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More "Cumber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... theirs. Yet, where are the literature, village libraries, social organizations, or other agencies of enlightenment promoted by them? Has not the country rotted and the emigrant ship been glutted? Away with them! Why cumber ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... called a "romance," because the incidents, characters, time, and scenery, are alike romantic. And in shaping this old tale, the Writer neither dares, nor desires, to claim for it the dignity or cumber it with the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... might ransack every hole and corner of your dim brain, and pick over all the spiders' webs and old iron that cumber your head, without ever lighting on a picklock to open this word and extract the meaning. But for me, my poor friend, you would get yourself hanged and your body burned for a word of one syllable which neither you nor your judges know the sense ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... only the greater number of modern rioters in language were compelled to hoard their words out of sheer necessity for the cable, we should have better results from the attempts at word-painting that now cumber the ground. And this brings me directly to a consideration of Steevens's work. In many respects, of course, it was never, even in separate papers, completed. Journalist and scholar he was, both. But the world was allowed to see too much of the journalist, ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... the dark thee cumber: What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light Like tapers ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... are those Who ne'er heard of Greek Prose— Or Greek Poetry either, as far as that goes; For Liddell and Scott Shall cumber them not, Nor Sargent nor Sidgwick shall break ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... I will save my father!" she exclaimed; "save him from worse than death! Let us fly together at once," she continued; "no, not together, I would cumber your flight; but make your escape, O my father, from this wicked court, this barbarous king, this life which, to a son of Hadassah, must be misery and bondage indeed! Oh, fly, fly; be safe, be free; be again what ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... church or market town, With more respect he and his dog are known: A brisker face he wears at wake or fair, Nor views with longing eyes the pedlar's ware, But buys at will or ribands, gloves, or beads, And willing maidens to the ale-house leads: And, Oh! secure from toils which cumber life, He makes the maid he loves an easy wife. Ah, Nelly! can'st thou with contented mind, Become the help-mate of a lab'ring hind, And share his lot, whate'er the chances be, Who hath no dow'r, but love, to fix on thee? Yes, gayest maid may ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the saddle-donkeys ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... and take all the loot you can find. The jewels we will divide among the men when at Meerut. Tell off another party to loot the rest of the rooms, but only take what is really valuable and portable. We cannot cumber ourselves with baggage. It would serve the rajah right if I were to burn his castle down; he may think himself lucky to get ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... thirst, ne'er quench'd but from the well, Whereof the woman of Samaria crav'd, Excited: haste along the cumber'd path, After my guide, impell'd; and pity mov'd My bosom for the 'vengeful deed, though just. When lo! even as Luke relates, that Christ Appear'd unto the two upon their way, New-risen from his vaulted grave; to us A shade ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... in which the French differ from us and from the Spaniards, is that they do not embarrass or cumber themselves with too much Plot. They only represent so much of a Story as will constitute One whole and great Action sufficient for a Play. We, who undertake more, do but multiply Adventures [pp. 541, 552]; which ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... badly needed. For the upper classes of all countries, the people who travel, and have to stand the nuisance and loss of changing their money at every frontier, the bankers and international merchants who have to cumber their accounts with the fluctuating item of exchange between commercial centres will insist upon it. All the European nations, with the exception of Russia and Turkey, are ready for the change, and when these reach the stage of real constitutionalism in their ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... way and carrying the medicine chest, were en route for the village, Dick carrying his case of surgical instruments under his arm. Their rifles they left with the wagon, deeming it unnecessary to cumber themselves with superfluous weapons in face of the fact that the villagers were obviously quite friendly disposed to white men, indeed they were still too close to ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... become standards; we see them following the lines of old stone walls that skirt the bounds and avenues of the farm, in company with the Ash and the Maple. In these situations, where they would not "cumber the ground," they have been allowed to grow, without exciting the jealousy of the proprietor of the land. Accident, under these circumstances, has reared many a beautiful tree, which would in any other place have been cut down as a trespasser. Thus Nature is always striving to clothe with beauty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... bodies in thin and trickling streams. You think of Ossian's heroes, of Thor and his hammer, of the Anakim or of the steeple-high Brobdignagian cavalry, and almost expect to hear groans issuing from the colossal trunks that cumber ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... The day after Fox, inspired by the Prince, had formally denied that any ceremony had taken place, 'the knocker of her door,' to quote her own complacent phrase, 'was never still.' The Duchesses of Portland, Devonshire and Cumber-land ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... squadron, with a sidewind sped, Through narrow lanes his cumber'd fire does haste, By powerful charms of gold and silver led The Lombard bankers and the Change ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Holly," she said, "this people founded the city, of which the ruins yet cumber the plain yonder, four thousand years before this cave was finished. Yet, when first mine eyes beheld it two thousand years ago, was it even as it is now. Judge, therefore, how old must that city have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show thee after what fashion ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... riches known, and yet despis'd, And we should serve him as a grudging master, As a penurious niggard of his wealth, And live like Natures bastards, not her sons, Who would be quite surcharged with her own weight, And strangl'd with her waste fertility; Th'earth cumber'd, and the wing'd air dark't with plumes. 730 The herds would over-multitude their Lords, The Sea o'refraught would swell, and th'unsought diamonds Would so emblaze the forhead of the Deep, And so bested with Stars, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... think of armchairs and reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... she said; and now, as a snow-storm threatened to block up the roads, she could neither stay where she was, nor pursue her journey. Her infant, too,—she was sure, if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such weather, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to take her aboard. And she was now with her child, all alone, below in the cabin I was stationed a-head on the out-look beside the foresail horse: the night ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... tale, surely, sir,—too strange to be believable," quoth Shelby. "You are a traitor, Captain Ireton—of the kind we need not cumber ourselves ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... corrie, Sage counsel in cumber, Red hand in the foray, How sound is thy slumber! Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou art gone, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... so must the highest-flying wit have a Dadalus to guide him. That Dadalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings, to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise indeed we do, but that, very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known: and so is our brain delivered of much matter, which never was begotten by knowledge. For, there being two principal parts, matter to be expressed by words, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... for younger folks. I'd got money enough, wi' only one daughter to leave it to, an' I says to myself, says I, it's time to leave off moitherin' myself wi' this world so much, an' give more time to thinkin' of another. But there's a many hours atween getting up an' lyin' down, an' thoughts are no cumber; you can move about wi' a good many on 'em in your head. See, here's ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... sometimes a little glimpse. But you should see the pictures of our holy Father Angelico, to whom the angels appeared constantly; for so blessed was the life he lived, that it was more in heaven than on earth. He would never cumber his mind with the things of this world, and would not paint for money, nor for prince's favor; nor would he take places of power and trust in the Church, or else, so great was his piety, they had made a bishop of him; but he kept ever aloof and walked in the shade. He used to say, 'They that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... us as many as four wives, and as many women slaves or concubines as a man can properly and with decency provide for, the children of the latter, if recognised by the father, sharing equally with the offspring of the former. Though why a man who has found his love should wish to cumber his house with other women, seething with jealousy and peevish from want of occupation, is beyond my power ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... now note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and often interfere with the work of ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... of Autumn . . . . . Ye are bound for the mountains— Ah, with you let me go . . . . . Hark! fast by the window The rushing winds go, To the ice-cumber'd gorges, The vast seas of snow. There the torrents drive upward Their rock-strangled hum, There the avalanche thunders The hoarse torrent dumb. —I come, O ye ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... his whip he flourished, Cracked his whip, all bead-embroidered, Quick he sped upon his journey, Lurched the sledge, the way was shortened, 10 Loudly rang the birchwood runners, And the rowan cumber rattled. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... rejection of a serious suitor such as John. It was rumored the latter was taking to liquor, and she was blamed for it. Women often like to have others say yes to the first man who comes, and not leave old love affairs to cumber the ground. And girls, however loving to their friends, have but a cold sympathy ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... you to teach my commandments, and not your fancies; and that ye should seek my glory and my vantage: you teach your own traditions, and seek your own glory and profit. You preach very seldom; and when ye do preach, do nothing but cumber them that preach truly, as much as lieth in you: that it were much better such were not to preach at all, than so perniciously to preach. Oh, what hear I of you? You, that ought to be my preachers, what other thing do you, than apply all your study hither, to bring ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... getting tired of ripening, and are beginning to go into a worthless condition,—green. The cucumbers cumber the ground,—great yellow, over-ripe objects, no more to be compared to the crisp beauty of their youth than is the fat swine of the sty to the clean little pig. The nutmeg-melons, having covered themselves with delicate lace-work, are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... people, these Finns and ... Greeks," he thought. "Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the earth. What is the ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... again with the forces of St. Luc. You would be there, Dagaeoga, to help in the fighting. Go, I am useless. It is not a time to cumber yourself with me." ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... seeds of them out of England, and preserve them with extraordinary care in their best gardens; this I learn out of our Johnson's Herbal; by which we may consider, that what is reputed a curse, and a cumber in some places, is esteem'd the ornament and blessing of another: But we shall not need go so far for this, since both beech and birch are almost as great strangers in many parts of this nation, particularly ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... now; And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger, He'd wish to sleep a little longer. And could he be indeed so old As by the newspapers we're told? Threescore, I think, is pretty high; 'Twas time in conscience he should die! This world he cumber'd long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that's the reason, some folks think, He left behind so great a stink. Behold his funeral appears, Nor widows' sighs, nor orphans' tears, Wont at such times each heart to pierce, Attend the progress of his hearse. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... valley, between high, grassy hills, completely covered with what at a distance resembled loose boards, but which were actually the long marble seats of the stadium. Urging our horses over piles of loose blocks, we reached the base of the theatre, climbed the fragments that cumber the main entrance, and looked on the spacious arena and galleries within. Although greatly ruined, the materials of the whole structure remain, and might be put together again. It is a grand wreck; the colossal fragments which have tumbled from the arched proscenium ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... left of the monastery of the Whitefriars," said Jeffreys. "The remains of monkish buildings cumber the ground outside of London walls as well as within. Some say 'twas a wicked thing to pull down so many fair edifices; others declare they were no better than plague-spots and heretical hovels on the fair face of a Protestant country, and that we are ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... contents of the bottle, exclaiming that he would be dead in a few minutes, and a pause ensued, during which the Officer confessed to me that he felt very uncomfortable. The end of it was that his visitor said, with a laugh, that 'he would not like to cumber the Salvation Army with his corpse,' and walked out of the room. The draught which he had ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... his proclamations he refers to those swarms of gentry "who, through the instigation of their wives, or to new model and fashion their daughters who, if they were unmarried, marred their reputations, and if married, lost them—did neglect their country hospitality and cumber the city, a general nuisance to the kingdom." He desired the Star Chamber "to regulate the exorbitancy of the new buildings about the city, which were but a shelter for those who, when they had spent their estates in coaches, lacqueys and fine clothes like Frenchmen, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... start, the sudden quickening of his glance told her how shrewdly she had struck home. Fearlessly, then, sure of herself, she continued. "To that end they use you. When you shall have served it you will but cumber them. When they shall have used you to procure their security from me, then they will deal with you as they have ever sought to deal with you—so that you trouble them no more. Ali, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... with the Five Nations purposely to protect them; yet it is impossible for any one to be aware or to guard against the ruffianly practices of those who think that the Red Man has no longer a right to cumber the earth. ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... in the Islands; there is no specimen in the Guernsey Museum, and Mr. Couch has never mentioned to me having had one through his hands, or recorded it in the 'Zoologist,' as he would have done had he had one; neither does Mrs. Jago (late Miss Cumber), who used to do a good deal of stuffing in Guernsey about thirty years ago, remember having had one through her hands. There can be no reason, however, why it should not occasionally occur in the Islands, as it does so both on the French and English side of the Channel. The wonder ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... not all. It would also follow that the names of substances would not only have, as in truth they have, but would also be supposed to have different significations, as used by different men, which would very much cumber the use of language. For if every distinct quality that were discovered in any matter by any one were supposed to make a necessary part of the complex idea signified by the common name given to it, it must follow, that men ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... gather from the specialists on the question, there is very considerable congestion in many of the London thoroughfares, delays that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of goods, multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds of acres of idle trucks—there are more acres of railway sidings than of public parks in Greater London—and our Overseas cousins find it ticklish work crossing Regent Street and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... The hours I number, And sad cares cumber My weary mind, This thought shall cheer me: That thou art near me, Whose ear to ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... was sinned against was in this: that her family looked upon her white hair and her wrinkles and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that her interest in life was gone—in short, that she was content to cumber the earth and to wait for the long sleep. To them she was simply one who tarries and is content. Scattergood looked into her sharp, old eyes, eyes that were capable of sudden gleams of humor or flashes of anger, and he knew. He knew that death seemed as distant to Grandmother ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... through the gangway and stood upon her deck I gained a new impression, namely that of spaciousness. For she was extraordinarily beamy; her hatchways were small, and there was nothing in the way of fittings of any kind to cumber up her decks; indeed, so far as actual room to move about upon was concerned, her quarter-deck seemed to be quite as spacious as that of the Europa. She was flush-decked fore and aft, and abaft the immensely lofty mainmast there was nothing but the companion, with ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... hammer, and assuming a more gentle and submissive tone of voice, "that when so poor a man does his day's job, he might be permitted to work it out after his own fashion. Your horse is shod, and your farrier paid—what need you cumber yourself further than to mount ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the gem, Which lake or sea in its fair breast doth show With either Neptune's arms encircling them. What joy to find that Thynia, and that plain Bithynian gone, and see thee safe again! Charming it is to rest from care and cumber, When the mind throws its burden, and we come Wearied with pains of foreign travel home, And in the bed so longed for sink to slumber. This pays for all the toil, this quiet after— Joy, my sweet Sirmio, for thy master's sake, Make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... pas la pretention de m'affubler d'un titre que la mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me permet pas de porter comma il sied. Je m'appelle, pour vous servir, Blair de Balmile tout court.' [My lord, I have not the effrontery to cumber myself with a title which the ill fortunes of my king will not suffer me to bear the way it should be. I call myself, at your service, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... allowed to cumber the crease this season," said Horace, bowling his cigarette-end into the darkness with a distinct swerve in the air. "To have him called our 'pocket edition,' on the cricket-field of all places, ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... my intentions to La Trape, I left this road and struck into a woodland path which promised to conduct us in the right direction. But the luxuriance of the undergrowth, and the huge chaos of grey rocks which cumber that part of the forest, made it difficult to keep for any time in a straight line. After being an hour in the saddle we concluded that we had lost our way, and were confirmed in this, on reaching a clearing. In ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... know it; and why not? What use are these manikins in creation? Only to cumber the earth. Well, mozo, you ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... children of the gardens of the earth from the face of their idle paradises: and, but for this stream of keener life and nobler energy, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete race of lotus-eaters than would now cumber the fairest regions ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Sheila Melrose's! You go straight ahead and marry her! You've got money, I know, but I hope you won't chuck your job on that account. Stick to it, and you shall have the Dower House to live in while I yet cumber the ground, and Burchester Castle as ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... life. But very soon the power of his charge was gone, his limbs could not rise, and his breath was taken from him; the hole that he had made was filled up behind him; fresh volumes from the shaken height came pouring down upon him; his flanks and his back were wedged fast in the cumber, and he stood still and trembled, being ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... History of Salem Village constitutes the First. This is drawn, almost wholly, from papers in the offices of registry, and from judicial files of the County, to which references would be of little use, and serve only to cumber and deform the pages. Everything can be verified by inspection of the originals, and not otherwise. The Second Part is a cursory, general, abbreviated sketch or survey of the history of opinions, not designed as an authoritative treatise ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... swamped English makers of cheap instruments, of which there are by this time five times as many in the market as there is any occasion for. Hence it is that Fiddles meet us everywhere; they cumber the toy-shop; they house with the furniture dealer; they swarm by thousands in the pawnbrokers' stores, and block out the light from his windows; they hang on the tobacconists' walls; they are raffled at public-houses; and they form an ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... cried, holding up an article of such cheap workmanship that I wondered so sensible an appearing woman would cumber her shelves with it. "I am glad you live over there," for I had nodded to her question. "I'm greatly interested in that house. I've worked there as cook ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... continent sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets—perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... knows it, and the society reporters are beginning their innuendoes. The next thing will be her picture in the sensational press, and a scandal. Don't you know this? It must not happen! We must make way for them—you and I. We cumber the path." ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... yet, Scopus. I will try to do credit to your training; give me my cloak." He wrapped himself in its ample folds, and then walked quietly back to the centre of the arena. A murmur of surprise rose from the spectators. Why should the Briton cumber his limbs ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... the captain's error; abashed, also, by the surprise and fear with which the Indian regarded me at first, and the obsequious civilities with which he soon began to cumber me. I know now that he must have overheard and comprehended the peculiar nature of my prayers. It is certain, of course, that he at once disclosed the matter to his patron; and looking back with greater knowledge, I can now understand what so much puzzled me at the moment, those singular ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... That further rules you will not break, And marriage liberties partake? Some really do, as I suppose, Upon design keep on some clothes, And yet in truth I'm not afraid For to describe a bundling maid; She'll sometimes say when she lies down, She can't be cumber'd with a gown, And that the weather is so warm, To take it off can be no harm: The girl it seems had been at strift; For widest bosom to her shift, She gownless, when the bed they're in, The spark, nought feels but naked skin. But she is modest, also chaste, While only bare from ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... am not at present able to produce my authority. I think it amounted to this, that James flung down a petition presented by some supplicant who paid no compliments to his horse, and expressed no admiration at the splendour of his furniture, saying, "Shall a king cumber himself about the petition of a beggar, while the beggar disregards the king's splendour?" It is, I think, Sir John Harrington who recommends, as a sure mode to the king's favour, to praise the paces of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... by no means sure that escape was what he wanted—not yet, at any rate; in the second place, if Gabriel Druse passed the word along the subterranean wires of the Romany world that Jethro Fawe should vanish, he would not long cumber the ground. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... you should die. You cumber the earth! Shall I do it?" Helwyse muttered to his heart,—"merely as a ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... be smashed in a moment, if that I did not slay the man very quick. For so mighty was he, that he did leap this way and that way after me, as though the great rock did cumber him no more than it had ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... to Pariss to hym to hasten hym homewards," and in April 1576, he landed at Dover in an exceedingly sulky mood. He refused to see his wife, and told Burghley he might take his daughter into his own house again, for he was resolved "to be rid of the cumber."[139] He accused his father-in-law of holding back money due to him, although Burghley states that Oxford had in one year L5700.[140] Considering that Robert Sidney, afterwards Earl of Leicester, had only L1OO a year for a tour abroad,[141] ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... enough, And Concubines a Number; Yet Ise possess more happiness, And he had more of Cumber; My Joys surmount a wedded Life, With fear she lets me mow her; A Wench is better than a Wife, ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... more, faithfully and heartily. And so I cannot be persuaded her Majesty thinketh; for from herself I find nothing but most sweet and—gracious, favour, though by others' censures I may gather otherwise of her judgment; which I confess, doth cumber me." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... at the same time narrowing down to a width varying from about two miles to less than half-a-mile in some parts, notably at the spot where it begins to thread its devious way among the islands that cumber the stream for a length of fully thirty miles, at a distance of about twenty-eight miles ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... strange tale, surely, sir,—too strange to be believable," quoth Shelby. "You are a traitor, Captain Ireton—of the kind we need not cumber ourselves with on ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... aim, it were all, in sooth, That any soul needs, to climb to heaven, And we would not cumber the way of truth With dreary dogmas, ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... notices of John a Cumber, see our Fourth Volume passim.—Knight of L. is Leopold of Austria; K. C., Knight of the Crescent of Turkey.—Pricket is a young male deer of two years old.—Impresse is from Ital. imprendere, says Blount: see ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... the channel at the same time narrowing down to a width varying from about two miles to less than half-a-mile in some parts, notably at the spot where it begins to thread its devious way among the islands that cumber the stream for a length of fully thirty miles, at a distance of about twenty-eight ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... serious suitor such as John. It was rumored the latter was taking to liquor, and she was blamed for it. Women often like to have others say yes to the first man who comes, and not leave old love affairs to cumber the ground. And girls, however loving to their friends, have but a cold sympathy for their ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit thereon, and found none. And he said unto the vinedresser, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why doth it also cumber the ground? And he answering saith unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: and if it bear fruit thenceforth, well; but if not, thou shalt cut it ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... foot on the correi, Sage counsel in cumber, Red hand in the foray, How sound is thy slumber! Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou art ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... go arter him—the sooner the better—for I'm no good to nobody now. One old coat 'ull do to patch another, but it's good for nought else. Thee'dst like to ha' a wife to mend thy clothes an' get thy victual, better nor thy old mother. An' I shall be nought but cumber, a-sittin' i' th' chimney-corner. (Adam winced and moved uneasily; he dreaded, of all things, to hear his mother speak of Hetty.) But if thy feyther had lived, he'd ne'er ha' wanted me to go to make room for another, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... came back with increasing reluctance to his work. The work itself, how unsatisfactory it became! Half the time and energy of the office seemed to be spent on creating rather than performing work; an immense amount of detail seemed to be entirely useless, and to cumber rather than to assist the conduct of the business that was important. Of course much of it was necessary work which had to be done by some one; but Hugh began to wonder whether his life was well bestowed in carrying out a system of which so ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... why not? What use are these manikins in creation? Only to cumber the earth. Well, mozo, you have ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... all they dared not be," and "speak the wisdom once they could not think." "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons," and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" cumber the ground like the unnoticed ruins ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... my father!" she exclaimed; "save him from worse than death! Let us fly together at once," she continued; "no, not together, I would cumber your flight; but make your escape, O my father, from this wicked court, this barbarous king, this life which, to a son of Hadassah, must be misery and bondage indeed! Oh, fly, fly; be safe, be free; be again what you were once! it is not too late! it is not too late!" There ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the bustle and cumber of the world, that will call a man off from looking after the salvation of his soul. This is intimated by the parable of the thorny ground. (Luke 8:14) Worldly cumber is a devilish thing; it will hurry a man from his bed without prayer; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and even our common Broom is so rare, that they have desired the seeds of them out of England, and preserve them with extraordinary care in their best gardens; this I learn out of our Johnson's Herbal; by which we may consider, that what is reputed a curse, and a cumber in some places, is esteem'd the ornament and blessing of another: But we shall not need go so far for this, since both beech and birch are almost as great strangers in many parts of this nation, particularly Northampton and Oxfordshire. Mr. Cook is much in praise of juniper for hedges, especially ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... that: the worthless ones are too often left to cumber the earth; it is the precious ones who are taken," he said, thinking of her as he looked into her tired face, and remembered all ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... as four wives, and as many women slaves or concubines as a man can properly and with decency provide for, the children of the latter, if recognised by the father, sharing equally with the offspring of the former. Though why a man who has found his love should wish to cumber his house with other women, seething with jealousy and peevish from want of occupation, is beyond my ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... numbers of them have become standards; we see them following the lines of old stone walls that skirt the bounds and avenues of the farm, in company with the Ash and the Maple. In these situations, where they would not "cumber the ground," they have been allowed to grow, without exciting the jealousy of the proprietor of the land. Accident, under these circumstances, has reared many a beautiful tree, which would in any other place have been cut down as a trespasser. Thus Nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... should be smashed in a moment, if that I did not slay the man very quick. For so mighty was he, that he did leap this way and that way after me, as though the great rock did cumber him no more than it had been but a ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... monopolized the conversation. There was a warm and animated discussion among the old ladies as to what was the most delightful product of the garden. One old lady said, that so "fur" as she was "consarned," she preferred the "per-turnip"—another preferred the "pertater"—another the "cow-cumber," and still another voted "ingern" king. But suddenly a wise looking old dame raised her spectacles and settled the whole question by observing: "Ah, ladies, you may talk about yer per-turnips, and your pertaters, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and often interfere with the work ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the lonely flower I bent, I thought of lives thus lowly clogged and pent, Which yet find room, Through care and cumber, coldness and decay, To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day And make the sad earth happier ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... regards every race, everywhere, at home or abroad, we cannot afford to deviate from the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... known: A brisker face he wears at wake or fair, Nor views with longing eyes the pedlar's ware, But buys at will or ribands, gloves, or beads, And willing maidens to the ale-house leads: And, Oh! secure from toils which cumber life, He makes the maid he loves an easy wife. Ah, Nelly! can'st thou with contented mind, Become the help-mate of a lab'ring hind, And share his lot, whate'er the chances be, Who hath no dow'r, but love, to fix on thee? Yes, gayest maid may meekest matron prove, ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... his majesty notices "those swarms of gentry, who through the instigation of their wives, or to new-model and fashion their daughters (who if they were unmarried, marred their reputations, and if married, lost them), did neglect their country hospitality, and cumber the city, a general nuisance to the kingdom."