetic, and, at the best, the skilful adaptation of traditional methods. The creative faculty of modern man seems by an irresistible law at work on the virgin soil of science, daily increasing by its inventions our command over nature, and multiplying the material happiness of man. But the happiness of man is not merely material. Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the beautiful ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... her hands from the frying-pan and the preserving kettle, and put dictionaries and philosophies into them. On her part, besides the negative incitement of losing herself and her troubles in books, Diana's mental nature was too sound and rich not to take kindly the new seeds dropped into the soil. She had gone just far enough in her own private reading and thinking to be all ready to spring forward in the wider sphere to which she was invited, and in which a hand took hers to help her along. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... brought the gold?" The bird croaked. Supposing the imaginary woman refused to pay him, he became angry, and threw up his spade, which frightening the bird, it flew from the nest, and alighted on a heap of soil at some distance. He fancied that Am Solomon had desired him to take his money from the heap, into which he dug with his spade, and found a brazen vessel full of gold coin. This discovery convinced him he was right, and being, notwithstanding ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... declare she would not go, in a tone that would reach the town itself. Even well-trained children had unregenerate impulses, but self-control was one of the early rules impressed upon childhood, the season and soil in which virtues were supposed to take ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... that Michael's silence was due to the fact that there was some foundation for the scandal, which was persistent, that Millicent was one of his party. The report had drifted to him from so many sources that he could scarcely doubt it. It had sprung up and flourished like seed blown over light soil. He was loath to believe that his friend, even if it had not been by his own willing or desire, should have permitted the woman to stay with him when he was Margaret's acknowledged lover. He despised him for being such a weak fool. If Freddy could have ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Gentlemen will not write, sir, they will not write, without the expectation of fame or profit, or perhaps both. Plays are like trees, which will not grow without nourishment; but like mushrooms, they shoot up spontaneously, as it were, in a rich soil. The muses, like vines, may be pruned, but not with a hatchet. The town, like a peevish child, knows not what it desires, and is always best pleased with a rattle. A farce-writer hath indeed some chance for success: but they have ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... Haugwitz, "and so do all your subjects. Sire, your whole people ardently desire to chastise this arrogant France, and to sweep these hosts of Jacobins from the soil of Germany. Oh, my king and lord, only make a trial, only raise your voice and call upon the people to rally around your standards, and to wage war against France! You will see them rally enthusiastically ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... love of this classic soil tempts us to insert the following noble instance from Cicero (pro Milone XXXI) "Vos enim jam Albani tumuli atque luci vos, inquam, imploro alque tester vosque Albanorum obrutae arae, sacrorum populi Romani sociae et aequales, quas ille praeceps amentia caesis prostratisque sanctissimi lucis ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... which seems to have some cotton trade; the houses along the bank are wretched in appearance. Meeaday was passed during a squall, I was thus prevented from making any observation on it. Teiyet is the largest place I have seen. The country we are now passing is very slightly undulated, soil light and sandy. Fine tamarind trees occur, also Terminalia. In addition to the usual plants a Lagerstraemia occurs, which attains the size of a middling tree, and a frutescent Hypericum, Aristolochia, and Hedyotis occur. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... is to Egypt, the stream which flows here is to Biskra. By considerable labor it has been made to meander among the palms in numerous tiny canals, thus by an elaborate system of irrigation causing the barren soil of the desert to become fertile and bring forth fruit. Everywhere the little runlets are led round the very roots of the trees, for the palm, it is said, loves to have its head in the fire and its feet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... character, in Roman estimation—took out its sting by following up his own oversight, as if it had been intentional, falling to the ground, kissing it, and ejaculating that in this way he appropriated the soil. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... to old Master Bunney who was putting in some garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the result of sixty years' experience as to soils—namely, that if your soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to make it all of a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of a share in that lottery where the prizes were so enormous, that the great preponderance of blanks was overlooked. Great inconvenience must have been felt by the early adventurers to the mines: for so many hands were employed in searching for gold, that few remained to cultivate the soil, and provide the necessaries of life. Yet that insatiable thirst of gold is a stimulus which has led to useful and to honourable things: it is not the love of the metal, but the possession of it gives power, and that is the real object of most men's ambition: it is certainly ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... pronounced even and well turned. Although it was already decided that I should not make farming the business of my life, I thrust into my plans a slender wedge of hope that I might one day own a bit of ground, for the luxury of having, if not the profit of cultivating, it. The aroma of the sweet soil had tinctured my blood; the black mud of the swamp still stuck ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... proper circumstances, it reproduces itself; so God said: "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth." The seed has in it a germ of life and a hidden vital force which heat, moisture and the soil have the capacity of developing, so that it reproduces itself. Every vital manifestation of this seed is the result of vital force with which the Creator has endowed every perfect seed. This force in the animal and vegetable kingdoms produces ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... the way to win renown, Or flies with wings to high desire, Who seeks to wear the laurel crown, Or hath the mind that would aspire— Let him his native soil eschew, Let him go range and seek ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... thus concretely and livingly and interactingly and correlatively exist that he has in mind; and when the anti-pragmatist tries to floor him because the word 'opinion' can also be taken abstractly and as if it had no environment, he simply ignores the soil out of which the whole discussion grows. His weapons cut the air and strike no blow. No one gets wounded in the war against caricatures of belief and skeletons of opinion of which the German onslaughts ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Union men it was common to hear such declarations as that "When it becomes a direct conflict between North and South, we will take part with the South," "The Northern troops shall not march over our soil to invade the South," "When it becomes apparent that the war is an abolition crusade, and waged for the destruction of slavery, Kentucky will arm against the Government," etc.; each man had some saving clause with his Unionism. ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... such legislation in our parliamentary system? Well, there are two measures just sprouting in the political soil, which may conceivably grow to something valuable. One is the institution of a Legal Minimum Wage. The other, Old Age Pensions. But there is a better plan than either of these. Some time ago I mentioned the subject of Universal Old Age Pensions to my fellow Socialist Mr Cobden-Sanderson, ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... with strangers, selling out and going away was virtually starting out on an unknown sea without rudder or compass. It was worse than that—it was the tearing up of a life that had rooted itself in the soil whereon he had been content from childhood to middle age. He would suffer more in going, and in the memory of what he had parted with, than in any of the vicissitudes which might overtake him. He had not ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... supplies to the scene of action without fear of hindrance. His Saxons have long since given up their seafaring habits. They have become before all things an agricultural people, drawing almost everything they need from their own soil. The few foreign tastes they have are supplied by foreign traders. However, if Wessex is to be made safe the sea-kings must be met on their own element; and so, with what expenditure of patience and money and encouraging ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... grew so of themselves, or gave to themselves their delicate and exquisite perfumes. We know that the skill of the gardener had something to do with their growth and beauty; we know, moreover, that rain and sunshine, the quality of soil, and other natural influences, did what was totally beyond the power of the gardener; and finally we come to God, who is, ultimately, the sole Author of their very ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... spoken fell into prepared soil, for Coomber had been hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and he went home that night feeling ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... the tank itself can be as near the house as ten or fifteen feet but the piping connecting it with the soil line of the plumbing should be water tight. The best way is to use four-inch cast iron pipe, calking all joints with oakum and lead. At a convenient point between house and tank, this line of pipe should have a "clean-out" fitting so that rags, solidified ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... speech which makes so direct an appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living from a stubborn soil, and still harder work to defend their independence, their liberties, their faith from foes of their own kindred, should be best known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the chivalrous follies for which their ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... showing the action of a recuperative process, and proving that the injured man had long survived his serious wound. In 1809, a farmer of Kirkcudbrightshire set to work to demolish a large cairn that interfered with his tilling of the soil, and which, according to popular tradition, was the tomb of a Scotch king. In taking away the earth the workmen found a large stone coffin, in which lay the skeleton of a man of great stature. The arm had been almost separated from the trunk by the blow of a diorite hatchet, a broken bit of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... at Xeres de la Frontera had been obliged, in consequence of the increasing demand for sherry, to