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More "Ploughman" Quotes from Famous Books



... and his saw, and he made a plough. When the plough was made he put a hole in the beam of it, and he said to the lion to go in under the plough till he'd see was he any good of a ploughman. He placed the lion's tail in the hole he had made for it, and then clapped in a peg, and the lion was not able to draw ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... not think that I look with a jaundiced eye upon my remembrances of that most unhappy time, but, as I remember, to have had an education a little better than that of the average ploughman, and to show an inclination to be smart and quick at duty, was a certain passport to the hostility of the non-commissioned officers of the time. They regarded themselves, as I am now inclined to fancy, as a sort of close ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,—kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman, whose songs have done more to humanize the hard theology of Scotland than all the rationalistic sermons that were ever preached. Our own Whittier has done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit than Burns, for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... left now. I hardly recognized the farm any more. All these new people had made themselves quite at home there, and I seemed to myself to be a new-comer. The serving-woman looked at me with distrust, and the ploughman avoided talking to me. The servant's name was Adele. All day long you could hear her grumbling and dragging her wooden shoes after her as she walked. She made a noise even when she was walking on straw. ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux

... thick-driving snow. A little while And night shall darken down. In shouting file The woodmen's carts go by me homeward-wheeled, Past the thin fading stubbles, half concealed, Now golden-grey, sowed softly through with snow, Where the last ploughman follows still his row, Turning black furrows ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman

... feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King? Perhaps this is he,—the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in view,—a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little store. A ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill. Sometime walking, not unseen, By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great sun begins his state, Rob'd in flames, and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight; While the ploughman, near at hand, Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, And the milkmaid singeth blithe, And the mower whets his scythe, And every shepherd tells his tale, Under the hawthorn in the dale. Straight mine eye hath ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... men report Lean, dusk, a gipsy: I alone nut-brown. Violets and pencilled hyacinths are swart, Yet first of flowers they're chosen for a crown. As goats pursue the clover, wolves the goat, And cranes the ploughman, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes already published are: Increase Mather's "Remarkable Providences"; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the "Visions" of Piers Ploughman; the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the "Hymns and Songs" and the "Hallelujah" of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden's "Table-talk"; the "Enchiridion" of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... the just conclusion, that if ever a country deserved to be called 'musical,' that country was England, in the 16th and 17th centuries. King and courtier, peasant and ploughman, each could 'take his part,' with each music was a part of his daily life; while so far from being above knowing the difference between a minim and a crotchet, a gentleman would have been ashamed not ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor

... yourself that the supplementing of the law by the common sense of the Privy Council would settle the whole difficulty. But no man knows what he means by common sense, though every man can tell you that it is very uncommon, even in Privy Councils. And since every ploughman is a man of the world, it is evident that even the phrase itself does not mean what it says. As a matter of fact, it means in ordinary use simply a man who will not make himself disagreeable for the ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw

... Collector; Mister Bill 'Iggins, Publican; Mister Walter Weed, Clerk; Mister Jeremiah Ramsmouth, Local Preacher; Mr. 'Ookey Snagg, Loafer; Mister William Guppy, Potman—place them beside Hybrias, Goat-herd; Damon, Shepherd; Phydias, Writer; Nicarchus, Ploughman; Balbus, Bricklayer; Glaucus, Potter; Caius, Carter; Marcus, Weaver; Aeneas, Bronze-worker; Antonius, Corn-seller; Canidius, Charioteer—and then talk of the glorious modern times of high civilization and the dark ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... more intangibly detained upon canvas so poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of evening on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the homeward ploughman—'" ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... when from the field some delver or ploughman goes gladly home to his hut, longing for his evening meal, and there on the threshold, all squalid with dust, bows his wearied knees, and, beholding his hands worn with toil, with many a curse reviles his belly; at that ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... not forget to wash my hands and feet, and plaster up my lacerated flesh; and as soon as she had made me comfortable I retired to rest. I rose refreshed, and returned the next day with renovated vigour to my task. To be brief, I soon because a good ploughman. My father daily witnessed with considerable anxiety my zealous and persevering exertions; and as I proceeded, he encouraged me by the most animating hopes of future prospects; he informed me that he had remarked with no small pleasure my determination ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... Fable: as I smoked a pipe And havered with a black-haired cowman, Grey-eyed, in that fine Celtic type, As much the poet as the ploughman— "Seems kind of lucky here," said I; "The very ducklings look more downy Than others do." He grinned: "An' why? May happen, Sir, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various

... the hide along its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... corn am I, Kara! Kara![5] Yoked with the kine we gayly fly, Kara! Kara! The ploughman's hand is strong and drives The glowing soil, the meadow thrives! Before the oxen ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... full opinion of them, for their choise in our seede. You shall know then that when you goe into the market to chuse Barly for your seede, you shall to your best power elect that which is whitest, fullest, and roundest, being as the ploughman calles it, a full bunting Corne, like the nebbe or beake of a Bunting, you shall obserue that it be all of one Corne, and not mingled, that is, clay Barly, and sand Barly together, which you shall distinguish by these differences: the clay Barly is of a palish, white, yellow colour; smoth, full, ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham

... of however mixed ingredients their ranks might have been composed, and however imbued with the spirit of feudal and aristocratic ideas, the discipline of the wilderness soon brought them to a democratic level; the gentleman felled the wood for his log-cabin side by side with the ploughman, and thews and sinews rose in the market. "A man was deemed honorable in proportion as he lifted his hand upon the high trees of the forest." So in the interior domestic circle. Mistress and maid, living in a log-cabin together, became companions, and sometimes the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... not make any one lose patience," said Mowbray, "to hear her quoting the rhapsodies of a hobnail'd peasant, when a man is speaking of the downfall of an ancient house! Your ploughman, I suppose, becoming one degree poorer than he was born to be, would only go without his dinner, or without his usual potation of ale. His comrades would cry 'poor fellow!' and let him eat out of their kit, and drink out of their bicker ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... The ploughman ploughs, the sower sows. The reaper reaps the ear; The woodman to the forest goes Before the day grows clear, But of our toil no fruit we see; The harvest's not for you and me: A robber band has seized the land, And we are ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... The roadside trees still dripped with dew, And hung their blossoms like a show. Who heard the cry? 'Twas but a few, A ragged herd-boy, here and there, With his long stick and naked feet; A ploughman wending to his care, The field from which he hopes the wheat; An early traveller, hurrying fast To the next town; an urchin slow Bound for the school; these heard and passed, Unheeding ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... and uncouth, to the loves, the hopes, and the fears of his own bosom. Had a summer sun risen on a winter morning, it could not have surprised the Lowlands of Scotland more than this Kilmarnock volume surprised and delighted the people, one and all. The milkmaid sang his songs, the ploughman repeated his poems; the old quoted both, and ever the devout rejoiced that idle verse had at last mixed a tone of morality with its mirth. The volume penetrated even into Nithsdale. "Keep it out of the way of your children," said ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... rags for jewels and silks. He is no longer the recluse of the lonely cliffs, chatting with the animals and gazing at the stars. He is a man of the world, with schemes of conquest filling his brain and a love of dominion ruling his heart. He is no longer a ditch-digger and a ploughman, but the proud master of councils or the cultured professor of the university. He still swears to the three vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience, but they do not mean the same thing to him that they did to the more ignorant, less ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... suck'd vp from the sea Contagious fogges: Which falling in the Land, Hath euerie petty Riuer made so proud, That they haue ouer-borne their Continents. The Oxe hath therefore stretch'd his yoake in vaine, The Ploughman lost his sweat, and the greene Corne Hath rotted, ere his youth attain'd a beard: The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And Crowes are fatted with the murrion flocke, The nine mens Morris is fild vp with mud, And the queint Mazes in the wanton greene, For lacke of tread ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... ploughman plods his homeward way, The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way, His homeward way the weary ploughman plods, His homeward way the ploughman weary plods, The weary ploughman homeward plods his way, The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way, His way, the weary ploughman ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various