—He addressed the Star Chamber to regulate "the exorbitancy of the new buildings about the city, which were but a shelter for those who, when they had spent their estates in coaches, lacqueys, and fine clothes like Frenchmen, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Finns and ... Greeks," he thought. "Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the earth. What is the good ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.... ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... prophet: "There where dragons roamed, In later days the grass shall grow—the reed"? I choose those rocky hills that, on our left, Drag down the skiey waters to the woods: Such loved I from my youth: to me they said, "Bandits this hour usurp our heights, and beasts Cumber our caves: expel the seed accurst, And yield us back to God!"' The King gave ear; And Cedd within those mountains passed his Lent, Driving with prayer and fast the spirits accurst With ignominy forth. Foundations next He laid with sacred pomp. Fair rose the walls: All day ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... would have taken her bow from her back, but he laughed aloud, and said: Nay, nay, I will not have that; for there be those who gird them to a sword and know not how to use it, but few will cumber their shoulders with bow and quiver who cannot shoot therewith; I deem it like that thou art a fell bowman. Keep thy bow therefore, and if thou wilt go without any other gift, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... like a second Robinson Crusoe than sober history. For that reason I have put the corroborative evidence in footnotes, rather than cumber the movement of the main theme. I am sorry to have loaded the opening parts with so many notes; but Radisson's voyages change the relative positions of the other explorers so radically that proofs must be given. The footnotes are for the student and ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... French differ from us and from the Spaniards, is that they do not embarrass or cumber themselves with too much Plot. They only represent so much of a Story as will constitute One whole and great Action sufficient for a Play. We, who undertake more, do but multiply Adventures [pp. 541, 552]; which (not being produced from one another, as Effects from Causes, but, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... The town of Castle Cumber it is not our intention to describe at more length than simply to say, that it consists of two long streets, intersecting each other, and two or three lanes of cabins—many of them mud ones—that stretch out of it on ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... unprais'd, Not half his riches known, and yet despis'd, And we should serve him as a grudging master, As a penurious niggard of his wealth, And live like Natures bastards, not her sons, Who would be quite surcharged with her own weight, And strangl'd with her waste fertility; Th'earth cumber'd, and the wing'd air dark't with plumes. 730 The herds would over-multitude their Lords, The Sea o'refraught would swell, and th'unsought diamonds Would so emblaze the forhead of the Deep, And so bested ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... child, but sometimes a little glimpse. But you should see the pictures of our holy Father Angelico, to whom the angels appeared constantly; for so blessed was the life he lived, that it was more in heaven than on earth. He would never cumber his mind with the things of this world, and would not paint for money, nor for prince's favor; nor would he take places of power and trust in the Church, or else, so great was his piety, they had made a bishop of him; but he kept ever aloof and walked in the shade. He used to say, 'They ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... sympathetic kinds of human beings, it is naught unless it is valued; but, being valued, it is a treasure beyond price. Cold, glittering, and dumb, it stands among the tasteless splendors with which the wealthy ignorant cumber their dreary abodes,—a thing of ostentation merely,—as uninteresting as the women who surround it, gorgeously apparelled, but without conversation, conscious of defective parts of speech. "There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... him to the village green and tell the good folks there the tale, and I warrant that he will not cumber the ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... ancestor of mine, Sharyar the Wazir, raised these walls during the wars—for the dispensing of that sacred duty of hospitality which Allah enjoins upon the faithful. It is reported that he was host here to fifty of the enemy during their remaining lifetime—although they had the delicacy not to cumber him with overlong living. It is not, as I said, a pleasant place, but the walls are strong and so ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... valley, Lift the dirge for the sons of the brave; We have fired our last bullet, have made our last rally, And Caucasus gives us a grave. Here the soft pipe no more shall invite us to slumber —The thunder our lullaby sings; Our eyes not the maiden's dark tresses shall cumber, Them the raven shall shade with his wings! Forget, O my children, your father's stern duty— No more shall he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Leonites, hopeless of obtaining a Government grant, have set on foot a subscription which reached 500l.—some say 700l. There are, therefore, certain fitful signs of activity, and bricks and fire-bricks now cumber the ground; but it is all a 'flash in the pan.' The present purpose is to make it a library, in place of the fine old collection which went to the dogs. It is also to serve as a lecture-room. But who is there in the 'African Liverpool' that can lecture? What is ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... subserviency. So far as concerns the economic efficiency of the community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the general habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate adjustment of human institutions to the existing situation. The habit of mind which best lends itself to the purposes of a peaceable, industrial community, is that matter-of-fact temper which recognizes the value of material facts simply as opaque items in the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the snow was gone; there was left only its cold bitterness and a vague sense that it ought no longer to cumber the ground, but would better go away as soon as possible and spare the wood folk any more suffering. The litter of a score of storms covered its soiled rough surface; every shred of bark had left its dark stain ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... wearied and over-heated, looked him over with a sneer. "A fine soldier with your complaints!" was his jeering comment. "I wonder to see a Jew in our ranks, but you'll not cumber us long, I'm thinking. You Jews are fit only for trading and money lending—not fighting. You'll melt away quickly enough in the ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... admitted to this work which has not been thoroughly tested by repeated trials, by far the larger share of such being original, either in the combination of the materials used, the method employed, or both materials and method. Care has been taken not to cumber the work with useless and indifferent recipes. It is believed that every recipe will be found valuable, and that the variety offered is sufficiently ample, so that under the most differing circumstances, all ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... minutes later the pair, with their sable guide leading the way and carrying the medicine chest, were en route for the village, Dick carrying his case of surgical instruments under his arm. Their rifles they left with the wagon, deeming it unnecessary to cumber themselves with superfluous weapons in face of the fact that the villagers were obviously quite friendly disposed to white men, indeed they were still too close to civilisation to ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... twilight, void of a star. As a bird unfledged is the broad-winged night, whose winglets are callow Yet, but soon with their plumes will she cover her brood from afar, Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies with their blossom Thick as the darkness of leaf-shadowed spring is encumbered with flowers. World upon world is enwound in the bountiful girth of her bosom, Warm and lustrous with life lovely to look on as ours. Still is the sunset ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... who depended on their vigilance, with their own lives. These assurances had, beyond a doubt, a soothing influence on the apprehensions of Ruth and her handmaidens; but they somewhat failed of their effect, with those unwelcome visiters who still continued to cumber Wish-Ton-Wish with their presence. Though they had evidently abandoned all ideas connected with the original object of their visit, they spoke not of departure. On the contrary as night approached, their chief entered into council with old Mark Heathcote, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... perished—the wrecks of his fine ships strewing the southern coast of Cuba, where they remain as memorials, like and unlike the distorted iron that was the Maine, in the harbor of Havana, and as the shattered and charred remnants of the fleet of Montejo, at Manila, still cumber the waters of the bay off Cavite, telling the story of the glory of our ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... to cure the fever of his pride This man besought: my counsel to that end He ask'd: and I was silent: for his words Seem'd drunken: but forthwith he thus resum'd: "From thy heart banish fear: of all offence I hitherto absolve thee. In return, Teach me my purpose so to execute, That Penestrino cumber earth no more. Heav'n, as thou knowest, I have power to shut And open: and the keys are therefore twain, The which my predecessor meanly priz'd." Then, yielding to the forceful arguments, Of silence as more perilous I deem'd, And answer'd: "Father! since thou washest me ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... shod, and your farrier paid—what need you cumber yourself further, than to mount ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... said, "you need me. You are like the others. When the fire has touched their eyes and indeed they see the things that are, they fall on their knees and they tear away at the weeds and rubbish that cumber the earth, and they never lift their eyes, and soon their frame grows weary and their heart cold. Be wise, man. The mark is upon you. Those live best and work best in this world who have a soul for its beauties. Women, for instance," he went on, smoking furiously. "What ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thee and a stripling scarcely grown? Or hast thou told of the Volsungs, and the gathered heart of these, And their still unquenched desire for garnering fame's increase? E'en so do I hearken thy words: for I wot how they deem it long Till a man from their seed be arisen to deal with the cumber and wrong. Bid me therefore to sit by thy side, for behold I wend on my way, And the gates swing-to behind me, and each day of mine is a day With deeds in the eve and the morning, nor deeds shall the noontide lack; ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... would be a strange shame for this age if it were not so: for as every age of the world has its own troubles to confuse it, and its own follies to cumber it, so has each its own work to do, pointed out to it by unfailing signs of the times; and it is unmanly and stupid for the children of any age to say: We will not set our hands to the work; we did not make the troubles, ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... thro' the shade, and Come down to your brow Like—eyes of the maiden Who calls on you now— Arise! from your dreaming In violet bowers, To duty beseeming These star-litten hours— And shake from your tresses Encumber'd with dew The breath of those kisses That cumber them too— (O! how, without you, Love! Could angels be blest?) Those kisses of true love That lull'd ye to rest! Up!—shake from your wing Each hindering thing: The dew of the night— It would weigh down your flight; And true love caresses— O! ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... this debt. Do not slay them—they are harmless. Slay me if you will. I offer my life if it will appease your ignorant wrath. I cannot return to Bantoom and so I might as well die, for there is no pleasure in intercourse with the feeble intellects that cumber the face of the world outside the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... cumber; What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light, Like ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... mighty squadron with a side-wind sped, Through narrow lanes his cumber'd fire does haste, By powerful charms of gold and silver led, The Lombard bankers and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... remembered that my work consists of three divisions. The History of Salem Village constitutes the First. This is drawn, almost wholly, from papers in the offices of registry, and from judicial files of the County, to which references would be of little use, and serve only to cumber and deform the pages. Everything can be verified by inspection of the originals, and not otherwise. The Second Part is a cursory, general, abbreviated sketch or survey of the history of opinions, not designed as an authoritative treatise for special students, but to prepare the reader for the ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... palsied head to the grave. Morning by morning she rises without a hope, night by night she lies down vacant or apathetic; and the utmost use she can make of the day is to totter three or four times across the floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and weary, "the tomb of her dead self," we look at this dry leaf, and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it in ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sheath; And, on his courser mounting light, He seemed to vanish from my sight; The moonbeam drooped, and deepest night Sunk down upon the heath. 