extend their vineyards up the sides of the mountains, beyond the natural soil of the sherry grape. The produce thus obtained was mixed with the fruit of the more genial soil below, and a very good sherry for common use was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... security of property; she could not send the good faith of her parliaments. These were gifts indigenous to herself, either through the temperament of her people, or through the original endowments of her soil. But her condition of moral sentiment, her high-toned civic elevation, her atmosphere of political feeling and popular boldness; much of these she could and did transmit, by the radiation of the press, to the very extremities ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... are no ferocious animals, insects, or reptiles that one cannot reasonably guard against; it is essentially one of those countries where "man's greatest enemy is man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million acres of virgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... no Brussels carpets, no Persian rugs, no hardwood floors. The bare soil was pounded hard, and that was the floor. There were two beds inn the two rear corners of the rooms. The corner position saved both space and labor. Two sides of the bed were composed of parts of the two walls. At the opposite angle a stake, with a forked top, was driven into the ground, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... Scottish maid, though her gallant if lawless deed was performed on Northumbrian soil; but there is one Northumbrian maiden whose fame will live as long as the sea-waves beat on the wild north-east coast, and as long as men's hearts thrill to a tale of courage and high resolve. Grace Darling's name still awakens ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... he has given us. If he gives us a field to cultivate, seed to sow, plants to train up, then we are responsible for the harvest, just in proportion to our agency in its production. If there is not a harvest of the right kind, because we neglected to cultivate the soil, to sow the proper seed, and to train up the plants, then He will hold, us accountable, and "we shall not come out thence till we ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... mean, Willard. I ask you never to assume this hated Northern uniform, or put your foot on Southern soil with ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... surprise when they saw the wonderful strangers kneel and kiss the soil, and then uplift a great and gleaming banner, of rich colors and designs that seemed magical to their untaught eyes. And deep was their delight when these strange beings distributed among them wonderful gifts,—glass beads, hawk's bells, and other ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... lips pronounce them fair! Flowers of more worth repay alone the care, The nurture, and the hopes of watchful hours; While plants most cultured have most lasting powers. So, flowers of Genius that will longest live Spring not in Mind's uncultivated soil, But are the birth of time, and mental toil, And all the culture Learning's hand can give: Fancies, like wild flowers, in a night may grow; But thoughts are plants ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... his surprise and dismay to run out of a thicket right into a low ridge of rough, broken rock, impossible to get a horse over. He wheeled to the left along its base. The sandy ground gave place to a harder soil, where his horse did not labor so. Here the growths of mesquite and cactus became scanter, affording better travel but poor cover. He kept sharp eyes ahead, and, as he had expected, soon saw moving dust-clouds and the dark figures of horses. They were half a mile ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... miles within the Montalivet Isles, was called PRUDHOE ISLANDS; besides which there were several scattered about the sound, and some of larger size near the main: of the latter are KATER'S and WOLLASTON'S. They are of a very rocky character, and furnished with but a poor and shallow soil, although the surface is thickly covered with small trees, growing most luxuriantly. WATER ISLAND, to the north-east, in latitude 14 degrees 21 minutes, and longitude 125 degrees 32 minutes 25 seconds, was visited ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... permitted to say that the views which your Royal Highness had developed to me in confidential conversation have not fallen on an ungrateful soil. I shall ever remember with interest and admiration the princely mind in the princely person, and shall at all times be prepared to prove to your Royal Highness my devotion. I have the honour to remain, Sir, your ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... this point was employed, which consisted in weighing a small area of the exposed surface of the ground, as it was evident that if the soil gave off vapor during a dewy night, it must lose weight. A small turf about 6 inches (152 mm.) square was cut out of the lawn, and placed in a small shallow pan of about the same size. The pan with its turf, after being carefully weighed, was put out on the lawn in the place where ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... all the countries of the Christians, saying, "It behoves none of the followers of the Messiah or soldiers of the Cross to hold back, especially the folk of the citadels and strong places: but let them all come to us foot and horse and women and children, for the Muslim hosts already tread our soil. So hasten, hasten, ere what we fear ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... and the influence of Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated by Vasari, was not inconsiderable. This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was early interested in the fine arts. Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste for travel and collection,[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... as the flames had been, they'd melted and bored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled and bubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was no other motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But when Calhoun switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange of high-pitched ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... if the habitant's crop failed he had little chance to do anything else without the seigneur's consent; he is, says the report of a Commission of Enquiry in 1843, "kept in a perpetual state of feebleness and dependence. He can never escape from the tie that forever binds to the soil him and his progeny; a cultivator he is born, a mere cultivator he is doomed to die." No doubt this plaint is pitched in a rather high key. But in time the burden of grievances was generally felt and then the seigniorial ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... "Half Alexandria has assembled to greet you. Ah, if you could only see it! How the kerchiefs are waving! Laurel after laurel in every hand! All the distinguished people in the capital have gathered on the sacred soil of the Temple of Poseidon. There is Archias, too; there are the artists and the famous gentlemen of the Museum, the members of the Ephebi, and the priests of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... waters accumulate and stagnate, forming vast pestilential swamps where rich pastures and wheat-fields should be—and have been in ancient times. In short, if left to itself, Upper Mesopotamia, (ancient Assyria), is unproductive from the barrenness of its soil, and Lower Mesopotamia, (ancient Chaldea and Babylonia), runs to waste, notwithstanding its extraordinary ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... shook hands, and I set off for my eight miles walk back. The whole island is one vast peat field, in many places below in a state of ignition; then the earth crumbles away below and pits are formed, rank with vegetation, splendid soil for potatoes.' ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in his capacity of wandering barber, had already run through the different provinces of South America, Lina, like her young mistress, had never been on Brazilian soil. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... made his first halt. Amid the ruins of a spacious villa two or three peasant families had their miserable home, with a vineyard, a patch of tilled soil, and a flock of goats for their sustenance. Here the travellers, sheltered from the fierce sun, ate of the provisions they carried, and lay resting for a couple of hours. Marcian did not speak with the peasants, but he heard the voice of a woman loud in lamentation, and ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... her vanity dilated without measure as attention and compliments were almost forced upon her, and yet it was frank, good-natured vanity, as naturally to be expected in her case as a throng of gaudy poppies where a handful of seed had been dropped. Zell's nature was a soil where good or bad seed would ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... high as to be invisible from the ground. Plunging the vessel like a bullet towards the grove in which he had left the Kondalian airship, he slowed abruptly just in time to make a safe landing. As he stepped out upon Osnomian soil, Loring landed the Earthly ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... all things, is not a farmer; possibly because, many years ago, the Manchus forbade him to till the soil. Moreover, on the ground he is as awkward as a duck out of water and he is never comfortable. The back of a pony is his real home, and he will do wonderfully well any work which keeps him in the saddle. As Mr. F. A. Larsen in Urga once said, "A Mongol would make a ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... idea of the impracticability of her own views flitted across her brain. Perhaps it was necessary that races doomed to live on the same soil should give way to each other, and adopt each other's pursuits. Perhaps it was impossible that after more than five centuries of close intercourse, Normans should remain Normans, and Saxons, Saxons. Perhaps after all her neighbours were wiser than herself, such ideas ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Christian, on reading Captain Cartaret's account of Pitcairn's Island, thought it better adapted for the purpose, and shaped his course thither. Having landed and traversed it, they found it every way suitable to their wishes, possessing water, wood, a good soil, and some fruits. Having ascertained all this, they returned on board, and having landed their hogs, goats, and poultry, and gutted the ship of everything that could be useful to them, they set fire to her, and destroyed every vestige that might lead to the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... without fatigue, I can halt without need of repose! I can soar above the nascent cities! I can speed onward with the rapidity of a tornado, sometimes at the loftiest heights, sometimes only a hundred feet above the soil, while the map of Africa unrolls itself beneath my gaze in the great atlas of ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... then that out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought and character, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, have sprung the flowers of poetry which you bid me celebrate to-night? From those songless beginnings have burst, in ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... throve. The noble blood in his veins was warm, and he became strong on his homely fare. He grew apace