... lies bare Between the hills and the sea: Come, ploughman Life, with thy sharp ploughshare, And plough ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... were they permitted to return to earth, would find it hard to recognise the scene of their brief existence. But there are things and powers which gold cannot purchase. That worn-out old millionnaire would give tons of it for a mere tithe of the health that yonder ploughman enjoys. Youth cannot be bought with gold. Time cannot be purchased with gold. The prompt obedience of thousands of men and women may be bought with that precious metal, but one powerful throb of a loving heart could not be procured by all the yellow gold ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne

... the Babylonians broke up their land with the plough; to draw which they seem to have employed two oxen, placed one before the other, in the mode still common in many parts of England. The plough had two handles, which the ploughman guided with his two hands. It was apparently of somewhat slight construction. The tail rose from the lower part of one of the handles, and was of unusual length. [PLATE XXIV., ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson

... certain negative signs, that one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or a child and an old woman looked from a doorway; but many of the fields were fallow and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts driven by peasants, a ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... more than an obliquely placed mattock, whose handle was lengthened in order to harness oxen to it. Whilst the ploughman pressed heavily on the handle, two attendants kept incessantly goading the beasts, or urging them forward with voice and whip, and a third scattered the seed in the furrow. A considerable capital was needed to ensure ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... rushing steeds, until the camp Was reached by foremost line Of the brigade of fearless men, Who rode through wood, and brake, and fen, As speeds the red deer to his glen. No gorgeous suit of war array, No uniform of red or gray In that rude band were seen; The ploughman's dress, but coarse and plain, And marred by toil with many a stain, Betrayed no gilded sheen; Their only badge the white cockade, No dagger's point or glittering blade Was worn with martial pride, But ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... letters in such handwritings, such grammar, and such orthography, that they burned them without replying. A common sort of case was that of the young farmer whose widowed mother had set her heart on marriage with 'a bonny labouring boy,' a ploughman. ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like, the attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... Edric's actions, dropped one by one into lazy silence, or set their tongues to whistling cleverly turned answers to the bird-calls in the hedges. Another mile, and from somewhere in the fields came the swinging chant of a ploughman, as he turned the soil between the rows of ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... the autumn advanced, and the rooks followed the ploughman. Dolly gradually recovered something of her physical buoyancy; her former light-heartedness never returned. Sometimes an incident would cause a flash of the old gaiety, only for her to sink back into subdued quietness. The change was most noticeable ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... Randal Leslie, and my business was to visit your master's family—that is, if you are, as I guess from your manner, Mr. Hazeldean's ploughman!" ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... Though Langland had a keen eye to those miseries of the poor which are always with us, the impression of the time gathered from his writings is not so much one of material suffering, as of social unrest and discontent. The poor ploughman, who cannot get meat, still has his cheese, curds, and cream, his loaf of beans and bran, his leeks and cabbage, his cow, calf, and cart mare.[1] The very beggar demanded "bread of clean wheat" and "beer of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... speculative as to whether he would return before dark. However, a recommencement of drizzling rain apparently cooled his ardour, and restored him to the party. The nomads gladly turned their thoughts and coaches towards the section house, realising as they went the sweet truth of the words, "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way." Lunch awaited them, and the fish of the morning appeared in a more pleasant guise, to be enjoyed by all. After lunch, the rain showing no signs of clearing off, the party had to give up ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... sought Sole on the church's northern slope. As when, Some father, absent long, returns at last, His children rush loud-voiced from field to house, And cling about his knees; and they that mark— Old reaper, bent no more, with hook in hand, Or ploughman, leaning 'gainst the old blind horse— Beholding wonder not; so to that grave Rushed they; so clung. Around that grave ere long Their own were ranged. That plague which smote the sire Spared not his sons. With ministering ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... of much greater antiquity. It appears in the Chronicle of Battel Abbey, p. 27 (Lower's translation), and in The Vision of Piers Ploughman, line ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... immediately makes his purchase, settles, and begins his operations. Here his eyes are soon opened. He must send to England for all his implements; and even then his French labourers neither can or will learn the use of them. An English ploughman becomes necessary; the English ploughman accordingly comes, but shortly becomes miserable amongst French habits ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney

... vitally connected with the spiritual constitution. Edwards' contemporaries, such as Lardner or Sherlock, thought that to be a Christian was to accept certain results of antiquarian research. With a curious naivete they sometimes say that a ploughman or a cobbler could summarily answer the problems which have puzzled generations of critics. Edwards sees the absurdity of hoping that a genuine faith can ever be based on such balancing of historical probabilities. The cobbler was to be awed by the learned man; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... delight, running round him, then forward a yard or two, then back to him and gambolling beside him as they went round the garden. But in spite of her joy she was full of fear. At every noise, a cow lowing, a cock crowing, or a ploughman in the distance hulloaing to scare the rooks, she started, her ears pricked to catch the sound, her muzzle wrinkled up and her nose twitched, and she would then press herself against his legs. They walked ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett

... which occupies the western side of the pedestal, peasants are resting from the labour of the plough; a yoked ox shows the nature of their employment; a ploughman takes a refreshing draught, from his wooden bottle, while a youth blows a horn to call his fellow labourers to an humble repast, which a female is busily ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various

... a source of the sublime, peculiarly suited to children; accuracy of observation and distinctness of perception, are essential to this species of the sublime. In Percy's collection of ancient ballads, and in the modern poems of the Ayreshire ploughman, we may see many instances of the effect of simplicity. To preserve our pupil's taste from a false love of ornament, he must avoid, either in books or in conversation, all verbose and turgid descriptions, the use of words and epithets ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... and Piety, (that banished train!) Justice and Truth, with you return again. 110 The city's trade, and country's easy life, Once more shall flourish without fraud or strife. Your reign no less assures the ploughman's peace, Than the warm sun advances his increase; And does the shepherds as securely keep From all their fears, as ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... neighbors were humble, hard working people, but they taught me "the great art of cheerful poverty." I was early cured of several follies by standing under the shadow of rustic wise men. I drove their oxen to the plow, and often fell behind alongside the ploughman and picked up the scattered seeds of old, traditional wisdom in his furrows. With these the sagacious urchin sometimes astonished his little mother. Visitors, a cloudy day, a gentle rain did not prevent Uncle Lyman ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... general. We see it reflected in a remarkable poem of the time, "The Vision of Piers Ploughman," in which the unfortunate position of the peasant is vividly portrayed.[185] This is only the most notable example of a great number of pamphlets, some in prose and some in bad verse, which were calculated to make the people more discontented ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... without any intervention, and lures and draws the absent one so that he cannot rest until he returns. But why attribute this spell to Paris alone? Every place where we have been young, dreamed, loved, and suffered, possesses it. We feel the affection for it which the ploughman has for the field to which he entrusted his seed. We have the desire to see whether we shall still find traces of our wanderings, and are joyously surprised when we discover that wherever we sowed our youth, the best part of ourselves, invisible to others, but tangible to us, a rich harvest of ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau

... beneath their burdens, this enlarging prosperity must be maintained; and on the steamships, and the telegraph lines, which interweave us with all the world. The swart miner must do his part for it; the ingenious workman, in whatever department; the ploughman in the field, and the fisherman on the banks; the man of science, putting Nature to the question; the laborer, with no other capital than his muscle; the sailor on the sea, wherever ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... not seem at all impressed by the fervent interrogation nor by this picture of prospective delights: "Many of your countrymen have seen the wonders of the Indian Empire and enjoyed the soft calm of Malta, and of Ceylon, the Paradise of the Ancients." It does not evince much knowledge of a ploughman's mind to seek to awaken his martial ardour by old myths about the Garden of Eden; nor is it specially alluring to him to mention, as the acme of glory, that he may distinguish himself so much as to gain "thanks from both Houses of Parliament." Such ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... th' infected air "Contagion suck'd; millions of vipers swarm'd "In our uncultur'd fields, our running streams "Tainting with poison. First the sudden plague "Its power display'd, on sheep, on dogs, on fowls, "Cattle, and forest beasts with deadly power. "The hapless ploughman, wondering, at his work "Sees his strong oxen in the furrow sink. "The woolly flocks with sickly bleatings waste "In body, while their wool spontaneous falls. "The steed so fiery, on the dusty plain "So fam'd, the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... was a remarkable man even by what was known of him; and that was but a small part of what he actually did. Although of a placid temper in ordinary circumstances, and accustomed to take the world with as much philosophy as any ploughman, the Prince of Bohemia was not without a taste for ways of life more adventurous and eccentric than that to which he was destined by his birth. Now and then, when he fell into a low humour, when there was no laughable play to witness in any of the London theatres, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... from all kinds of people, and now he marked with human sympathy each little homestead with its belt of firs against the winter's storms, and its stackyard where the corn had been gathered safe; the ploughman and his horses cutting brown ribbons in the bare stubble; dark squares where the potato stalks have withered to the ground, and women are raising the roots, and here and there a few cattle still out in the fields. His eye fell on the great wood through which he had rambled in August, now one blaze ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... plods his homeward way, The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way, His homeward way the weary ploughman plods, His homeward way the ploughman weary plods, The weary ploughman homeward plods his way, The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way, His way, the weary ploughman homeward plods, His ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various

... tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herds Mind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way And leaves the world to ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... knowledge; and, but a comparatively small part of useful knowledge comes from books. Men are not to be called ignorant merely because they cannot make upon paper certain marks with a pen, or because they do not know the meaning of such marks when made by others. A ploughman may be very learned in his line, though he does not know what the letters p. l. o. u. g. h mean when he sees them combined upon paper. The first thing to be required of a man is, that he understand well his own calling, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... The ploughman inly smiles to see upturn His mellow globe, best pledge of future crop: With glee the gardener eyes his smoking beds; E'en pining sickness feels ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... to the calamity, or our national credit must be destroyed, by showing the public creditors the inability of the nation to repay them their principal money.—Bounties had already been given for recruits which exceeded the year's wages of the ploughman and reaper; and as these were exhausted, and husbandry stood still for want of hands, the manufacturers were next to be tempted to quit the anvil and the loom by higher offers.—France, bankrupt France, had no such calamities impending over ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... have occasionally beheld a ploughman, bricklayer, gardener, weaver, or blacksmith, begin his work in the morning, I have envied him the readiness and willingness with which he took to it. The plough-man, after he has got his horses ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... didst outswim the flood; Tortoise! whereon earth hath stood; Boar! who with thy tush held'st high The world, that mortals might not die; Lion! who hast giants torn; Dwarf! who laugh'dst a king to scorn; Sole Subduer of the Dreaded! Slayer of the many-headed! Mighty Ploughman! Teacher tender! Of thine own the sure Defender! Under all thy ten disguises Endless praise ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold

... Peter wears a huge greatcoat threadbare and patched itself, yet carefully so disposed and secured by what buttons remain, and many supplementary pins, as to conceal the still more infirm state of his under garments. The shoes and stockings of a ploughman were, however, seen to meet at his knees with a pair of brownish, blackish breeches; a rusty-coloured handkerchief, that has been black in its day, surrounded his throat, and was an apology for linen. His hair, half grey, half black, escaped in elf-locks around a huge wig, made of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... public regeneration. "The French people," says Robespierre, "seems to have outstripped the rest of humanity, by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species. In the rest of Europe, a ploughman, an artisan, is an animal formed for the pleasures of a noble; in France, the nobles are trying to transform themselves into ploughmen and artisans, but do not succeed in obtaining that honor."[21111] Life in all directions is gradually assuming democratic forms Wealthy ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... Marston, more tired than any ploughman or watchman, or any other son of labour from this to John O'Groat's House. I was sent for, from the House, six hours ago, and every hour since have I been poring over those puzzled papers. How long I can stand this wear and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... whichever way you turned, that ledger in the road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the future would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly recall ancient ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... seaman's star, The ploughman from the sun his season takes; But still the lover wonders what they are, Who look for day before his mistress wakes. Awake, awake! break thro' your veils of lawn! Then draw your curtains, and ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various

... be planted and nails can be hammered, bill-hooks can be wielded and faggots chopped, no matter what the inward care. The ploughman is deeply in debt, poor fellow, but he can, and does, follow the plough, and finds, perhaps, some solace in the dull monotony of his labour. Clods cannot feel. A sensitive mind and vivid imagination—a delicately-balanced organization, that almost lives on its ideas as ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... work as he deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground? No,—but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... the period of my infatuation for Psyche, there were complaints from every province of the universe. It was said that unless my attention could be in a measure diverted from that admirable girl, there would be something like a stagnation of general vitality. Phoebus remarked one day, that if the ploughman became the plough the cessation of harvests ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... lumber, furs, and salted fish were beginning to be sent to England in exchange for manufactured articles; 4000 goats and 1500 head of cattle grazed in the pastures, and swine innumerable rooted in the clearings and helped to make ready the land for the ploughman. Political meetings were held, justice was administered by magistrates after old English precedents, and church services were performed by a score of clergymen, nearly all graduates of Cambridge, though one or two had their degrees from Oxford, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... looks at our little diversion in the benevolent spirit of the giant whose daughter brought home ploughman, oxen, and all in her apron for playthings," said Viola, who with Eustace had found her way to us, but we were all divided again, Viola being carried off by some grandee, Eustace having to search for some noble damsel to whom he had been introduced, ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... by Science than an excellence of art: in the other sense, we think some to be Scientific in a general way, not in any particular line or in any particular thing, just as Homer says of a man in his Margites; "Him the Gods made neither a digger of the ground, nor ploughman, nor in any ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... be gaping and marvelling and rushing about, and what then? In a week or two the ploughman would settle down to his plough, the carpenter to his bench, the smith to his anvil, the merchant to his money, and the dead come to life would be utterly forgotten. No matter in what manner the possibilities of human life are put before the world, the crowd ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... and he was always careful to set his hat, his riding-whip and his gloves and cape behind the door. Then, bareheaded, he took his place on the right hand of his host at the long oaken table, to which in due order came son, daughter, house-maiden, out-lass, ploughman and herd. The only difference was that when it came to the blessing upon the food to be partaken of, Adam the Laird stood up, while the others sat still with bowed heads. Why this was, no one knew, not even Adam or Diarmid. But so it had been in the time of their fathers, and so it would continue ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... rose, through all this garden-land, May shed its rich perfume, But I would rather wander 'mong My country's bonnie broom. There sings the shepherd on the hill, The ploughman on the lea; There lives my blithesome mountain maid, O Scotland's hills ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... many a toil-worn weaver at life's heavy loom. To lay aside the world's distressing cares at sunset, to wipe his moistened brow, and "homeward plod his weary way" to his cabin small and lowly, where glows this cheerful love in one dear breast, in one sweet face, is to the uncouth "ploughman" a joy, a comfort, which many a prince ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... the Old World,—that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding new-comer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... was the experience of Archie's father. At the best, it had been only with thrift ends could be got to meet, but as he aged it was a struggle. The children had to help. Archie hired with a farmer and in time rose to be ploughman; Mirren after learning to be a dressmaker, found to be in service was preferable. What they could spare of their earnings it was their pride to give in order to keep a home for their parents. While still a boy Archie had shaped in ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar

... you a prime character as a drover or a ploughman or a carter or a dairyman or a housemaid or a curate or anything you like except a looker. Why should I give you eighteen shillun a week as my looker—twenty shillun, as I've made it now—when my best wether could ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... the gravestone of Burns,—the very same that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before this monument was built. Displayed against the surrounding wall is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, with the Genius of Caledonia summoning the ploughman to turn poet. Methought it was not a very successful piece of work; for the plough was better sculptured than the man, and the man, though heavy and cloddish, was more effective than the goddess. Our guide informed us that an old man ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... whose favored ear In golden days to come shall hear The ploughman, as he tills the ground, The tarter, as he drives his round, The shopman, as his task he plies, With psalms or sacred melodies Whiling the hours of toil away! O, happy he who hears the lay Of shepherd and of shepherdess, As ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings. The ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... flight of his countrymen in the battle of Luncarty and won the victory over the Danes by the help of the yoke of his oxen—exhausted with the fray uttered the exclamation "Hoch heigh!" The grateful king about to ennoble the victorious ploughman at once replied: ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy; nevertheless, as good ploughing was exacted from me as if I were a man, and very soon I had to become a good ploughman, or rather ploughboy. None could draw a straighter furrow. For the first few years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... may cast himself at length under the first tree that invites him, and repose there as safely as if he were in a palace. Fearless of damps, and unmolested by noxious insects, his sleep is as sound as it is refreshing, and he rises with renewed spirits to pursue his journey. Equally so may the ploughman or the labourer seek repose beside his team, and allow them to graze quietly around him. The delicious coolness of the morning and the mild temperature of the evening air, in that luxurious climate, are beyond the power of description. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... the earth To the god's pregnant footing thrilled within. Or whiles, beside the sobbing stream, he breathed, In his clutched pipe unformed and wizard strains Divine yet brutal; which the forest heard, And thou, with awe; and far upon the plain The unthinking ploughman ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson

... protection." Here the effect naturally to be expected from the clashing of inconsistent revenues appeared in its full light, as well as the state of the unfortunate peasants of Bengal between such rival protectors, where the ploughman, flying from the tax-gatherer, is obliged to take refuge under the wings of the monopolist. No dispute arises amongst the English subjects which does not divulge the misery of the natives; when the former are in harmony, all is well ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... tea, coffee, and chocolate. I was instantly obliged to provide cold fowl, ham, oysters, white wine, &c. I marvel not at the strength and vigour of these French belles. In appetite, they would cope with an English ploughman, who had just turned up an acre of wholesome land on ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... break, grind, and digest it. And, indeed, if day-laborers, and handicraftsmen were allowed the high, strong food of men of condition, and the quiet and much-thinking persons were confined to the farmer and ploughman's food, it would be much ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... him more than he can use so he will not ask for more, and will not take it: it is true that his work may be more special than another's, but it is not more necessary if you have organized labour properly; the ploughman and the fisherman are as necessary to society as the scientist or the artist, I will not say more necessary: neither is the difficulty of producing the more special and excellent work at all proportionate to its speciality or excellence: the higher workman produces his work as easily ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... aw despise;— False pride an wild ambition; Tho' ivvery man should strive to rise, An better his condition. Aw hate a meean an grovlin soul, I' breast ov peer or ploughman, But what aw hate the mooast ov all, Is th' chap 'at ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley

... devolve upon us and the innumerable demands increasing with the accumulation of means and workers call for a new kind of service in leadership. Political necessity has supplanted the reform epoch; the reapers of the harvest have replaced the ploughman and seed sower, each equally needed in the process of the cultivation and the development of an ideal as in the harvest of the land. When this movement began its pioneers were reformers, people who saw a vision and dreamed dreams of the time when all mankind should be free ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... robb'd by turns, the dreamer sees:— Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests, Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease 'Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries; Times out of joint, a universe of lies, Till Love divine appear in Ploughman's guise ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... what?" echoed the King with rising voice. "For this; that the ploughman on the plain may reap what he has sown; that the shepherd on the hillside may enjoy the increase which comes to his flock; that taxation may be light; that my nobles shall deal honestly with the people, and not use their position ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr

... formation, which the old ice sheet had broken and shouldered and transported about. About every five or six acres had loose stones and rock enough to put a rock-bottomed wall around it and still leave enough in and on the soil to worry the ploughman and the mower. All the farms in that section reposing in the valleys and bending up and over the broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone walls, and the right- angled fields, in their many colours of green and brown and yellow and red, give ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... idea by the present generation, of the folly in such respects, of these early ages. But these follies were not confined to the laiety. Affectation of parade, and gaudy cloathing, were admitted among many of the clergy, who incurred the severest invectives of the poets on that account. The ploughman, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is full upon this point. He gives us the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... tremors and gave him the appearance of being asleep. Early next morning, with his terror still on him, he told what he had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the dreadful secret, they related it to someone—a carter or ploughman on the farm. He in turn told the farmer, who at once gave information, and in a short time the man and woman were arrested. In due time they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the crime ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... horses, bullocks, or heifers. Bullocks and heifers are, however, more commonly used than horses, though it is no unusual sight to see a horse and a heifer yoked together. There is no boy to drive; but the ploughman, as in Scotland, at once holds the stilts of the plough, and with his voice, and a long halter, guides the cattle. With respect to the harrows, I saw little difference between them and our English implements, except that those in Germany are lighter, and never have more than one horse or one bullock ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... come, and to the siege of Aberdeen marched a hungry half-dozen—three of them from Thrums, two from the Glenuharity school. The sixth was Tod Lindertis, a ploughman from the Dubb of Prosen, his place of study the bothy after lousing time (Do you hear the klink of quoits?) or a one-roomed house near it, his tutor a dogged little woman, who knew not the accusative from the dative, but never tired of holding the book while ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... rude vplandisshe ploughman, on a tyme[185] reprouynge a good holy father sayd, that he coude saye all his prayers with a hole mynde and stedfaste intention, without thinkyng on any other thynge. To whome the good holy man sayde: Go to, saye one ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown

... trouble was not in vain; it seemed to invite all those who waited and were anxious to trust their care to Him and seek repose. It was all this, and much more, to many people: and yet, when it spread in another direction over the fields, it meant nothing to the yawning ploughman, either musical or poetical, had no significance whatever for him if it were not of the time of day, gathered, however, with the help of sundry other sensations of which hunger and fatigue were chief. It probably conveyed as much, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... I ran and opened the door; and wha think ye I saw but Jean Graham, Mr. Napier's cook, with een like twa candles, and her mouth as wide as if she had been to swallow the biggest sup of porridge that ever crossed ploughman's craig?" ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... find a desolation pregnant with the dire lesson of example? The fields had been left uncultivated, weeds and gaudy flowers sprung up,—or where a few wheat-fields shewed signs of the living hopes of the husbandman, the work had been left halfway, the ploughman had died beside the plough; the horses had deserted the furrow, and no seedsman had approached the dead; the cattle unattended wandered over the fields and through the lanes; the tame inhabitants of the poultry yard, baulked of their ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... Ossian, for any thing that I have heard, could neither write nor read.' The author is indeed a striking example of native genius bursting through the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life. He is said to be a common ploughman; and when we consider him in this light, we cannot help regretting that wayward fate had not placed him in a more favoured situation. Those who view him with the severity of lettered criticism, and judge him by the fastidious rules of art, will discover that he has not the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... again, that prudence and foresight are the gifts of God; and God's gifts are surely meant to be used. Isaiah, too, tells us that the common work of the farm, tilling the ground, sowing, and reaping, were taught to men by God; and says of the ploughman, that 'His God doth instruct him to discretion and doth teach him.' Neither can God mean us to sit idle with folded hands waiting to be fed by miracles. Would He have given to man reason, and skill, and the power of bettering his mortal condition by ten thousand ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley

... character as a drover or a ploughman or a carter or a dairyman or a housemaid or a curate or anything you like except a looker. Why should I give you eighteen shillun a week as my looker—twenty shillun, as I've made it now—when my best ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... now the cock, the ploughman's horn, Calls forth the lily-wristed morn, Then to thy cornfields thou dost go, Which, though well-soil'd, yet thou dost know That the best compost for the lands Is the wise master's feet and ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... the notes from Ploughman?" asked Mr. Clamp. "He is perfectly good; and he will pay the interest till we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... touch of Zephyr and of Spring has loosen'd Winter's thrall; The well-dried keels are wheel'd again to sea: The ploughman cares not for his fire, nor cattle for their stall, And frost no more is whitening all the lea. Now Cytherea leads the dance, the bright moon overhead; The Graces and the Nymphs, together knit, With rhythmic feet the meadow ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... Literally the ploughers.) which get under the skin. We could distinguish with a lens nothing but streaks, or parallel and whitish furrows. It is the form of these furrows, that has obtained for the insect the name of ploughman. A mulatto woman was sent for, who professed to be thoroughly acquainted with all the little insects that burrow in the human skin; the chego, the nuche, the coya, and the arador; she was the curandera, or surgeon of the place. She promised to extirpate, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... to the West with the intention of working hard and using his hands as well as his brains; he had not been squeamish; he had, in fact, laboured like a ploughman; and to be obliged to give in had been galling and bitter. There are human beings into whose consciousness of themselves the possibility of being beaten does not enter. This man was one ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... existence in a state of nature, because the very first step towards such inferior forms would have led to the rapid extinction of the race; still less could they now exist in competition with their wild allies. The great speed but slight endurance of the race horse, the unwieldy strength of the ploughman's team, would both be useless in a state of nature. If turned wild on the pampas, such animals would probably soon become extinct, or under favourable circumstances might each lose those extreme qualities which would ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various

... I'm the monkey that has seen the world, and I'm going to tell you all about it. First, there's a gentleman who takes a rifle for a fowling-piece. Next, there's a farmer who warns everybody, gentleman and beggar, off his premises. Next, there's a tinker and a ploughman, who think that God is always fighting with the devil which shall command the kingdoms of the earth. The tinker's for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft, white sleep ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... plate, and he was always careful to set his hat, his riding-whip and his gloves and cape behind the door. Then, bareheaded, he took his place on the right hand of his host at the long oaken table, to which in due order came son, daughter, house-maiden, out-lass, ploughman and herd. The only difference was that when it came to the blessing upon the food to be partaken of, Adam the Laird stood up, while the others sat still with bowed heads. Why this was, no one knew, not even Adam or Diarmid. But so it had been in the time of their fathers, and ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... degrees of frost by day were what Thrums began to accept as a revised order of nature. Vainly the Thrums doctor, whose practice extends into the glens, made repeated attempts to reach his distant patients, twice driving so far into the dreary waste that he could neither go on nor turn back. A ploughman who contrived to gallop ten miles for him did not get home for a week. Between the town, which is nowadays an agricultural centre of some importance, and the outlying farms communication was cut off for a month; and I heard subsequently of one farmer who did not see a human being, unconnected ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... cleared the feathery tops Of the fir-thicket on the eastward hill, His horses leaned and laboured. His great hands Held both the reins and plough-stilts: he was proud; Proud with a ploughman's pride; nobler, may be, Than statesman's, ay, or poet's pride sometimes, For little praise would come that he ploughed well, And yet he did it well; proud of his work, And not of what would follow. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... amid the fields of Ayr A ploughman, who, in foul and fair, Sings at his task So clear, we know not if it is The laverock's song we hear, or his, Nor ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings. The writings of Sterne, particularly, form the best ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... loved the Muses, and would pay Due honours even to the ploughman's lay; Would cheer the feebler bard, and with the strong Soar to the noblest energies of song; Catch the rib-shaking laugh, or from his eye Dash silently the tear of sympathy. Happy old man!—with feelings such as these The seasons all ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield

... she said, "have come from the very lowest ranks of life. There was Burns, a ploughman; and Hugh Miller, a stonemason; and plenty of others. Dodsley was ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... can't. But I am quite ready to admit that there are all sorts of inconsistencies in me. Now, the other day I was reading Burns, and I couldn't describe what exaltation all at once possessed me in the thought that a ploughman had so glorified a servant-girl that together they shine in the highest heaven, far above all the monarchs of earth. This came upon me with a rush—a very rare emotion. Wasn't ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... what stirs the heart of man is his religion, whether he calls it religion or not. That which makes the heart beat and the breath come quicker, love and hate, and joy and sorrow—that has been to me as worthy of record as his hopes of a future life. The thoughts that come into the mind of the ploughman while he leads his team afield in the golden glory of the dawn; the dreams that swell and move in the heart of the woman when she knows the great mystery of a new life; whither the dying man's hopes and fears are led—these ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... and branching off in every direction to the different elevations. The ground was so saturated in these terraces that ploughing was carried on by means of a large scraper, like a fender, which was dragged along by bullocks, the ploughman standing up in the machine as it floundered and wallowed about, and guiding it through ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... who could take any form he pleased, was travelling about as a poor beggar, and being very tired he stopped at the cottage of a Ploughman to rest himself, and asked for ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... beasts, Robbers and robb'd by turns, the dreamer sees:— Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests, Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease 'Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries; Times out of joint, a universe of lies, Till Love divine appear in Ploughman's guise ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... Burns,—the very same that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before this monument was built. Displayed against the surrounding wall is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, with the Genius of Caledonia summoning the ploughman to turn poet. Methought it was not a very successful piece of work; for the plough was better sculptured than the man, and the man, though heavy and cloddish, was more effective than the goddess. Our guide informed us that an old man of ninety, who knew Burns, certifies ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... away. Far off on the brown Ottawa, beyond the Cascades of Carillon and the Chute a Blondeau, the keen-eyed voyageur catches its gleam, and, for gladness to be nearing the familiar mountain, more cheerily raises the chanson he loves. Near St. Placide the early ploughman—while yet mist wreathes the fields and before the native Rossignol has fairly begun his plaintive flourishes—watches the high cross of Rigaud for the first glint that shall tell him of the yet unrisen sun. The wayfarer marks his progress by ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson

... "I had no idea I could seem clumsy! I feel like a great ploughman. I wish I were ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth

... we say. The humblest does his share. There's fear in that thought, but more of hope. Nothing perishes. The private, who falls, bravely fighting, does his part like the general. The ploughman's honest life gives its contribution to the Nation's greatness as the life of Webster does. All is telling in 'the long results of time,' helping to decide what style of manhood shall be fashioned in America ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... "Though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad-plodding son of daybook and ledger." Where are the letters which brought to the ploughman at Lochlie such a constant and copious stream of replies? The circumstances of his position will explain why they perished: he was then "a youth and all unknown to fame." It is even doubtful if the five hundred and forty published letters include all the letters ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... The Ploughman—of whom Chaucer remarked, "A worker true and very good was he, Living in perfect peace and charity"—protested that riddles were not for simple minds like his, but he would show the good pilgrims, if they willed it, ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... be devised by the ingenuity of man.[11] It has been supposed by some theorists, who are practically unacquainted with agriculture in this or any other country, that all who have any interest in land above the rank of cultivator or ploughman are mere drones, or useless consumers of that rent which, under judicious management, might be added to the revenues of Government—that all which they get might, and ought to be, either left with the cultivators or taken by the Government. At the head of these is the justly ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... become the yoke-fellow of the Egyptian crocodile; and a farm which, ploughed by such a pair, should extend from the upper cataract to the Pillars of Hercules, might have charms even for a philosopher. But while the ploughman is without a nymph, Arcadia is imperfect. What were Dionusos without his Ariadne, Ares without Aphrodite, Zeus without Hera? Even Artemis has her Endymion; Athens alone remains unwedded; but only because Hephaestus was too rough a wooer. Such is not he who now offers to the representative of Athene ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... his own—pride is surely the maddest state of mind that any of us can allow ourselves in. The first king of Bohemia kept his clouted old shoes ever in his sight, that he might never forget that he had once been a ploughman. And another wise king used to drink out of a coarse cup at table, and excused himself to his guests that he had made the rude thing in his rude potter days. Look with Primislaus and Agathocles at the hole of the pit out of which you also have been dug; look ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... another as if in utter ignorance. "Have I said anything wrong? I only meant that I was present at Mrs. Brand's first wedding—when she married your father, Mr. Wyvis—not your adopted father, of course, but John Wyvis, the ploughman." ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... issue, we need say but little. Suffice it to know, that Jane and her ploughman William had four children, three sons and one daughter; of whom William, the second son, married an honest man's daughter, whose name was Alice Gryse, and whose children were living in 1490, when ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various