'Twere long to tell what cause I have To know his face, that met me there, Called by his hatred from the grave, To cumber upper air; Dead or alive, good cause had he ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... pieces; the line should not exceed (especially for three or four links towards the hook) I say, not exceed three or four haires; but if you can attain to Angle with one haire; you will have more rises, and catch more fish. Now you must bee sure not to cumber yourselfe with too long a Line, as most do: and before you begin to angle, cast to have the wind on your back, and the Sun (if it shines) to be before you, and to fish down the streame, and carry the point or tip of the Rod downeward; by which meanes the shadow of yourselfe, and Rod ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... acquaint themselves with few subtleties: to frame myself, therefore, to your country fashion with much faith and little flattery, know, beautiful shepherdess, that whilst I lived in the court I knew not love's cumber, but I held affection as a toy, not as a malady; using fancy as the Hyperborei do their flowers, which they wear in their bosom all day, and cast them in the fire for fuel at night. I liked all, because I loved none, and who was most fair, on her I fed mine eye, but as charily ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... And then they took him out again, And cutten all his joints in sunder, And burnt him eke upon a hill; I-wis they did him curstly cumber. ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... let Rivers take four men, and go in, and take all the loot you can find. The jewels we will divide among the men when at Meerut. Tell off another party to loot the rest of the rooms, but only take what is really valuable and portable. We cannot cumber ourselves with baggage. It would serve the rajah right if I were to burn his castle down; he may think himself lucky to get off with ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... It would also follow that the names of substances would not only have, as in truth they have, but would also be supposed to have different significations, as used by different men, which would very much cumber the use of language. For if every distinct quality that were discovered in any matter by any one were supposed to make a necessary part of the complex idea signified by the common name given to it, it must follow, that men must suppose the same word to signify different things ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... every one wounded became a serviceable clod; rapidly as the dump and cumber of humanity filled the moat the ladders extended their upward reach; while drum-beat, battle-cry, trumpet's blare, and the roar of cannon answering cannon blent into one steady ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... writings into a consistent body, illustrated by one series of plates, purchasable in separate parts, and numbered consecutively. Of other prefatory matter, once intended,—apologetic mostly,—the reader shall be spared the cumber: and a clear prospectus issued by the publisher of the new series of plates, as soon as they are in ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Oct. 11th, Mr. Cumber cam to me. Oct. 14th, payd Nurse Barwik six shillings for one month ending on the seventh, being Wensday. Oct. 15th, this afternoone and all the night following a great storme of wynde at North-West. One Prychard that had marryed Proctor Lewes his ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs of unadjustable "broilers" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: 'You raving maniac!' Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac was ne'er to ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the grandeur, and the fame Are bounded by the world alone; The calm, the smouldering, and the flame Of awful patience were his own; With him they are forever flown Past all our fond self-shadowings, Wherewith we cumber the Unknown As with inept, ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... on Mr. Linklater's part, but I am not at present able to produce my authority. I think it amounted to this, that James flung down a petition presented by some supplicant who paid no compliments to his horse, and expressed no admiration at the splendour of his furniture, saying, "Shall a king cumber himself about the petition of a beggar, while the beggar disregards the king's splendour?" It is, I think, Sir John Harrington who recommends, as a sure mode to the king's favour, to praise the paces of the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... entrance of every village, and the inhabitants believe that it is tenanted by the soul of their first ancestor and that it rules their destiny. Sometimes there is a sacred grove near a village, where the trees are suffered to rot and die on the spot. Their fallen branches cumber the ground, and no one may remove them unless he has first asked leave of the spirit of the tree and offered him a sacrifice. Among the Maraves of Southern Africa the burial-ground is always regarded as a holy place where neither a tree may be felled nor a beast killed, because everything ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... one should prepare for prosperity. I fancy there are a good many people unconsciously repeating the mistake of the Canadian farmer—chopping down all the native growths of life, clearing the ground of all the useless pretty things that seem to cumber it, sacrificing everything to utility and success. We fell the last green tree for the sake of raising an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop to think what an ugly, barren place we may have to sit in while we eat them. The ideals, the attachments—yes, even the dreams of youth are worth ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... hole and corner of your dim brain, and pick over all the spiders' webs and old iron that cumber your head, without ever lighting on a picklock to open this word and extract the meaning. But for me, my poor friend, you would get yourself hanged and your body burned for a word of one syllable which neither you nor your judges know the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... will never bear the strain of development. Lazy and ambitionless, they are incapable of uniting their tribal forces. Alas for them! They merely cumber the ground. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, and the emptiness, and the greyness under the long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to whisper, "I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth." Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy and squat houses built with grey bricks, seems less old than this mosque of Ibn-Tulun. For its long facade is striped with white and apricot, and there are lebbek-trees growing in its ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... German Fiddles, which may be bought new for a few shillings, has swamped English makers of cheap instruments, of which there are by this time five times as many in the market as there is any occasion for. Hence it is that Fiddles meet us everywhere; they cumber the toy-shop; they house with the furniture dealer; they swarm by thousands in the pawnbrokers' stores, and block out the light from his windows; they hang on the tobacconists' walls; they are raffled at public-houses; and they form an item in ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Aunt Hannah, still unreconciled, turned him from the door? No matter! Rancour and grief have no hold on mortals walking in such an April world—in such an exquisite and sunlit beauty. On! let thought and nature be enough! Why complicate and cumber life with relations that do but give a foothold to pain, and offer ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the ears, And fought on the question of 'freedom for bears;' And how, inter alia, the beast got away And took himself off in the midst of the fray; And how Tommy Johnson at last came to grief: All which I omit, as I wish to be brief. The story's too lengthy—it must not be sent all To cumber your pages, my dear CONTINENTAL. At present my purpose, my object, my mission is To show how the woodman became 'Abolitionist.' Introductions, you know, like 'original sin,' Hang on, while you long for some sign ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... we met below, They, too, have long roam'd to and fro; They ramble, leaving, where they pass, Their fragments on the cumber'd grass. And often to some kindly place Chance guides the migratory race, Where, though long wanderings intervene, They recognise a former scene. The dingy tents are pitch'd; the fires Give to the wind their wavering spires; In dark knots ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... they waited for, corrected and enlarged. We have a memorable instance of this policy in the Athenian envoys, who, upon receiving a most ominous doom, but obscurely expressed, from the Delphic Oracle, which politely concluded by saying, "And so get out, you vagabonds, from my temple—don't cumber my decks any longer;" were advised to answer sturdily—"No!—we shall not get out—we mean to sit here forever, until you think proper to give us a more reasonable reply." Upon which spirited rejoinder, the Pythia saw ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... musket, a brace of pistols, with a good supply of ammunition for each, a stout dagger, a bow, arrows, and a good strong machete for general purposes. That, I think, will be quite as much as it will be advisable for us to cumber ourselves with." ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Gudabirsi fix the event at the period when their forefathers still inhabited Bulhar on the coast,—about 300 years ago. If the date be correct, the substantial ruins have fought a stern fight with time. Remnants of houses cumber the soil, and the carefully built wells are filled with rubbish: the palace was pointed out to me with its walls of stone and clay intersected by layers of woodwork. The mosque is a large roofless building containing twelve square pillars of ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... the everlasting Night, And blest the endless Slumber! We are heated with the day too bright, And withered up with cumber! We're weary of that life abroad: Come, we will now ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... the man, stuttering. "That's 'appen for them as doesn't like them. I niver knowed a cumber do me no harm, an' I eat 'em like a happle." Whereupon the hawker took a "cumber" from his barrow, bit off the end, and chewed it till the sap squirted. "What's wrong with that?" he said, holding up ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... your friends to-day, aren't you? I'm an idiot to think of cutting down the pine grove. I'm a milksop compared with a red-headed Indian you never saw before. Now I'm a blunderbuss for answering a simple question asked me by my sister. What do you think I am, anyhow? Fit to cumber the earth?" ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... four links next to the hook, I say, not exceed three or four hairs at the most; though you may fish a little stronger above, in the upper part of your line: but if you can attain to angle with one hair, you shall have more rises, and catch more fish. Now you must be sure not to cumber yourself with too long a line, as most do. And before you begin to angle, cast to have the wind on your back; and the sun, if it shines, to be before you; and to fish down the stream; and carry the point or top of your rod downward, by which means the ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... soon the power of his charge was gone, his limbs could not rise, and his breath was taken from him; the hole that he had made was filled up behind him; fresh volumes from the shaken height came pouring down upon him; his flanks and his back were wedged fast in the cumber, and he stood still and trembled, being ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as all the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumber the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... storm-winds of Autumn . . . . . Ye are bound for the mountains— Ah, with you let me go . . . . . Hark! fast by the window The rushing winds go, To the ice-cumber'd gorges, The vast seas of snow. There the torrents drive upward Their rock-strangled hum, There the avalanche thunders The hoarse torrent dumb. —I come, O ye mountains! ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... vailed in innocence, Nor envy's snaky eye, finds any harbour here. Nor flatterer's venomous insinuations. Nor coming humourist's puddled opinions, Nor courteous ruin of proffer'd usury, Nor time prattled away, cradle of ignorance, Nor causeless duty, nor cumber of arrogance, Nor trifling titles of vanity dazzleth us, Nor golden manacles stand for a paradise. Here wrong's name is unheard; slander a monster is, Keep thy sprite from abuse, here no abuse doth haunt, What man ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... monsters that our brethren bring over," said Sir Robert. "Mark me, young brother, cumber not yourself with these beasts of Europe, which are good for nothing but food for foul birds in the East. Purvey yourself of an Arab as soon as you land. There is a rogue at Acre, one Ali by name, who will not cheat you more than is reasonable, so you mention my name to him, Sir ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the breast, and the hands drooped upon the poor crippled limbs, whose crawl in the sunshine hard youth had grudged. He felt humbled, stunned, crushed; the pride was clean gone from him; the cruel words struck home. Worse than a cipher, did he then but cumber the earth? At that moment old Ponto, the setter, shook himself, looked up, and laid his head in his master's lap; and Dash, jealous, rose also, and sprang, not actively, for Dash was old, too, upon his knees, and licked the numbed, drooping hands. Now, people praise ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... oh Holly," she said, "this people founded the city, of which the ruins yet cumber the plain yonder, four thousand years before this cave was finished. Yet, when first mine eyes beheld it two thousand years ago, was it even as it is now. Judge, therefore, how old must that city have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show thee after what fashion ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... but cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... under terminable lease from the Crown, the Company exercised, as in British Columbia, exclusive rights to trade only, were, as the reader knows, transferred to Canada by Imperial sanction at the same time. It is not the author's intention, therefore, to cumber his pages with trite or irrelevant matter; yet certain transactions which preceded this primordial and greatest treaty of all not unfittingly may be set forth, though in the briefest way, as a pardonable introduction to the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... truth. Every mental weapon is valid against mental error. And as ridicule has been found the most potent weapon of religious enfranchisement, we are bound to use it against the wretched superstitions which cumber the path of progress. Intellectually, it is as absurd to give quarter as it is absurd to ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... beloved, the Giver of Life sends down upon thee sometimes things of sadness; but I, the singer, shall make thee glad in the place of difficulty, in the place of cumber. ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... fundamental law, and a rearrangement and different allocation of the functions of government, this challenges the closest thought of the publicist. That the problem is here crying aloud for solution is apparent. The publications which cumber the counters of our book-stores, those for which the greatest popular call to-day exists—treatises relating to trade interests, to collectivism, to socialism, even to anarchism—tell the tale in part; in part it is elsewhere and otherwise told. Only recently, in once ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... with you," replied Tim, readily. "I'm only good to cumber the earth, and if I get little pleasure out of life I must admit that it's ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... do some good among these poor creatures, and here I shall stay. You are young and full of life, and have many happy days in store for you. My race is nearly run—even did I wish for life, I would not cumber you and your friends; there will be perils to encounter and fatigues to be undergone. Had not Mary left us I would have sent her with you, but God did not will it so. Go, therefore, to the window, dear, as you were told ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... am such a vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I couldn't hold to the gallery a month together if it was a regular pursuit or if I didn't camp there, gipsy fashion. Come! I disgrace nobody and cumber nobody; that's something. I have not done that for many ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... in which we resided has long since been swept away, with its barns, its piggery, and its shippon. Never more will its cornricks gladden the eye—never more will busy agricultural life be carried on in its precincts. Streets and courts full of houses cumber the ground. No more will the lark be heard over the cornfield—the brook seen running its silvery course—or the apple in the orchard reddening on the bending bough. The lark is represented by a canary in a gilded cage ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of yours he must be looked to; I'll send Callum to you; but diaoul! ceade millia mottigheart,' continued the impatient Chieftain, 'what made an old soldier like Bradwardine send dying men here to cumber us?' ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... no particular bad passions to gratify, he only wished to lead an easy, quiet life, just as if the business of this mighty world could be carried on by innocent people fond of ease and quiet, or that Providence would permit innocent, quiet drones to occupy any portion of the earth and to cumber it. God had at any rate decreed that this man should not cumber it as a drone. He brings a certain affliction upon him, the agony of which produces that terrible whirling of the brain which, unless it is stopped in time, produces madness; he suffers indescribable misery for a period, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... moment and destroy her and her child. Indians would not live either on the village side of The Stone or in the valley beyond. They had a legend that, some day, one, whom they called The Man Who Sleeps, would rise from his hidden couch in the mountains, and, being angry that any dared to cumber his playground, would hurl The Stone upon them that dwelt at Purple Hill. But white men pay little heed to Indian legends. At one time or another every person who had come to the village visited The Stone. Colossal ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by a high-road. Having disclosed my intentions to La Trape, I left this road and struck into a woodland path which promised to conduct us in the right direction. But the luxuriance of the undergrowth, and the huge chaos of grey rocks which cumber that part of the forest, made it difficult to keep for any time in a straight line. After being an hour in the saddle we concluded that we had lost our way, and were confirmed in this, on reaching a clearing. In place of the chateau we saw before us a small house, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... he said. "Yes, it will be quite all right. I'll continue to cumber the ground a little longer, if you call that being sensible. And if you think my chances of heaven are likely to be improved by your kind intervention, p'r'aps you'll put up a prayer now and then on my behalf to the Power that casts out ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... with a feeling of consternation and pity, as she thought of the orphan boy, she accepted his greeting with duteous welcome as he said, "Kinswoman, I am come to cumber you, whilst I inquire into this matter. I give your son thanks for the honesty and faithfulness he hath shown in the matter, as befitted his father's son. I should wish myself ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would be a dead weight on the community, and "cumber the ground," be a Drunkard; for that will render you useless, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... thee cumber: What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light Like tapers ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... society, a similar spectacle presents itself. All trades and professions, without exception, are crowded with once well-doing individuals, who now serve only to cumber the ground, and obstruct the progress of others. Whatever be his reverses, a man seems to think it necessary to abide by his employment and his station, even if he starves in the one, and excites pity or ridicule in the other. He will not see that he has suffered shipwreck; that he has been thrown ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... Elizabeth and her friend the countess, discoursing upon heavenly themes, they were interrupted by the rattling of a coach, and callers were announced. The countess "fetched a deep sigh, crying out, 'O the cumber and entanglements of this vain world! They hinder all good.' Upon which," says William, "I replied, looking her steadfastly in the face, 'O come thou out of them, then.'" This journey was of great importance as affecting afterwards the population of Pennsylvania. Here it was that Penn ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... speculations respecting the star in the Northern Crown. 'I,' says M. Cornu, 'will not try to form any hypothesis about the cause of the outburst. To do so would be unscientific, and such speculations, though interesting, cumber science wofully.' This is sheer nonsense, and comes very ill from an observer whose successes in science have been due entirely to the employment of methods of observation which would have had no existence had ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... lord, Bougwan, that—I love him, and that I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor the white ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... of every district and city shall be subject to the bishop, that they shall love peace and quiet and observe the fasts and prayers in the places where they are assigned continually; that they shall not cumber themselves with ecclesiastical and secular business and shall not take part in such; they shall not leave their cloisters except when in cases of necessity they may be commissioned by the bishop of the city with such; that no slave shall be admitted into the cloister in order to ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... my threshold had boasted and jeered and cried— 'The pledge of your offsprings' birthright your children have swept aside— They cumber the land of strangers, they dwell in the alien's tent Till "home" is a word forgotten, and ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... thee, delightful Sirmio! Of all peninsulas and isles the gem, Which lake or sea in its fair breast doth show With either Neptune's arms encircling them. What joy to find that Thynia, and that plain Bithynian gone, and see thee safe again! Charming it is to rest from care and cumber, When the mind throws its burden, and we come Wearied with pains of foreign travel home, And in the bed so longed for sink to slumber. This pays for all the toil, this quiet after— Joy, my sweet Sirmio, for thy master's sake, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... I here?—Thou hast not need of me, Home of the rotting and the rotten dead— For thou art cumber'd to satiety, And wilt be cumber'd—ay, when I am fled! Why stand I here, the living among tombs? Answer, all ye who own a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... longings, for among the many proclamations against the residence in London of country gentlemen in unofficial positions is one of James I., noticing "those swarms of gentry, who, through the instigation of their wives, do neglect their country hospitality and cumber the city, a general nuisance to the kingdom;" and the royal Solomon elsewhere observes that "gentlemen resident on their estates are like ships in port—their value and magnitude are felt and acknowledged; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... abashed by the captain's error; abashed, also, by the surprise and fear with which the Indian regarded me at first, and the obsequious civilities with which he soon began to cumber me. I know now that he must have overheard and comprehended the peculiar nature of my prayers. It is certain, of course, that he at once disclosed the matter to his patron; and looking back with greater knowledge, I can now understand what so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, but for that of Richard and the first year of John he is really admirable. No circumstance is too trivial for his pen, and in this garrulous diffuseness many touches are preserved of priceless worth to us, with which better authors would have disdained to cumber their work.] ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... things he would have done, the difficulties he might have avoided had he exercised forethought. Though Defoe had little insight into the complexities of man's inner life, he has not been surpassed in his accumulations of naturalistic outer details. These do not cumber his narrative; they contribute to its purpose and add to its effectiveness. In this selection (Appendix 5) observe how plausible are such homely details as Crusoe's seeing no sign of his comrades ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... years were occupied with the strife of Kirk and King, whence arose "all the cumber of Scotland" till 1689. The preachers, led by the learned and turbulent Andrew Melville, had an ever-present terror of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and of an ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... of any kind, quieted his soul by the worship of animals, birds, and insects, holding the cat sacred to Re, the bull to Isis, the beetle to Pthah. A long struggle against their rude faith ended in its adoption as the religion of the new empire. Then rose the mighty monuments that cumber the river-bank and the desert—obelisk, labyrinth, pyramid, and tomb of king, blent with tomb of crocodile. Into such deep debasement, O brethren, the sons of the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... must rely for quickening and sustentation has been exhausted. Some manly or Christian grace falls upon a young mind, and quickly strikes root and rises into flower and fruit; while the same grace thrown upon an adult mind would fail to reach the soil, through the vices that cumber and choke it. It is thus that home and the school-room are literally seminaries—places where seed is sown— and it is in these that we expect and intend that every seed shall produce after its kind. Let us talk about this ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... across continent sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets—perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... which is not intended by the directing power, is the sole good purpose these agencies were ever known to serve. Lord Mansfield, it must be admitted, once seemed to justify the use of private detectives in divorce suits, but he was careful to cumber the faint praise with which he damned them by making honesty in the discharge of these delicate duties a first essential. Had he lived to see the iniquitous perfection the business has now attained, he would undoubtedly have withheld even that quasi-endorsement ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... wit have a Dadalus to guide him. That Dadalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings, to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise indeed we do, but that, very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known: and so is our brain delivered of much matter, which never was begotten by knowledge. For, there being two principal parts, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... itself can be known only partially even to the women themselves; what the world has lost by that compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have been its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one can ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumber the ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise that beneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried a sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientific investigator, or a good judge. Scientifically ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... canon, "this is your sort, is it? I'll have nought to do with it! Preaching, preaching! Every idle child's head is agog on preaching nowadays! A plague on it! Why can't Master Dean leave it to the black friars, whose vocation 'tis, and not cumber us with his sermons for ever, and set every lazy lad thinking he must needs run after them? No, no, my good boy, take my advice. Thou shalt have two good bellyfuls a day, all my cast gowns, and a pair of shoes by the year, with a groat a month if thou ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... on these sheaves," he continued, "and look again. Let us reject not a single one of the little facts that build up the reality of which I have spoken. Let us permit them to depart of their own accord into space. They cumber the foreground, and yet we cannot but be aware of the existence behind them of a great and very curious force that sustains the whole. Does it only sustain and not raise? These men whom we see before us are at least no longer the ferocious animals ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... expression; but he is not the evident artist that Dickens is. He does not seek opportunity to revel in mere rhetoric. He goes for the heart of his subject and his literary charms are displayed quite incidentally to his progress thereto. His stylism does not clog his story or cumber his argument. The result is that he produced a tract of the Church of Man which is a powerful argument for a realization in Man of the Church of God. His book is superbly human and "Ginx's Baby" deserves immortality with other dream- ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... darkness banned, In light eternal forge for you the brand Against Abaddon, who hath overcast The truth and right, Adami, made full fast Unto God's glory by our steadfast band. Go, smite each sophist, tyrant, hypocrite! Girt with the arms of the first Wisdom, free Your country from the frauds that cumber it! Swerve not: 'twere sin. How good, how great the praise Of him who turns youth, strength, soul, energy, Unto the dayspring of ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... the conclusion that the southern country was not sufficiently remote, and that only a change of hemispheres would suit the precise state of his mind. Letters of combined farewell and notice-giving, reached Pattaquasset too late to cumber the doctor with a bevy of friends to see him off; but his sudden motions were too well known, and his peculiarities too long established, to excite much surprise or dismay by ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... no apology for the number and extent of bibliographical and other lists given in this Appendix: they may cumber the book but they are necessary to complete my design. This has been to supply throughout the ten volumes the young Arabist and student of Orientalism and Anthropology with such assistance as I can render him; and it is my conviction that if with the aid of this version he will master the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... first place, he was by no means sure that escape was what he wanted—not yet, at any rate; in the second place, if Gabriel Druse passed the word along the subterranean wires of the Romany world that Jethro Fawe should vanish, he would not long cumber the ground. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... our frills and tumble them in the dust. Domestic cats may mioul in the garden at night to a certain extent, but a line must be drawn; after that they must be chased up trees and barked at, if necessary, all night. Opossums and native cats are unfit to cumber the earth, and must be hunted into holes, wherever possible. Cows and other horned animals must not come into the yard, or even look over the garden fence, under penalties. Black fellows must be barked at, and their dogs chased to the uttermost limits of the habitable globe. Such were the chief ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... haughty, bold, and young, Rage gnaw'd the lip, and wonder chain'd the tongue. Silence at length the gay Antinous broke, Constrain'd a smile, and thus ambiguous spoke: "What god to your untutor'd youth affords This headlong torrent of amazing words? May Jove delay thy reign, and cumber late So bright a genius with ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... jostling, tossing, and wild leaping of the waters there are due to its impact against these obstacles. A very different explanation occurred to me upon the spot. Boulders derived from the adjacent cliffs visibly cumber the sides of the river. Against these the water rises and sinks rhythmically but violently, large waves being thus produced. On the generation of each wave there is an immediate compounding of the wave-motion with the river-motion. The ridges, which in still water would proceed in circular ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Binning's greatest enemy, being very active to obtain the gift of his forefaulture, with a designe of his ruine, and the prejudice of his numerous and just creditors, the deceased Mr. James Gordon, minister at Cumber in Ireland, John Binning's father in law and former Curator, to whom he was oweing a considerable soume of money, came over to Scotland, at John Binning's desire, who was then in Ireland, to obtaine the said gift, to disappoint Matthew Colvill thereof, who prevailed ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... has a picturesqueness and a kinship with Nature and the hills, utterly lacking in a mining locality. The squalid rows of the latter, arranged in wretched, heart-breaking symmetry, are an offence to the landscape. Mud and filth cumber the door-steps, runnels of malodorous water ooze along the rows, ragged and ill-kempt bairns tumble about like little savages. A pitiful sight it is to see the black squads of colliers returning to their homes after a day in the damp bowels of the earth: greasy ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... been a cumber-ground long already, and wilt thou continue so still? Thy sin has brought this army to thy walls, and shall it bring it in judgment to do execution into thy town? Thou hast heard what the captains have said, but as yet thou shuttest thy gates. ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... to deprive Burr of all power and influence. He killed Hamilton, but he fell himself by the same shot that carried death to his opponent; and so complete was his fall that he never could rise again, though he continued to cumber the earth for more than thirty-two years. Hamilton's quarrel with Burr, as his son and biographer truly observes, "was the quarrel of his country. It was the last act in the great drama of his life. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... alone, That further rules you will not break, And marriage liberties partake? Some really do, as I suppose, Upon design keep on some clothes, And yet in truth I'm not afraid For to describe a bundling maid; She'll sometimes say when she lies down, She can't be cumber'd with a gown, And that the weather is so warm, To take it off can be no harm: The girl it seems had been at strift; For widest bosom to her shift, She gownless, when the bed they're in, The spark, nought feels but naked skin. But ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... reluctance to his work. The work itself, how unsatisfactory it became! Half the time and energy of the office seemed to be spent on creating rather than performing work; an immense amount of detail seemed to be entirely useless, and to cumber rather than to assist the conduct of the business that was important. Of course much of it was necessary work which had to be done by some one; but Hugh began to wonder whether his life was well bestowed in carrying out a system of which so much seemed to consist in dealing with unimportant minutiae, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... noxiousness look very much like a direct command from the Author of Nature, to do that which shall turn the refuse to a good account—namely, to bury it in the earth. Yet, from sloth and negligence, it is often allowed to cumber the surface, and there do its evil work instead. An important principle is thus instanced—the essential identity of Nuisance and Waste. Nearly all the physical annoyances we are subjected to, and nearly all the influences that are operating actively for our hurt, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... terminable lease from the Crown, the Company exercised, as in British Columbia, exclusive rights to trade only, were, as the reader knows, transferred to Canada by Imperial sanction at the same time. It is not the author's intention, therefore, to cumber his pages with trite or irrelevant matter; yet certain transactions which preceded this primordial and greatest treaty of all not unfittingly may be set forth, though in the briefest way, as a pardonable introduction to ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... soul. Don't take any more advice—certainly not Sheila Melrose's! You go straight ahead and marry her! You've got money, I know, but I hope you won't chuck your job on that account. Stick to it, and you shall have the Dower House to live in while I yet cumber the ground, and Burchester Castle as soon ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... grandeur, and the fame Are bounded by the world alone; The calm, the smouldering, and the flame Of awful patience were his own; With him they are forever flown Past all our fond self-shadowings, Wherewith we cumber the Unknown As with inept, ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... strange shame for this age if it were not so: for as every age of the world has its own troubles to confuse it, and its own follies to cumber it, so has each its own work to do, pointed out to it by unfailing signs of the times; and it is unmanly and stupid for the children of any age to say: We will not set our hands to the work; we did not make the troubles, we will not ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... the interior Indians will never bear the strain of development. Lazy and ambitionless, they are incapable of uniting their tribal forces. Alas for them! They merely cumber the ground. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... supposed to be a muniment-room, in charge of the feoffees' clerk. The clerk used it for drying his garden-seeds and onions, and spread his hoarding apples to ripen on the floor. So when Taffy grew to need a room of his own, and his father's books to cumber the very stairs of the gate-house, the money which Humility and her mother made by their lace-work, and which arrived always by post, came very handy for the rent which the clerk asked ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the severe atmosphere of the law, beyond the reach of chronic ribaldry, and into the region of argument, where it must be estimated by its legal merits. I have applied to it the rules of law. I have pushed away the dead exfoliations that cumber the path; and have gone to the foundations, to the ever fresh and preserving spirit of the rules of the common law, and have sought to apply them ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... were occupied with the strife of Kirk and King, whence arose "all the cumber of Scotland" till 1689. The preachers, led by the learned and turbulent Andrew Melville, had an ever-present terror of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and of an unknown proportion of the people. The Reformation of 1559-1560 had ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... suitor such as John. It was rumored the latter was taking to liquor, and she was blamed for it. Women often like to have others say yes to the first man who comes, and not leave old love affairs to cumber the ground. And girls, however loving to their friends, have but a cold sympathy for their sex ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... laughed. "I hain't ergoin' ter 'cumber yore projeck's none ternight," he declared, good-humouredly, then added fairly enough, "but termorrer night I aims ter go sparkin' thar myself—an' I looks ter ye to do as much fer me an' ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... whom we met below, They, too, have long roam'd to and fro; They ramble, leaving, where they pass, Their fragments on the cumber'd grass. And often to some kindly place Chance guides the migratory race, Where, though long wanderings intervene, They recognise a former scene. The dingy tents are pitch'd; the fires Give to the wind their wavering spires; In dark knots crouch round the wild flame Their ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: 'You raving maniac!' Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac was ne'er to ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stood upon her deck I gained a new impression, namely that of spaciousness. For she was extraordinarily beamy; her hatchways were small, and there was nothing in the way of fittings of any kind to cumber up her decks; indeed, so far as actual room to move about upon was concerned, her quarter-deck seemed to be quite as spacious as that of the Europa. She was flush-decked fore and aft, and abaft the immensely lofty mainmast there was nothing but the companion, with a seat and ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... 'Oh, why cumber yourself with such a useless thing,' cried the Lala in disgust; 'have you not enough to occupy your hands and mind, without taking an extra burden?' But the prince, who liked having his own way, paid no heed to him, and ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... exclaimed, "there is enough clothing in those two cases to last us for the rest of our lives; to say nothing of that third case which you say is full of unmade silks and linen. Surely it was scarcely necessary to cumber yourself with ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... out in these pages, the fig tree was a favorite type in rabbinical representation of the Jewish race, and the Lord had before adopted the symbolism in the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree, that worthless growth which did but cumber ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... market town, With more respect he and his dog are known: A brisker face he wears at wake or fair, Nor views with longing eyes the pedlar's ware, But buys at will or ribands, gloves, or beads, And willing maidens to the ale-house leads: And, Oh! secure from toils which cumber life, He makes the maid he loves an easy wife. Ah, Nelly! can'st thou with contented mind, Become the help-mate of a lab'ring hind, And share his lot, whate'er the chances be, Who hath no dow'r, but love, to fix on thee? Yes, gayest maid ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... adversity one should prepare for prosperity. I fancy there are a good many people unconsciously repeating the mistake of the Canadian farmer—chopping down all the native growths of life, clearing the ground of all the useless pretty things that seem to cumber it, sacrificing everything to utility and success. We fell the last green tree for the sake of raising an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop to think what an ugly, barren place we may have to sit in while we eat ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Fiddles, which may be bought new for a few shillings, has swamped English makers of cheap instruments, of which there are by this time five times as many in the market as there is any occasion for. Hence it is that Fiddles meet us everywhere; they cumber the toy-shop; they house with the furniture dealer; they swarm by thousands in the pawnbrokers' stores, and block out the light from his windows; they hang on the tobacconists' walls; they are raffled at public-houses; and they form an item ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Public Prosecutor, who has little to do, and has even that little done for him by his chief clerk, Zolotucha. The Inspector of the Medical Department is also a man of leisure, and likely to be at home—if he has not gone out to a card party. Others also there are—all men who cumber the ground for nothing." ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a second Robinson Crusoe than sober history. For that reason I have put the corroborative evidence in footnotes, rather than cumber the movement of the main theme. I am sorry to have loaded the opening parts with so many notes; but Radisson's voyages change the relative positions of the other explorers so radically that proofs must be given. The footnotes are for the student and may be omitted ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... a picturesqueness and a kinship with Nature and the hills, utterly lacking in a mining locality. The squalid rows of the latter, arranged in wretched, heart-breaking symmetry, are an offence to the landscape. Mud and filth cumber the door-steps, runnels of malodorous water ooze along the rows, ragged and ill-kempt bairns tumble about like little savages. A pitiful sight it is to see the black squads of colliers returning to their homes after a day in the damp bowels of the earth: greasy caps with little ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... in its normal state? Sir George thought not, and hence he virtually says to the landlords, "Now is your time to get rid of the people; they have served your purpose; they are useful to you no longer; why should they cumber the ground?" Mr. Poulett Scrope objected to carrying the clause so suddenly into execution, as it would be a complete clearance of the small farmers of Ireland, and would amount to a social revolution in the state of things in that country. Mr. Sharman Crawford said he would divide the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and had a good bed in which to sleep. Where she was sinned against was in this: that her family looked upon her white hair and her wrinkles and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that her interest in life was gone—in short, that she was content to cumber the earth and to wait for the long sleep. To them she was simply one who tarries and is content. Scattergood looked into her sharp, old eyes, eyes that were capable of sudden gleams of humor or flashes of anger, and he knew. He knew that death seemed ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... embroidery, Their various arms that glitter in the air! What gallant war-hounds rouse them from their lair, And gnash their fangs, loud yelling for the prey! All join the chase, but few the triumph share: The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away, And Havoc scarce for joy can cumber their array. ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... pyramids slumber, Sealed in the Lybian sands; Princes in gorgeous cathedrals Decked with the spoil of the lands Kinglier, princelier sleeps he Couched 'mid the prairies serene, Only the turf and the willow Him and God's heaven between! Temple nor column to cumber Verdure and bloom of the sod— So, in the vale by Beth-peor, Moses ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... and cumber of the world, that will call a man off from looking after the salvation of his soul. This is intimated by the parable of the thorny ground. (Luke 8:14) Worldly cumber is a devilish thing; it will hurry a man from his bed without prayer; to a sermon, and from it again, without prayer; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets—perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... lie and cumber Sunlit pallets never thrive; Morns abed and daylight slumber Were not meant for ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... That ever lived in the tide of times. Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood! Over thy wounds now do I prophesy— Which like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue; A curse shall light upon the limbs of men; Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war; All pity choked with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar's spirit, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... hordes, whose iron sinews swept the nerveless children of the gardens of the earth from the face of their idle paradises: and, but for this stream of keener life and nobler energy, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete race of lotus-eaters than would now cumber the fairest regions of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... sacrifice. And then when I thought of myself as the cause of all this suffering, it seemed as if it ought not to be a matter of wonder or complaint if the verdict should be, that such a wretch should cumber the earth no longer. And yet, Agnes, in the eye of Him who looketh only on the heart, I believe I was as much a murderer when I struck down my school-mate in the play-ground as now. For in the height of my passion then, I think I should have been glad ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... "I pray you, O excellent wife, cumber not yourself and me to get a curiously rich dinner for this man and woman who have just alighted at our gate. These things, if they desire them, they can get for a few shillings at any village inn; but rather let that stranger see, if he will, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... by the soul of their first ancestor and that it rules their destiny. Sometimes there is a sacred grove near a village, where the trees are suffered to rot and die on the spot. Their fallen branches cumber the ground, and no one may remove them unless he has first asked leave of the spirit of the tree and offered him a sacrifice. Among the Maraves of Southern Africa the burial-ground is always regarded as a holy place where neither ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... divine what holds thee here in a net. I, too, have a counsel for thee; O mark it and keep it. Since I received the same from the Master above: Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls; A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride. Cumber thee not for the world, and this my precept forget not, 'Tis but a toy that a vagabond sweetheart has left us. Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks; Never to me nor to thee was option ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the old ladies as to what was the most delightful product of the garden. One old lady said, that so "fur" as she was "consarned," she preferred the "per-turnip"—another preferred the "pertater"—another the "cow-cumber," and still another voted "ingern" king. But suddenly a wise looking old dame raised her spectacles and settled the whole question by observing: "Ah, ladies, you may talk about yer per-turnips, and your pertaters, and your passnips and other gyardin ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... pair, with their sable guide leading the way and carrying the medicine chest, were en route for the village, Dick carrying his case of surgical instruments under his arm. Their rifles they left with the wagon, deeming it unnecessary to cumber themselves with superfluous weapons in face of the fact that the villagers were obviously quite friendly disposed to white men, indeed they were still too close to civilisation to ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... Spake not the prophet: "There where dragons roamed, In later days the grass shall grow—the reed"? I choose those rocky hills that, on our left, Drag down the skiey waters to the woods: Such loved I from my youth: to me they said, "Bandits this hour usurp our heights, and beasts Cumber our caves: expel the seed accurst, And yield us back to God!"' The King gave ear; And Cedd within those mountains passed his Lent, Driving with prayer and fast the spirits accurst With ignominy ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... had Wives enough, And Concubines a Number; Yet Ise possess more happiness, And he had more of Cumber; My Joys surmount a wedded Life, With fear she lets me mow her; A Wench is better ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... vineyard; and he came seeking fruit thereon, and found none. And he said unto the vinedresser, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why doth it also cumber the ground? And he answering saith unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: and if it bear fruit thenceforth, well; but if not, thou shalt ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... we resided has long since been swept away, with its barns, its piggery, and its shippon. Never more will its cornricks gladden the eye—never more will busy agricultural life be carried on in its precincts. Streets and courts full of houses cumber the ground. No more will the lark be heard over the cornfield—the brook seen running its silvery course—or the apple in the orchard reddening on the bending bough. The lark is represented by a canary in a gilded cage hanging out of a first-floor window—the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... earth like a base common sod; I wonder at thee, and thy power to hold The world in bond to thee, thou yellow gold! Yet do I sadly own thy fascination, And would I gladly show my estimation By giving house-room to thee, if thou'lt come And cumber up my home;— I'd even promise not to call attention To these things that ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... it were all, in sooth, That any soul needs, to climb to heaven, And we would not cumber the way of truth With dreary ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for a dollar at any village. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... dismally marked by fragments of dress, broken harness, golden ornaments, and other valuables plundered on their march,—by the dead bodies of men, or by those less fortunate, who were left to die alone in the wilderness. As for the horses, their carcasses were not suffered long to cumber the ground, as they were quickly seized and devoured half raw by the starving soldiers, who, like the famished condors, now hovering in troops above their heads, greedily banqueted on the most offensive offal to satisfy the gnawings ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... true, there is but one of the three estates mentioned; but the other two are virtually included; for the archbishop and cardinal are at the head of the deputies: And that the rest are mute persons every critic understands the reason, ne quarta loqui persona laboret. I am never willing to cumber the stage with many speakers, when I can reasonably avoid it, as here I might. And what if I had a mind to pass over the clergy and nobility of France in silence, and to excuse them from joining in so illegal, and so ungodly a decree? Am I tied in poetry to the strict rules ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... courting slumber, The hours I number, And sad cares cumber My weary mind, This thought shall cheer me: That thou art near me, Whose ear to ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... weighbridge^; spring balance, piezoelectric balance, analytical balance, two-pan balance, one-pan balance; postal scale, baby scale. [Science of gravity] statics. V. be heavy &c adj.; gravitate, weigh, press, cumber, load. [Measure the weight of] weigh, poise. Adj. weighty; weighing &c v.; heavy as lead; ponderous, ponderable; lumpish^, lumpy, cumbersome, burdensome; cumbrous, unwieldy, massive. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... nickname probably, and were allowed to play cards with them, and lose your money for their benefit. If you were non-congenial you did not exist—that was all. You might be sitting in a chair, but they only saw it and an empty space—you did not even cumber their ground. ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... gentle, I think the best are of two pieces; the line should not exceed (especially for three or four links towards the hook) I say, not exceed three or four haires; but if you can attain to Angle with one haire; you will have more rises, and catch more fish. Now you must bee sure not to cumber yourselfe with too long a Line, as most do: and before you begin to angle, cast to have the wind on your back, and the Sun (if it shines) to be before you, and to fish down the streame, and carry the point or tip of the Rod downeward; by which meanes the shadow of yourselfe, and Rod too will ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... but from the well, Whereof the woman of Samaria crav'd, Excited: haste along the cumber'd path, After my guide, impell'd; and pity mov'd My bosom for the 'vengeful deed, though just. When lo! even as Luke relates, that Christ Appear'd unto the two upon their way, New-risen from his vaulted grave; ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... six fathoms for the next fourteen miles, the channel at the same time narrowing down to a width varying from about two miles to less than half-a-mile in some parts, notably at the spot where it begins to thread its devious way among the islands that cumber the stream for a length of fully thirty miles, at a distance of about twenty-eight miles from ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... with hate, heavy with fear. Why should they cumber their strength with his weakness? To do so meant death; not to do so—and they remembered the law of Sitka Charley, and ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... everlasting Night, And blest the endless Slumber! We are heated with the day too bright, And withered up with cumber! We're weary of that life abroad: Come, we will now go ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... I'm no good to nobody now. One old coat 'ull do to patch another, but it's good for nought else. Thee'dst like to ha' a wife to mend thy clothes an' get thy victual, better nor thy old mother. An' I shall be nought but cumber, a-sittin' i' th' chimney-corner. (Adam winced and moved uneasily; he dreaded, of all things, to hear his mother speak of Hetty.) But if thy feyther had lived, he'd ne'er ha' wanted me to go to make room for another, for he could no more ha' done wi'out me nor ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... whose your bondsmen when alone, That further rules you will not break, And marriage liberties partake? Some really do, as I suppose, Upon design keep on some clothes, And yet in truth I'm not afraid For to describe a bundling maid; She'll sometimes say when she lies down, She can't be cumber'd with a gown, And that the weather is so warm, To take it off can be no harm: The girl it seems had been at strift; For widest bosom to her shift, She gownless, when the bed they're in, The spark, nought feels but naked ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... cannot be considered at all common in the Islands; there is no specimen in the Guernsey Museum, and Mr. Couch has never mentioned to me having had one through his hands, or recorded it in the 'Zoologist,' as he would have done had he had one; neither does Mrs. Jago (late Miss Cumber), who used to do a good deal of stuffing in Guernsey about thirty years ago, remember having had one through her hands. There can be no reason, however, why it should not occasionally occur in the Islands, as it does so ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... disclosed my intentions to La Trape, I left this road and struck into a woodland path which promised to conduct us in the right direction. But the luxuriance of the undergrowth, and the huge chaos of grey rocks which cumber that part of the forest, made it difficult to keep for any time in a straight line. After being an hour in the saddle we concluded that we had lost our way, and were confirmed in this, on reaching a clearing. In place of the chateau we saw before us a small house, which La Trape ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... Abaddon, who hath overcast The truth and right, Adami, made full fast Unto God's glory by our steadfast band. Go, smite each sophist, tyrant, hypocrite! Girt with the arms of the first Wisdom, free Your country from the frauds that cumber it! Swerve not: 'twere sin. How good, how great the praise Of him who turns youth, strength, soul, energy, Unto the dayspring of the ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... capitals it met much the same reception. Nowhere did it reach the eye of a Departmental Head. It went to Siam, to the Prince of Monaco, to Ecuador, and was tossed to cumber a basket, or moulder ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... kinds of human beings, it is naught unless it is valued; but, being valued, it is a treasure beyond price. Cold, glittering, and dumb, it stands among the tasteless splendors with which the wealthy ignorant cumber their dreary abodes,—a thing of ostentation merely,—as uninteresting as the women who surround it, gorgeously apparelled, but without conversation, conscious of defective parts of speech. "There is much music, excellent voice, in that little organ," but there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Till they glance thro' the shade, and Come down to your brow Like—eyes of the maiden Who calls on you now— Arise! from your dreaming In violet bowers, To duty beseeming These star-litten hours— And shake from your tresses Encumber'd with dew The breath of those kisses That cumber them too— (O! how, without you, Love! Could angels be blest?) Those kisses of true love That lull'd ye to rest! Up!—shake from your wing Each hindering thing: The dew of the night— It would weigh down your flight; And true love ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... civilians, and so did the military. At last the Sa Leonites, hopeless of obtaining a Government grant, have set on foot a subscription which reached 500l.—some say 700l. There are, therefore, certain fitful signs of activity, and bricks and fire-bricks now cumber the ground; but it is all a 'flash in the pan.' The present purpose is to make it a library, in place of the fine old collection which went to the dogs. It is also to serve as a lecture-room. But who is there in the 'African Liverpool' that can lecture? What is he to lecture about? Who will stand ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... no place for a relation of personal subserviency. So far as concerns the economic efficiency of the community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the general habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate adjustment of human institutions to the existing situation. The habit of mind which best lends itself to the purposes of a peaceable, industrial community, is that ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... with what at a distance resembled loose boards, but which were actually the long marble seats of the stadium. Urging our horses over piles of loose blocks, we reached the base of the theatre, climbed the fragments that cumber the main entrance, and looked on the spacious arena and galleries within. Although greatly ruined, the materials of the whole structure remain, and might be put together again. It is a grand wreck; the colossal fragments which have tumbled from the ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... awful people, these Finns and ... Greeks," he thought. "Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the earth. What ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... offered them. Then let Rivers take four men, and go in, and take all the loot you can find. The jewels we will divide among the men when at Meerut. Tell off another party to loot the rest of the rooms, but only take what is really valuable and portable. We cannot cumber ourselves with baggage. It would serve the rajah right if I were to burn his castle down; he may think himself lucky to get off ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... able to produce my authority. I think it amounted to this, that James flung down a petition presented by some supplicant who paid no compliments to his horse, and expressed no admiration at the splendour of his furniture, saying, "Shall a king cumber himself about the petition of a beggar, while the beggar disregards the king's splendour?" It is, I think, Sir John Harrington who recommends, as a sure mode to the king's favour, to praise the paces ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... is ready. There need be no delay. I have no wife nor children to cumber me. My trunks are already packed; my resolve made; my last business transacted I have some lands in Alabama which I mean to sell. This done, I am off for the great field of performance, south and southwest. You shall hear of me, perhaps may wish to hear FROM me. ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... cumbered with large boulders, and that the jostling, tossing, and wild leaping of the water there, are due to its impact against these obstacles. I doubt this explanation. At all events, there is another sufficient reason to be taken into account. Boulders derived from the adjacent cliffs visibly cumber the sides of the river. Against these the water rises and sinks rhythmically but violently, large waves being thus produced. On the generation of each wave, there is an immediate compounding of the wave-motion with he river-motion. The ridges, which in still water ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... morning seems to rise. In vain may death in various shapes invade, The swift-wing'd arrow, the descending blade; His naked breast their impotence defies; The dart rebounds, the brittle fauchion flies. Shut in himself, the war without he hears, Safe in the tempest of their rattling spears; The cumber'd strand their wasted volleys strow; His sport, the rage and labour of the foe. His pastimes like a cauldron boil the flood, And blacken ocean with the rising mud; The billows feel him, as he works his way; His hoary footsteps shine along the sea; ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... blundering heads with enchanted swords. But things have wonderfully changed. It is the giants, now-a-days, that have the science and the intelligence, while the chivalrous Don Quixotes of Conservatism still cumber themselves with the clumsy armour of a by-gone age. On whirls the restless globe through unsounded time, with its cities and its silences, its births and funerals, half light, half shade, but never wholly dark, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... is the sole good purpose these agencies were ever known to serve. Lord Mansfield, it must be admitted, once seemed to justify the use of private detectives in divorce suits, but he was careful to cumber the faint praise with which he damned them by making honesty in the discharge of these delicate duties a first essential. Had he lived to see the iniquitous perfection the business has now attained, he would undoubtedly have withheld even that quasi-endorsement ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Nor envy's snaky eye, finds any harbour here. Nor flatterer's venomous insinuations. Nor coming humourist's puddled opinions, Nor courteous ruin of proffer'd usury, Nor time prattled away, cradle of ignorance, Nor causeless duty, nor cumber of arrogance, Nor trifling titles of vanity dazzleth us, Nor golden manacles stand for a paradise. Here wrong's name is unheard; slander a monster is, Keep thy sprite from abuse, here no abuse doth haunt, What man grafts in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... very soon the power of his charge was gone, his limbs could not rise, and his breath was taken from him; the hole that he had made was filled up behind him; fresh volumes from the shaken height came pouring down upon him; his flanks and his back were wedged fast in the cumber, and he stood still and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... last generation, and the number and variety and novelty of the questions they have essayed to solve in this, are undoubted. Their work must, of course, be tested by time. Much of it has already borne good fruit, and any that does manifest harm is not likely to cumber the earth long. If laws in colonies are more quickly passed, they are also more easy to amend than in ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the empty cask; and all but two or three fled my poor friend's ravelled hesp. He had recovered the lost thread before he died, but his tangled life was past unravelling in this world, and we wrapped his ragged hesp around him for a winding-sheet, and left him with Christ, who so graciously took the cumber of Rutherford's ill-ravelled life also. Young men whose hesp still runs even, and whose web is not yet torn, as Rutherford says to Earlston, 'Make conscience of your thoughts and study in everything to mortify your lusts. Wash your hands in innocency, and God, who knoweth what you ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... are more delightful in the genial home-circles of which they are the centres and ornaments, or in the more exciting stir and whirl of the ballroom. After every gathering hecatombs of slain male victims mournfully cumber the ground; and one all-conquering fair one, now herself conquered by matrimony and motherhood, wrung from those her charms had blighted the title of ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... correi, Sage counsel in cumber, Red hand in the foray, How sound is thy slumber! Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... he had no particular bad passions to gratify, he only wished to live a happy quiet life, just as if the business of this mighty world could be carried on by innocent people fond of ease or quiet, or that Providence would permit innocent quiet drones to occupy any portion of the earth and to cumber it. God had at any rate decreed that this man should not cumber it as a drone. He brings a certain affliction upon him, the agony of which produces that terrible whirling of the brain which, unless it ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... night, the pain that slumber Strikes with her mace of silence dead and dumb Loomed over me and, formless, said, "I come! Bringing illusions lost beyond all number. Rigid you lie, yet for a little cumber This flaming world, where some die proudly, some Glitter like granite, or dream millenium." It left me toiled in mountainous clouds ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... Vulcan, C. W. Cyclops, commander, for the Old World; having come to the conclusion that the southern country was not sufficiently remote, and that only a change of hemispheres would suit the precise state of his mind. Letters of combined farewell and notice-giving, reached Pattaquasset too late to cumber the doctor with a bevy of friends to see him off; but his sudden motions were too well known, and his peculiarities too long established, to excite much surprise or dismay by ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... were "eaten up:" the Gudabirsi fix the event at the period when their forefathers still inhabited Bulhar on the coast,—about 300 years ago. If the date be correct, the substantial ruins have fought a stern fight with time. Remnants of houses cumber the soil, and the carefully built wells are filled with rubbish: the palace was pointed out to me with its walls of stone and clay intersected by layers of woodwork. The mosque is a large roofless building ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... sees the cub, and does himself oppose Betwixt his cumber'd mother and her foes; With desp'rate courage he receives her wounds, And men and boats his active tail confounds. Their forces join'd, the seas with billows fill, And make a tempest, though the winds ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... loud trump must wake him now; And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger, He'd wish to sleep a little longer. And could he be indeed so old As by the newspapers we're told? Threescore, I think, is pretty high; 'Twas time in conscience he should die! This world he cumber'd long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that's the reason, some folks think, He left behind so great a stink. Behold his funeral appears, Nor widows' sighs, nor orphans' tears, Wont at such times each heart to pierce, Attend the progress of his hearse. But what of ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... every ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky. They talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly debating. Were not the canals water-ways, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 'freedom for bears;' And how, inter alia, the beast got away And took himself off in the midst of the fray; And how Tommy Johnson at last came to grief: All which I omit, as I wish to be brief. The story's too lengthy—it must not be sent all To cumber your pages, my dear CONTINENTAL. At present my purpose, my object, my mission is To show how the woodman became 'Abolitionist.' Introductions, you know, like 'original sin,' Hang on, while you long for some sign of repentance ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the evident artist that Dickens is. He does not seek opportunity to revel in mere rhetoric. He goes for the heart of his subject and his literary charms are displayed quite incidentally to his progress thereto. His stylism does not clog his story or cumber his argument. The result is that he produced a tract of the Church of Man which is a powerful argument for a realization in Man of the Church of God. His book is superbly human and "Ginx's Baby" deserves immortality ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... midst of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as all the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumber the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who are speaking ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... but such respect is a national virtue and emotion. No nation loving war harbours that virtue. And in nothing do the kinsmen with whom we have much language in common differ from us more than in the policy that brought this Prussian host to cumber the stagnant waters of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the twilight, void of a star. As a bird unfledged is the broad-winged night, whose winglets are callow Yet, but soon with their plumes will she cover her brood from afar, Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies with their blossom Thick as the darkness of leaf-shadowed spring is encumbered with flowers. World upon world is enwound in the bountiful girth of her bosom, Warm and lustrous with life lovely to look on as ours. Still is the sunset adrift as a spirit in ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to all they dared not be," and "speak the wisdom once they could not think." "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons," and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" cumber the ground like the unnoticed ruins of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... whip he flourished, Cracked his whip, all bead-embroidered, Quick he sped upon his journey, Lurched the sledge, the way was shortened, 10 Loudly rang the birchwood runners, And the rowan cumber rattled. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... Robert know of the substitution of Boston for the fiddle, because he knew Robert could not tell a lie. Therefore, when he murmured over the volume some of its own words which he had read the preceding Sunday, it was in a quite inaudible whisper: 'Now is it good for nothing but to cumber the ground, and furnish ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... "Be early," says he, "take time by the forelock: get rid of your entail and get rid of your land. Don't wait till the Government does both for you, and have to accept whatever condition the law will cumber you with, but be before them! Get your son to join you in docking the entail; petition before the court for a sale, yourself or somebody for you; and wash your hands clean of it all. It's bad property, in a very ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... taken her bow from her back, but he laughed aloud, and said: Nay, nay, I will not have that; for there be those who gird them to a sword and know not how to use it, but few will cumber their shoulders with bow and quiver who cannot shoot therewith; I deem it like that thou art a fell bowman. Keep thy bow therefore, and if thou wilt go without any other gift, even so ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... regulated by their feelings, and much as I respect them, I have a greater respect for truth. Every mental weapon is valid against mental error. And as ridicule has been found the most potent weapon of religious enfranchisement, we are bound to use it against the wretched superstitions which cumber the path of progress. Intellectually, it is as absurd to give quarter as it ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Present-good, namely, for they are two men full of civility and cunning. Let these engage in this business for us, and let Mansoul be taken up with much business, and if possible with much pleasure, and this is the way to get ground of them. Let us but cumber and occupy and amuse Mansoul sufficiently, and they will make their castle a warehouse for goods instead of a garrison for men of war.' This diabolical advice was highly applauded all through hell till all the lesser devils, while setting themselves to carry it out, gnashed ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... many women slaves or concubines as a man can properly and with decency provide for, the children of the latter, if recognised by the father, sharing equally with the offspring of the former. Though why a man who has found his love should wish to cumber his house with other women, seething with jealousy and peevish from want of occupation, is beyond my ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... aint much to look at,' says the Southerner, looking him over carefully. 'He won't eat like folks—he can't talk—an' he sleeps like a bat. I dunno why such a pusillanimous critter should cumber the yearth,' and with that he puts his hand to his hip and pulls out a forty-five from under the tails of his coat. Fuzzy takes one look at it, and it didn't need any prodding to make him holler, and he tries to ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... at the most; though you may fish a little stronger above, in the upper part of your line: but if you can attain to angle with one hair, you shall have more rises, and catch more fish. Now you must be sure not to cumber yourself with too long a line, as most do. And before you begin to angle, cast to have the wind on your back; and the sun, if it shines, to be before you; and to fish down the stream; and carry ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... the women themselves; what the world has lost by that compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have been its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one can ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumber the ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise that beneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried a sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientific investigator, or a good judge. Scientifically speaking, it is as unproven that there is any organic ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... bottle, exclaiming that he would be dead in a few minutes, and a pause ensued, during which the Officer confessed to me that he felt very uncomfortable. The end of it was that his visitor said, with a laugh, that 'he would not like to cumber the Salvation Army with his corpse,' and walked out of the room. The draught which he had ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... that sacred duty of hospitality which Allah enjoins upon the faithful. It is reported that he was host here to fifty of the enemy during their remaining lifetime—although they had the delicacy not to cumber him with overlong living. It is not, as I said, a pleasant place, but the walls are strong and so I selected a ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... under this seven years' weight of misery," replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path; neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dark thee cumber; What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light, Like tapers clear ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... sister!" he said. "Yes, it will be quite all right. I'll continue to cumber the ground a little longer, if you call that being sensible. And if you think my chances of heaven are likely to be improved by your kind intervention, p'r'aps you'll put up a prayer now and then on my behalf to the Power that casts ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... Fox, inspired by the Prince, had formally denied that any ceremony had taken place, 'the knocker of her door,' to quote her own complacent phrase, 'was never still.' The Duchesses of Portland, Devonshire and Cumber-land were among her visitors. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... "Joe Cumber." He grew still more ill at ease. "I hear that even if you hit the mark you got to talk to the ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... Augustus—the beach is a-spray; Blithesome the bee and the hive full alway; Better work than the bow hath the sickle to-day; Fuller the stack than the House of the Play; The Churl who cares neither to work nor to pray Now why should he cumber the earth with his clay? Justly St. Breda, the sapient, would say "As many to evil as good take ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... secure itself in thee, so that vehement blasts shall but contribute to its more fixed abode, and more fruitful actings in thee. Live up then to the gospel, and so be sure of it, and be safe in it. I mean, let Christ live in thee as thy all, and cast all thy care and cumber on him; lay all thy difficulties before him; lean all thy weight upon him; draw all thy necessities out of him: and undertake all thy duties in him; be strong in him, and in the power of his might; let him be thy counsellor, conductor, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... her and her child. Indians would not live either on the village side of The Stone or in the valley beyond. They had a legend that, some day, one, whom they called The Man Who Sleeps, would rise from his hidden couch in the mountains, and, being angry that any dared to cumber his playground, would hurl The Stone upon them that dwelt at Purple Hill. But white men pay little heed to Indian legends. At one time or another every person who had come to the village visited The Stone. Colossal as it was, the real base on which its weight rested was actually very ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Gods forgotten,—or is it that subtler mirth The Gods extort of a certain sort of folk that cumber the earth? ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... manured, so must the highest-flying wit have a Dadalus to guide him. That Dadalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings, to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise indeed we do, but that, very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known: and so is our brain delivered of much matter, which never was begotten by knowledge. For, there being two principal parts, matter to be expressed by words, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... long convalescence to lie, And from the low window, gaze out at the sky, And float, as the zephyrs so tranquilly do, Aloft in the depths of ineffable blue:— In painless, delicious half consciousness brood,— No duties to cumber, no claims to intrude,— Receptive as childhood, from trouble as free, And feel it is bliss enough ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... consent of the bishop of the city; and further, that also the monks of every district and city shall be subject to the bishop, that they shall love peace and quiet and observe the fasts and prayers in the places where they are assigned continually; that they shall not cumber themselves with ecclesiastical and secular business and shall not take part in such; they shall not leave their cloisters except when in cases of necessity they may be commissioned by the bishop of the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
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