in the humble house, and the Danish dialect spoken by the West Jutes became his language. The pomegranate seed from Spanish soil became a hardy plant on the coast of West Jutland. Such may be a man's fate! To this home he clung with the roots of his whole being. He was to have experience of cold and hunger, and the misfortunes ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... said, wrongfully charged as being both insolent and insubordinate to his commander, and on the arrival of the vessel at the Cape of Good Hope he was discharged. Left with but small means, and, to him, almost on foreign soil, he bethought himself of some expedient for making money; so, getting hold of a sailor loafing at the port, he talked matters over with him, and they decided upon clubbing their resources, hiring a hall, and circulating posters that on a certain ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... patches of cultivation are to be seen: small potato-gardens, as they are called, or a few roods of oats, green even in the late autumn; but, strangely enough, with nothing to show where the humble tiller of the soil is living, nor, often, any visible road to these isolated spots of culture. Gradually, however—but very gradually—the prospect brightens. Fields with inclosures, and a cabin or two, are to be met with; a solitary tree, generally an ash, will be seen; ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... thought, we must rook him to the heart. And therefore, you put up your idiot cockney. And now you come round, and dictate, and think sure of your Excise? Sure? Are you sure I'll let you pack with a whole skin? By my soul, but I've a mind to pistol you like dogs. Out of this! Out, I say, and soil my home no more. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the doctor was so held by his burning curiosity that it was difficult to lead him into Martin's bedroom. Everything interested him; he bent down and felt the tablecloth with his dirty thumb, then the soil round the hyacinth, then the blue china. Between every investigation he stared at Maggie as though he were now seeing her for the first time. At last, however, he was bending over Martin, and his examination was clever and deft; he had been, like his patient, used to better ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... change for the worse, and the road from bad became abominable, rising by an easy ascent between great sterile fields in which the only signs of vegetation were the everlasting pine woods with their dark verdure, forming a dismal contrast with the gray-white soil. It was the most forlorn spot they had seen yet. The ill-paved road, washed by the recent rains, was a lake of mud, of tenacious, slippery gray clay, which held the men's feet like so much pitch. It was wearisome work; the troops were exhausted and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... services to-day, while much is changed, and the language is our own, we can still trace very much that has been used continuously since the day when S. Augustine first said the whole office of the Church on British soil. ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... Egypt was unique, not in one, but in every sense. To begin at the very foundation of life in that country, we find that the soil was unlike any other on earth in its origin. Every acre of fruitful land between the first cataract and the sea had been brought from Inner Africa, and each year additions were made to it. Out of this mud, borne ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... is no such motive; these most destitute of Destitution's children are simply fellow-countrymen and fellow-Christians. Sons of the same soil, and worshippers of the same God, they need no good works in the way of proselyzation to save them from eternal perdition; consequently they receive no help to keep them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... his life over again in them. It is his greatest pride to be able to trace his blood back into the days of Sverre and St. Olaf, and with the same confidence he expects to see his race spread into the future in the same soil where once it has struck root. Then comes the storm from the Western seas, wrestles with the sturdy trunk, and breaks it; and the shattered branches fly to all the four corners of the heavens. No wonder, then, like a tree that has lost its ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... through the breast-high greasewood and picked his steps along the edge of the hill. The twigs and branches lisped and clattered against the carved leather tapaderos that hooded the stirrups. The warm sun awoke the wild fragrance of sage and mountain soil. Little lizards of the stones raced from Black Boyar's tread, becoming rigid on the sides of rocks, clinging at odd angles with heads slanted, like delicate ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Sunday, during the sermon, she planned a house-party; and so, in due course, invitations were issued, and accepted or regretfully declined. She possessed sufficient sense of the fitness of things to refrain from transplanting any of her unusual varieties from their native soil, but asked only those persons whose family connections ensured a proper tone to ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Fearadach Finnfechtnach whose son was Fiacha Finnolaidh whose son again was Tuathal Teachtmhar. This Tuathal had a son Felimidh Reachtmhar who had in turn three sons—Conn Ceadcathach, Eochaidh Finn, and Fiacha Suighde. Conn was king of Ireland for twenty years and the productiveness of crops and soil and of dairies in the time of Conn are worthy of commemoration and of fame to the end of time. Conn was killed in Magh Cobha by the Ulstermen, scil.:—by Tiopruid Tireach and it is principally his seed which has held ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... to make life easy to a class which formerly had to work hard for the bare necessities of existence. With this came education. The lowest of the people were taught to read and write, and the most ill-chosen and elementary book-knowledge was flung upon unploughed soil, unprepared for its reception. Nature was hurried, and began to produce, not fair flowers at once, but the abnormal and diseased. A little knowledge is a ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... haunted Delsarte and afforded yet another proof of his tolerance. The Italian, C——, shared neither his political ideas nor his religious beliefs; he was one of those refugees whom the defeats of the Carbonari have cast upon our soil, and whose necessities France—does our neighbor remember this?