... meaning by an example. A man—I do not say a geologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman—sees a small valley, say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in the Windsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... of Paris, a great theologian, who died in 1429. Be that as it may, I can assure your correspondent A. B. C. that the saying in question did not originate with the author of that work. In Piers Ploughman's Vision, written A.D. 1362, it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various

... slimness of his daughter's stockinged legs, and thought what a real little man his son seemed already, so sturdy on his pins. In his blue overalls he looked like a miniature ploughman in a smock-frock. Dale laughed when Billy scampered away resolutely, and Norah had to run ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... my part of the story. As I was coming home from the burial, I overtook Roger our ploughman. Said he, What think you of this burying?—'What should I think,' said I, 'but that we have lost the best Master and Lady that we shall ever know?' 'God, He knows,' quoth Roger, 'whether they be living or dead; but if ever I saw my Lady in my life, I saw her alive ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve

... than half a century ago the whole country—at least the whole educated country—was still Swedish at heart and Swedish in language. From Sweden Finland had borrowed its literature and its laws until Russia stepped in, when the Finn began to assert himself. The ploughman is now educated and raising his voice with no uncertain sound on behalf of his own country and his language, and to-day the greatest party in the Parliament are ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... sciences with critical exactness, pursue an extended course of inquiry into physical phenomena, note and digest the results of Italian, Spanish, English, French, German, Dutch, and American naturalists, ply every guide and ploughman, every driver and forester, every fisherman and miner, every lumberman and carpenter, for the results which men attain by observing within the narrow circle of their occupation,—and weave all into a copious work which subordinates all results ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... one is already in another world. On the cold February day when we turned out of Meaux and took the road to the Argonne, the change was chiefly shown by the curious absence of life in the villages through which we passed. Now and then a lonely ploughman and his team stood out against the sky, or a child and an old woman looked from a doorway; but many of the fields were fallow and most of the doorways empty. We passed a few carts driven by peasants, a stray wood-cutter in a copse, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... dawn, when they went about their respective avocations for a couple of hours before breakfast. As soon as the cows were milked, they and the heifers and calves were driven off to the pastures, while the ploughman yoked a span of ten oxen to the plough, and set out to break up some new land, and very hard work it was. Although the soil was tolerably rich, it was baked by the sun, and as hard as a rock, and in some places the whole strength of the oxen was required to draw the share through it. Two of ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston

... ballads, which may possibly be placed within these limits) no mention whatever is made of him in literature before the latter half of the reign of Edward the Third. "Rhymes of Robin Hood" are then spoken of by the author of "Piers Ploughman" (assigned to about 1362) as better known to idle fellows than pious songs, and from the manner of the allusion it is a just inference that such rhymes were at that time no novelties. The next notice is in Wyntown's Scottish Chronicle, written about 1420, where the following lines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads," especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of real life—the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... ancient days of faith the doors of the churches used to be opened with the first glimmer of the dawn in summer, and long before the moon had set in winter; and many a ditcher and woodcutter and ploughman on his way to work used to enter and say a short prayer before beginning the labour of the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton

... Tom Thumb as we know it today, opens with a visit of the magician Merlin at the cottage of an honest and hospitable ploughman. Merlin rewarded the Goodman and his Wife for their hospitality by calling on the Queen of the fairies, who brought to the home, Tom Thumb, a boy no bigger than ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... worthy Giroudeau, with a skull as polished as my knee, forty-eight years, a big stomach, a face like a ploughman, and a nose like a potato, can get a ballet-girl, I ought to be the lover of the first actress in Paris. Where does one find ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... more than he can use so he will not ask for more, and will not take it: it is true that his work may be more special than another's, but it is not more necessary if you have organized labour properly; the ploughman and the fisherman are as necessary to society as the scientist or the artist, I will not say more necessary: neither is the difficulty of producing the more special and excellent work at all proportionate ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in the road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the future would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly recall ancient tales ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... herself cross and stupefied, and quite enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor on a winter's morning, yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at sitting, like Honoria, beside the bed of the ploughman's consumptive daughter, in a reeking, stifling, lean-to garret, in which had slept the night before, the father, mother, and two grown-up boys, not to mention a new-married couple, the sick girl, and, alas! her baby. And of such bedchambers there ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... of the Croft, "man, dominie, since he converted Jock, my ploughman, he hasna been drunk yince, and I get twice the work oot o' the craitur ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... native land 'Tally-ho!' is shouted and welcomed in due season by all conditions of men; by the ploughman, holding hard his startled colt; by the woodman, leaning on his axe before the half-felled oak; by bird-boys from the tops of leafless trees; even Dolly Dumpling, as she sees the white-tipped brush flash before her market-cart in a deep-banked lane, stops, points ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey

... and women cooking meals, The mothering girl-child with her doll in arms, The ploughman trudging at his horse's heels, The fires we lay, our chill at war's alarms:— These epic, ancient gestures of the race Have still the greatness of those great who wrought In other days than ours, who keep their place Along our ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton

... beheld a ploughman, bricklayer, gardener, weaver, or blacksmith, begin his work in the morning, I have envied him the readiness and willingness with which he took to it. The plough-man, after he has got his horses harnessed to the plough, does not delay a minute: into the turf the shining share enters, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... mountains, whose grand rocky buttresses advanced from the haze almost to the river. Here, in the windings of the Forth, our steamer went many times backward and forward, first towards the mountains and then towards the level country to the south, in almost parallel courses, like the track of a ploughman in a field. At length we passed a ruined tower and some fragments of massy wall which once formed a part of Cambus Kenneth Abbey, seated on the rich lands of the Forth, for the monks, in Great Britain at least, seem always to have chosen for the site of their monasteries, the banks ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... along its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... Music unite in song. From the earliest ages song has been the sweet companion of labor. The rude chant of the boatman floats upon the water, the shepherd sings upon the hill, the milkmaid in the dairy, the ploughman at the plough. Every trade, every occupation, every act and scene of life, has long had its own especial music. The bride went to her marriage, the laborer to his work, the old man to his last long rest, each with ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... god, doth deface, Doth deface Lady Ceres' crown, And the tillage doth go to decay, To decay in every town; Landlords their rents so highly enhance, That Pierce, the ploughman, barefoot may dance; Well a day! Farmers that Christmas would still entertain, Scarce have wherewith themselves to ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... pieces of split sticks, like laths, with chalk-marks on them, all as unintelligible as the signs of the zodiac are to an old school-mistress that teaches the horn-book and primer, or as Arabic or Greek is to a ploughman. Every stick had notches on one side for single pounds, on the other side for tens of pounds, and so higher; and the length and breadth also had its signification, and the colour too; for they were painted in some places with one colour, and in some places with anther; ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... farmers still plough with them; and may it be long before the old custom is abandoned! There is no pleasanter or more peaceful sight than—looking up—that of a wide-horned team of black oxen, smoking a little in the morning air, drawing the plough through the earth, while the ploughman whistles, and the ox-herd, goad in hand, utters his Saxon grunts of incitement or reproof. The black oxen of the hills are of Welsh stock, the true Sussex ox being red. The "kews," as their shoes are called, may still be seen on the walls of a smithy here ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... the low fence between the garden and the cornfield, and started down one of the long rows leading directly away from the house. Old Needham was a good ploughman, and straight as an arrow ran the furrow between the rows of corn, until it vanished in the distant perspective. The peas were planted beside alternate hills of corn, the cornstalks serving as supports for ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... wait until my absence caused anxiety, when some one would surely come after me. Not a very alarming plight if one were well, but I felt one of my old cruel attacks was at hand, which was not encouraging. No one was within sight, but in case there should be a ploughman over a rise within hearing, I coo-eed long and well. My voice had been trained. I coo-eed three times, allowing an interval to elapse, and then settled into the bottom of the boat to await developments. Soon I was disturbed by the plunk! plunk! of a swimmer, and saw ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... huge greatcoat threadbare and patched itself, yet carefully so disposed and secured by what buttons remain, and many supplementary pins, as to conceal the still more infirm state of his under garments. The shoes and stockings of a ploughman were, however, seen to meet at his knees with a pair of brownish, blackish breeches; a rusty-coloured handkerchief, that has been black in its day, surrounded his throat, and was an apology for linen. His hair, half grey, half black, escaped in elf-locks ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... walking, not unseen, By hedgerow elms on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great sun begins his state, Robed in flames and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight; While the ploughman, near at hand, Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, And the milkmaid singeth blithe, And the mower whets his sithe, And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... friends left now. I hardly recognized the farm any more. All these new people had made themselves quite at home there, and I seemed to myself to be a new-comer. The serving-woman looked at me with distrust, and the ploughman avoided talking to me. The servant's name was Adele. All day long you could hear her grumbling and dragging her wooden shoes after her as she walked. She made a noise even when she was walking on straw. She used to eat her meals standing, and ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux

... and our grindstones passed from us long ago, when the ploughman and the miller took our place; but for a time we kept fast possession of the kneading-trough and the brewing-vat. Today, steam often shapes our bread, and the loaves are set down at our very door—it may be by a man-driven motor-car! The history ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in which Mr. Gosse is at his best. A favourite motive, he has treated it even more melodiously in "Lying in ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... them, inasmuch as there was a great plenty of hay in the neighbourhood, seeing that all the cattle had been killed or driven away (as related above). I therefore made up my mind to go in God's name with my new ploughman to Guetzkow, whither a great many Mecklenburg horses were brought to the fair, seeing that times were not yet so bad there as with us. Meanwhile I went a few more times up the Streckelberg with my daughter at night, and by moonlight, ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold

... Old World,—that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... large plantation, about which I secreted myself, until the darkness of the next night began to disappear. The morning larks commenced to chirp and sing merrily—pretty soon I heard the whip crack, and the voice of the ploughman driving in the corn field. About breakfast time, I heard the sound of a horn; saw a number of slaves in the field with a white man, who I supposed to be their overseer. He started to the house before the slaves, which gave me an opportunity to get the attention of one of the slaves, whom I ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb

... with those around her. When her father took it into his head to grow angry and cry, "You must!" she would burst out laughing; whereupon he would laugh also, and say: "I'm not the master here; in fact, I am placed in the position of a ploughman arguing ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez

... him, and repose there as safely as if he were in a palace. Fearless of damps, and unmolested by noxious insects, his sleep is as sound as it is refreshing, and he rises with renewed spirits to pursue his journey. Equally so may the ploughman or the labourer seek repose beside his team, and allow them to graze quietly around him. The delicious coolness of the morning and the mild temperature of the evening air, in that luxurious climate, are beyond the power of description. It appears to have ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... sunny morning in early January— a day that was Nature's breathing space after a week of sleet and boisterous winds. The gulls were back again from their inland shelters. Across the upland above the cliff a ploughman drove leisurably forth and back, and always close behind his heels the earth was white with these birds inspecting the fresh-turned furrow. The furze-bushes below him were braided with cobwebs, and ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... in all ages, especially in this last century of years, by people of all sorts, though never so mean and mechanical; every man strains his fortune to keep his children at school; the cobbler will clout it till midnight, the porter will carry burdens till his bones crack again, the ploughman will pinch both back and belly to give his son learning, and I find that this ambition reigns no where so much as in this island. But, under favour, this word, learning, is taken in a narrower sense among us than among ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various

... heifer of the corn am I, Kara! Kara![5] Yoked with the kine we gayly fly, Kara! Kara! The ploughman's hand is strong and drives The glowing soil, the meadow thrives! ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... To be talked of—how poor a desire! Does it matter whether it be by the gossips of this age or the next? Some men are urged on to fame by poverty—that is an excuse for their trouble; but there is no more nobleness in the motive than in that which makes yon poor ploughman sweat in the eye of Phoebus. In fact, the larger part of eminent men, instead of being inspired by any lofty desire to benefit their species or enrich the human mind, have acted or composed, without any definite object beyond the satisfying a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Halifax to Point de Bute. His mother was a widow. He married Miriam Smith, from Sackville, and the ceremony took place at the "Brick House," Prospect. Isaac settled at Hall's Hill, but afterward moved back to Point de Bute. He was an excellent ploughman, and was one of the drovers north when the Richibucto and Miramichi markets were supplied with beef from the Westmoreland marshes. He contracted consumption and died comparatively young. Mrs. Edward Jones, ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman

... this brief sketch of my experiences in the war, I would ask my readers to go back of the war a little with me. I want to show them a few of the dark pictures of the slave system. Hark! I hear the clanking of the ploughman's chains in the fields; I hear the tramping of the feet of the hoe-hands. I hear the coarse and harsh voice of the negro driver and the shrill voice of the white overseer swearing at the slaves. I hear the swash of the lash upon the backs of the unfortunates; ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer

... for the night. Labour used to be so dear and wages so high, especially in the back country of New Zealand, that the couple of men,—one for indoor work, to saw wood, milk, cook, sweep, wash, etc., and the other to act as gardener, groom, ploughman, and do all the numerous odd jobs about a place a hundred miles and more from the nearest shop,—represented a wage-expenditure of at least 200 pounds a year. Every gentleman therefore as a matter of course sees to his own horse when he arrives ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... uncle? Nay, nay, in any king, Christian or heathen, you may strike off a third part of that well enough—and, as far as I know, half of the rest, too. In far fewer years than three thousand it may well fortune that a poor ploughman's blood may come up to a kingdom, and a king's right royal kin on the other hand fall down to the plough and cart, and neither that king know that ever he came from the cart, nor that carter know that ever he came ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... helpless, she caught at the side of the little carriage, which was being dragged violently at the pony's heels. She had need of all her spirit. Fortunately, the road was a straight one, but there was not a soul in sight to help her, not a sower in the fields, not a ploughman, not even a boy herding cattle along the road. Her right hand still grasped the useless rein. She stared before her, while the rocking of the little carriage grew more and more violent, and the hedges ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... a moving dot, a ploughman turned a belated furrow; or a sweating ditcher leaned upon his reluctant spade and longed for night; or a shepherd, quite as silly as his sheep, gawked up the morning hills. But not a sign of help ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... Towler was the queerest. Tom in his person furnished an apt illustration of the right appropriation of talent and the fitness of things, for he would neither have made a groom, nor a coachman, nor a postillion, nor a footman, nor a ploughman, nor a mechanic, nor anything we know of, and yet he was first-rate as a huntsman. He was too weak for a groom too small for a coachman, too ugly for a postillion, too stunted for a footman, too light for a ploughman, too ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... Englishman.—Alas! the soldiers who fell under the sword of the Britons are not yet reduced to dust: the labourer in turning up his field, still draws from the bosom of the earth their whitened bones; while the ploughman, with tears of tenderness and gratitude, still recollects that his fields, now covered with rich harvests, have been moistened with French blood. While every thing around the inhabitants of this country animates them to speak of the tyranny of Great Britain, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall

... our early settlers from the Continent elected to live on the downland rather than in the valleys. Go where you may over the Plain, its turfy surface is scored by terraces or "lynchets," telling the tale of the ancient ploughman's furrows on the slopes, and side by side with them lie the scars of what were once cattle enclosures, farms, and stockaded villages. Nor is the explanation far to seek, for the valleys afforded shelter to the wolves, and ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens

... lover's vows, What time the blue mist round the patient cows Dim rises from the grass and half conceals Their dappled hides. I hear the nightingale, That from the little blackthorn spinney steals To the old hazel hedge that skirts the vale, And still unseen sings sweet. The ploughman feels The thrilling music as he goes along, And imitates and listens; while the fields Lose all their paths in dusk to lead him wrong, Still sings the nightingale her soft ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... tremble all Before things far more vile and trivial— Even a glow-worm can confound their might. The earth that lies bare to the sun, and breeds A thousand germs that burgeon and decay— This earth is wounded by the ploughman's share: But only darkness serves for human seeds; Night therefore is more sacred far than day, Since man excels all fruits ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... of midges. The people gather these minute insects by night, and boil them into thick cakes, to be used as a relish—millions of midges in a cake. A kungo cake, an inch thick, and as large as the blue bonnet of a Scotch ploughman, was offered to us; it was very dark in colour, and tasted not unlike ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... the cool and dark-lipped furrow breathes a dim delight Through the woodland's purple plumage to the diamond night. Aureoles of joy encircle every blade of grass Where the dew-fed creatures silent and enraptured pass. And the restless ploughman pauses, turns, and wondering, Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king; For a fiery moment looking with the eyes of God Over fields a slave at morning bowed him to the sod. Blind and dense with revelation every moment flies. And unto the mighty mother, gay, eternal, rise All the ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell

... the wonder of things, a sense of eternity, a swift, inexplicable compassion, a longing for service to the needs of men. His ears thrilled to the song of the earth and the whistle of the ploughman turning up the fresh brown earth. He filled his lungs with the wind of the open country, drank in the enchantment of the morning and the dusk, his nostrils joyously alive to the smell of the furrowed ground and a ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... family is full of it, it takes hold almost of all sorts of men, from the prince to the ploughman, even amongst gossips it is to be seen, scarce three in a company but there is siding, faction, emulation, between two of them, some simultas, jar, private grudge, heart-burning in the midst of them. Scarce two gentlemen ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... who with thy tush held'st high The world, that mortals might not die; Lion! who hast giants torn; Dwarf! who laugh'dst a king to scorn; Sole Subduer of the Dreaded! Slayer of the many-headed! Mighty Ploughman! Teacher tender! Of thine own the sure Defender! Under all thy ten disguises Endless praise to ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold

... lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon; Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, All with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the scritch owl, scritching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the churchway paths ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various

... never seen and could not imagine). Or else he wished he were the abbot's huntsman, hunting in the forest; or a monk of St Germain, singing sweetly in the abbey church; or a merchant, taking bales of cloaks and girdles along the high road to Paris; anything, in fact, but a poor ploughman ploughing other people's land. An Anglo-Saxon writer has imagined a dialogue ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... ["Now the old ploughman, shaking his head, sighs, and compares present times with past, often praises his parents' happiness, and talks of the old race as full of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... good, and the work hard, nobody who starts with the hounds is likely to be in at the death, except the huntsmen. We are all mad for the sport, and off we go, over the hills and far away, picking up a fresh field as we go. The ploughman leaves his plough, and the shepherd leaves his flock, and the farmer leaves his thrashing, to follow us; in every field we cross we get fresh blood, while those who join us at the start fall off by degrees. Well, it happened one day late in October, when there were ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... most. In his view it was 'the most loved of all the Ocean's sons,' and he commended it especially for its freedom from sudden and impetuous wave, from the unexpected inundations which spoil the mower's hopes and mock the ploughman's toil. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams

... works that Mr. Morris had some thought of printing may also be mentioned The Bible, Gesta Romanorum, Malory's Morte Darthur, The High History of the San Graal (translated by Dr. Sebastian Evans), Piers Ploughman, Huon of Bordeaux, Caxton's Jason, a Latin Psalter, The Prymer or Lay Folk's Prayer-Book, Some Mediaeval English Songs and Music, The Pilgrim's Progress, and a Book of Romantic Ballads. He was engaged on the selection of the Ballads, which he spoke of ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris

... A Ploughman yoked his Ox and his Ass together, and set to work to plough his field. It was a poor makeshift of a team, but it was the best he could do, as he had but a single Ox. At the end of the day, when the beasts ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... lower end of Ayton village. The family were of that "strict, not strictest species of Presbyterian Dissenter," and John attended also the Bible-class and Fellowship Meeting. The family of John Murray, a ploughman or "hind" from the Duns district, and now settled at Bastleridge, the next farm to Ayton Hill, also attended Mr. Ure's church. An intimacy sprang up between the two families. It ripened into affection between John Cairns and Alison, John Murray's only daughter, and ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... remember. Life within convent walls would have been scarcely more tranquil or more monotonous. Sir John rode with his hounds three or four times a week, or was about the fields superintending the farming operations, walking beside the ploughman as he drove his furrow, or watching the scattering of the seed. Or he was in the narrow woodlands which still belonged to him, and Angela, taking her solitary walk at the close of day, heard his axe ringing through ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... beneath his feet teeming with the tangible memories of grisly conflict, or of an old civilization that had been blotted out long ago—the swords of Roman legionaries, the bones of British heroes, coins with legends that few could read turned up by the ploughman's share. Yonder, men said, away there at Redburn, the heathen pursuers had come upon England's proto-martyr and slain the saint of God, whose bones since then had been gathered up, and were now resting in their sumptuous ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... lies crouched the lordly stag, The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag; And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker, As broadening casements light them on toward home, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... the window, the better to look in, and clenching the other, shook it at them, crying out, "Wait, ye accursed peasant boors, I, too, will judge ye for your sins!" But seeing her cousin, Jobst Bork, present, she screamed yet louder—"Eh! thou thick ploughman, hath the devil brought thee here too? Art thou not ashamed to accuse thy own kinswoman? Wait, I will give thee something to make thee ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... purse-proud tenant, never known to fail? The farm which never yet was left on hand? The marsh reclaimed to most improving land? The impatient hope of the expiring lease? The doubling rental? What an evil's peace! In vain the prize excites the ploughman's skill, In vain the Commons pass their patriot bill;[334] The Landed Interest—(you may understand The phrase much better leaving out the land)— The land self-interest groans from shore to shore, 600 For ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... rains sometimes continued for days together; the fields for miles around were under water, and the ducks and buffaloes enjoyed themselves amazingly. All along the road to Macassar, ploughing was daily going on in the mud and water, through which the wooden plough easily makes its way, the ploughman holding the plough-handle with one hand while a long bamboo in the other serves to guide the buffaloes. These animals require an immense deal of driving to get them on at all; a continual shower of exclamations is kept ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate, physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance. One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a wood. Another, the Duchess, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... to be fed as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... Polyeuka mine, from which he was receiving large monthly dividends. If that went on prosperously, perhaps he need not return to the colony at all. 'Poor Dick Shand!' he said. 'He is a shepherd far away in the west, hardly earning better wages than an English ploughman, and I am coming home with a pocket full of money! A few glasses of whisky have made all ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... disregard of conventionalities and externalisms. Just as the lower gift of what we call 'genius' is above all limits of culture or education or position, and falls on a wool-stapler in Stratford-on-Avon, or on a ploughman in Ayrshire, so, in a similar manner, the altogether different gift of the divine, life-giving Spirit follows no lines that Churches or institutions draw. It falls upon an Augustinian monk in a convent, and he shakes Europe. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren









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