—for years supplied, as if they were her own children. However, she could offer ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... announced this event, than its importance deserved.[30] The truth seems to be, that a belief in omens and prodigies was again become prevalent, as the people were evidently relapsing into pristine barbarity, ignorance being ever the proper soil for a harvest ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... the conversation of many ingenious men who frequented it; and he spent his evenings in reading. His understanding had been of late uncultivated; but the fresh seeds that were now profusely scattered upon the vigorous soil ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... although it presents the appearance of an almost perfect oval, it forms, commencing from Tiberias up to the entrance of the Jordan, a sort of gulf, the curve of which measures about three leagues. Such is the field in which the seed sown by Jesus found at last a well-prepared soil. Let us run over it step by step, and endeavor to raise the mantle of aridity and mourning with which it has been covered by ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... in force, for some little time. The great lords of the Scotch marches are ill friends with each other; and, until the quarrel between Douglas and Dunbar is patched up, neither will venture to march his forces into England. It may be months, yet, before we see their pennons flying on English soil. ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... create" are often understood by the ordinary mind to convey the idea of evolving something out of nothing. This is clearly not its meaning; we are mentally obliged to provide our Creator with chaos from which to produce the worlds. The tiller of the soil, who is the typical producer of social life, must have his material, his earth, his sky, rain, and sun, and the seeds to place within the earth. Out of nothing he can produce nothing. Out of a void Nature cannot arise; ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the slightest labor to occupy her hands and mind, gave her idle time—fertile soil for the raising of a dark crop of morbid thoughts. She brooded much, and, brooding, became restless, unhappy, and she could not conceal it from Bonbright when he came home eagerly for his dinner, ready to take up with boyish hope the absurd game he had ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... which comes from the alimentary canal. The way the ancients looked at this matter was, that the food, after being received into the alimentary canal, was then taken up by the branches of this great vein, which are called the 'vena portae', just as the roots of a plant suck up nourishment from the soil in which it lives; that then it was carried to the liver, there to be what was called "concocted," which was their phrase for its conversion into substances more fitted for nutrition than previously existed in ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we have lately begun to realize—namely, that in the case of France there was a transplanting of culture to another soil. A number of teachers fled the country, and some at least came to Ireland. This, as far as we can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... find that Locke sowed the seed, Watts watered the soil in which the seed fell, and that Newbery, after mixing in ideas from his very fertile brain, soon reaped a golden harvest from the crop of readers, picture-books, and little histories which he, with the aid ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... way to the breakfast-table of the quiet Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial aid by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the human world seemed so different (though it was much the same). It was purely for security that she had been requested by Angel to send her communications ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... abundant, while others producing two or three times as many young are much less plentiful? The explanation is not difficult. The food most congenial to this species, and on which it thrives best, is abundantly distributed over a very extensive region, offering such differences of soil and climate, that in one part or another of the area the supply never fails. The bird is capable of a very rapid and long-continued flight, so that it can pass without fatigue over the whole of the district it inhabits, and as soon as the supply of food begins to fail in one ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... joins the British Legion, which was raised by Sir de Lacy Evans to support the cause of Queen Christina and the Infant Queen Isabella, and as soon as he sets foot on Spanish soil his adventures begin. Arthur is one of Mr. Henty's most brilliant heroes, and the tale of his experiences is thrilling and breathless ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... I think not; for, as I said, some things won't pay at any figure. Their soil's better than ours. He meant to bribe me, and so beat me, and bring me down through my own plants. But would it pay a man to insure his brig that was not seaworthy (though he was to get L50,000 if she ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... "Backslidden, professing Christians," I said. Then they asked if I thought America would get into it, and I answered, "Most assuredly." However the majority of them said no, and they also said that our American boys would never leave American soil to fight. I told them that our boys would not only go to Europe to fight, but to almost all the Islands of the sea. Then they asked how long I thought the war was going to last, and I told them "1949." ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... the gloom. The sharp patter of the rain on leaves had ceased, and from just ahead there came back to us the stealthy padding of feet in wet soil. My hand closed on Hotchkiss' shoulder, and we listened together, warily. The steps were close by, unmistakable. The next flash of lightning showed nothing moving: the house was in full view now, dark and uninviting, looming huge above a terrace, with an Italian garden at the side. Then ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... preeminently a rock tree, occupying the baldest domes and pavements in the upper silver fir and alpine zones, at a height of from 7000 to 9500 feet. In such situations, rooted in narrow cracks or fissures, where there is scarcely a handful of soil, it is frequently over eight feet in diameter and not much more in height. The tops of old trees are almost always dead, and large stubborn-looking limbs push out horizontally, most of them broken and dead ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... a mane of green-barked yew-tree. Near is an apple-tree, Big like a hostel; A pretty bush thick as a fist of hazel-nuts, a choice spring and water fit for a Prince to drink. Round it tame swine lie down, Wild swine, grazing deer, A badger's brood, A peaceful troop, a heavy host of denizens of the soil A-trysting at my house. To meet them foxes ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... or four fragments of bones. It is no wonder, therefore, that subjects whose ideational stores are scanty, and whose associations are based upon accidental rather than logical connections, find the test one of peculiar difficulty. Invention thrives in a different soil. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... the presence of serene night and unbounded shadow, but to divide and distinguish its constituent causes were as vain as in the contour and color of a single tree to note the varied influence of rock, soil ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... danger of death—something for him to protect and to save. He had well nigh forgotten: he knew that she had quite forgotten. She was safe now, and was become once more the lady of the manor to whose soil he was fettered. He had remembered, and she was beginning to remember, for presently she said timidly and sweetly, but with condescension ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... knowledge, the hunger for a broader and deeper culture, are not the motives for reading, you will not get the most out of a book. But, if your thirsty soul drinks in the writer's thought as the parched soil absorbs rain, then your latent possibilities and the potency of your being, like delayed germs and seeds in the soil, will spring forth into ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... papers publish the statement that a Breslau merchant has offered 30,000 marks to the German soldier who, weapon in hand, shall be the first to place his feet on British soil. By a characteristic piece of sharp practice the reward, it will be noted, is offered to the man personally and would not be payable to his next ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... to me that there must be other relics of antiquity still buried under the soil of Gafsa, which is raised on a mound, like an island, above the surrounding country; particularly in the vicinity of the termid, which we may suppose to have lain near the centre of the old town. And where are the paving-stones? The ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... covert, rode past, saluting, and dashed in again. A jay came out with a screech, dived, and doubled back; a hare made off across the fallow—the light-brown lopping creature was barely visible against the brownish soil. Pigeons, very high up, flew over and away to the next wood. The shrilling voices of the whips rose from the covert-depths, and just a whimper now and then from the hounds, swiftly wheeling their noses among the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... count. "I maintain the word. Remember well, viscount, power has been, and always will be, on the side of wealth, especially on the side of those who hold the soil. The men of '93 well understood this principle, and acted upon it. By impoverishing the nobles, they destroyed their prestige more effectually than by abolishing their titles. A prince dismounted, and without footmen, is no more ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... manifesting itself in the shape of patriotic clubs (the chief being called the Tugend-bund, or Alliance of Virtue), which included the young and the daring of every class, and threatened, at no distant period, to convulse the whole fabric of society with the one purpose of clearing the national soil of its foreign oppressors. Napoleon affected to deride, but secretly estimated at its true importance, the danger of such associations, if permitted to take firm root among a people so numerous, so enthusiastic, and so gallant. Lastly, there is every reason to believe that, cordial as the ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart |
