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More "Ploughshare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Jesuits at Mont Desert, and we might say a colony of Swedes on the sea-coast, between the two large rivers just named, the memory of which is traditional, and the vestiges of which are sometimes turned up by the ploughshare. These people probably fell beneath some outbreak of savage vengeance, which left no name or ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... of the former class is Duport, once a counselor in the parliament, who, after 1788, knew how to turn riots to account. The first revolutionary consultations were held in his house. He wants to plough deep, and his devices for burying the ploughshare are such that Sieyes, a radical, if there ever was one, dubbed it a "cavernous policy."[1233] Duport, on the 28th of July, 1789, is the organizer of the Committee on Searches, by which all favorably disposed informers or spies form in his hands a supervisory ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... upper world and European types of countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian heads which look out from the canvases of Titian—speaking of ambition or craft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions have passed with iron ploughshare. These were the countenances of men who had lived in struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forces of vril had changed the character of society—men who had fought with each other for power or fame as we ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the outbreak were not speedily suppressed, what grave consequences might ensue. 'Let this happen,' he said, 'on June 2, and does any sane man doubt that twenty-four hours would swell the hundreds of rebels into thousands, and in a week every ploughshare in the Delhi States would be turned into a sword? And when a sufficient force had been mustered, which could not be effected within a month, should we not then have a more difficult game to play than Clive at Plassy or Wellington at Assaye? We should then be literally striking for ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the forge-fire illumined with a fitful flicker the dark interior, showing the rod across the corner with its jingling weight of horseshoes, a ploughshare on the ground, the barrel of water, the low window, and casting upon the wall a grotesque shadow of Jube's dodging figure as he ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Great, and when 700 years more or less had elapsed since the birth of the Lord, Willebrord with eleven others did irrigate the said land with the waters of their holy preaching. Moreover, with the help of his companions he did busy himself with breaking up the ground with the ploughshare of discipline, yet not without much difficulty; and in a short space the task of spreading the faith did prosper wondrously beneath their hands; for God worked with them, and did confirm their words ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men,' said he, Were slain in ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... ideal. The millionaire himself, though old, maintained a fairly middle-aged appearance—he was a thin, wiry, well-preserved man, his wizened and furrowed countenance chiefly showing the marks of Time's ploughshare. It would have been difficult to say why, out of all the feminine butterflies hovering around him, he had chosen Lydia Herbert,—but he was a shrewd judge of character in his way, and he had decided that as she was not in her first youth ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... the grain and the furrow, The plough-cloven clod And the ploughshare drawn thorough, The germ and the sod, The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, the ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Maurice, "and I ought to be, and fancy I am, the happiest man under the sun. But I am to quit the army, and turn my sword into a ploughshare, and gather oats instead of laurels; and I am not quite certain how I shall take to ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... the town had observed, "is a bloodthirsty, unsettled sort of a rascal, that the peaceable, home-loving, bread-winning citizen can never conscientiously look on as a brother till he has beaten his sword into a ploughshare and his spear ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... peevish asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... affront. An officer, who had been secured by tumultuary process during the early efforts to expand the land forces, proved to be a disappointment and had to be invited to convert his sword into a ploughshare. His reply is understood to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... most severe form of execution. In Flanders, monastic ingenuity had invented another most painful punishment for Waldenses and similar malefactors. A criminal whose guilt had been established by the hot iron, hot ploughshare, boiling kettle, or other logical proof, was stripped and bound to the stake:—he was then flayed, from the neck to the navel, while swarms of bees were let loose to fasten upon his bleeding flesh and torture him to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... field-piece as if it had been a stick. His look was terrible. He put his right hand on the muzzle, his left hand on the breach; he pulled with this, he pushed with that, and wheeled it round, as if it had been a plaything. It furrowed the ground like a ploughshare. He tore the sheet-lead from the touch-hole; then the powder-monkey rushed up with the fire, when the cannon went off, making the bark fly from the trees, and many an Indian send up his last yell and ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... full of a foolish melancholy, I felt a sad delight at being doomed to blight and loneliness; not but that I managed still (when mother was urgent upon me) to eat my share of victuals, and cuff a man for laziness, and see that a ploughshare made no leaps, and sleep of a night without dreaming. And my mother half-believing, in her fondness and affection, that what the parish said was true about a mad dog having bitten me, and yet arguing that it must be false (because God would have prevented ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Washington, whose sword was never drawn but in the cause of his country, and never sheathed when wielded in his country's cause! Franklin, the philosopher of the thunder-bolt, the printing-press, and the ploughshare! What names are these in the scanty catalogue of the benefactors of human kind! Washington and Franklin! What other two men whose lives belong to the eighteenth century of Christendom, have left a deeper ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... trusted." He could only answer, "that desperate diseases required desperate remedies. He could with truth declare that he felt no lust for power, but wished with as much fervency as any man upon this wide extended continent, for an opportunity of turning the sword into a ploughshare; but his feelings as an officer and a man had been such as to force him to say, that no person ever had a greater choice of difficulties ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... amongst the farmers and gentry, who employed me in fabricating little articles of fancy work and repairing all sorts of things most diverse in their natures and uses. At one farm-house I mended a tea-pot and a ploughshare, and at a gentleman's house, near St. Helen's, repaired a cart, and almost re-built a boat, which was used on his fish-pond. I turned my hand to any and everything. I do not say I did everything well, but I did it satisfactorily to those who employed me. I now began ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... creed, have likewise pitched upon the soldier's conduct in war as a signal illustration of the potentialities of human nature in peace. Thus Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral assimilation of industrial action to military. "Soldiers of the ploughshare," he exclaims in one of his works, "as well as soldiers of the sword! All my political economy is comprehended in that phrase." So, too, Mr. Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of Positivism, following out the same ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... through the long-revolving years The ploughshare of a Century to-day Runs peaceful furrows where a crop of Spears Once stood ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... witnessed, and said, "You have borne too hard on us, Sir Preacher—but coming with the commendations which you have brought me, I doubt not but your meaning was good. But we are a wilder folk than you inland men of Fife and Lothian. Be advised, therefore, by me—Spur not an unbroken horse—put not your ploughshare too deep into new land—Preach to us spiritual liberty, and we will hearken to you.—But we will give no way to spiritual bondage.—Sit, therefore, down, and pledge me in old sack, and we ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... tables of increase in Cotta, Anweisung zum Waldbau, p. 228. Count Buquoy, Theorie der N. Wirthschaft, p. 54, ridicules the absurd procedure of a great many farmers, as if by forcing the ploughshare deeper into the soil, they could compel it to produce a double return, and asks: if one should dig a square foot of land to the center of the earth and manure it, who would take it off his hands? As to the effect of manure, Kuhlmann's ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... out there a long time and I'd rather be there now fighting the Indians, instead of fighting our own people, although no other choice was left me. I've seen some terrible hurricanes on the plains, winds that would cut the earth as if it was done with a ploughshare, and these armies are going to be rained ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... nation against nation rise, Nor ardent warriors meet with hateful eyes, But useless lances into scythes shall bend, And the broad falchion in a ploughshare end. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... huts, propped up with rough-hewn stakes, that were first built as a shelter against the inclemencies of the air. All then was union, all peace, all love and friendship in the world. As yet no rude ploughshare presumed with violence to pry into the pious bowels of our mother earth, for she without compulsion kindly yielded from every part of her fruitful and spacious bosom, whatever might at once satisfy, sustain, and indulge her frugal children. Then was the time when innocent, beautiful young ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... in the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough The ploughshare turns them out. For many thousand men," said he, "Were ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... our ploughshare is the Sabre: Here's the harvest of our labour; For behind those battered breaches Are our foes with all their riches: There is Glory—there is plunder— Then ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Christendom is quantity, power, variety, fulness; not as yet co-operation, harmony, peace, union. Powers are first developed, which are afterward to be harmonized. The sword is not yet beaten into a ploughshare, nor has universal peace arrived. Yet such is the inevitable tendency of things. As knowledge spreads, as wealth increases, as the moral force of the world is enlarged, law, more and more, takes the place of force. Men no longer ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... strength. Like the Geotrupes, they are vigorous excavators. Grasped in the closed hand, they insinuate themselves through the interstices of the fingers and plough up your skin in a fashion to make you very quickly loose your hold. With his head, a robust ploughshare, the Beetle might very easily push the ring off its short support. He is not able to do so because he does not think of it; he does not think of it because he is devoid of the faculty attributed ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... shall return tomorrow night. And then begins our great quest. But first I shall have much to say, so that you may know what to do and to dread. Then our promise shall be made to each other anew. For there is a terrible task before us, and once our feet are on the ploughshare ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... that slept in its ashen furrows. A shining undulation passed through it, and broke, at the ends, as it were, into a curling golden foam. Then Anne stood up and tossed it backwards. Her brush went deep and straight, like a ploughshare, turning up the rich, smooth swell of the under-gold; it went light on the top, till numberless little threads of hair rippled, and rose, and knitted themselves, and lay on her head like a fine gold ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... as fine a little craft as I could wish for, but," he added, "the commander is one of the oddest fish I ever fell in with. He has not been to sea for a number of years, and having, as he says, turned his sword into a ploughshare, has devoted his mind to farming and rural sports. Unwilling to tear himself altogether from his beloved beeves and sheep, and pigs and poultry, he has brought them along with him, and has converted the little ship into a regular Noah's ark. The boats are turned into sheep-pens and hen-coops, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... a great word of glowing encouragement for all sad hearts. 'Fools and children,' says the old proverb, 'should not see half-done work '; at least, they should not judge it. When the ploughshare goes deep into the brown, frosty ground, the work is only begun. The earth may seem to be scarped and hurt, and, if one might say, to bleed, but in six months' time 'you scarce can see' the soil for waving corn. Yes; and sorrow, as some of us could witness, is the forecast of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... who succeeded not only in living on terms of friendship with one of the worst landlords in Ireland, but in obtaining many concessions from him. When he came to live in Culloch the landlord had said to him that what he would like to do would be to run the ploughshare through the town, and to turn "Culloch" into Bullock. But before many years had passed Father O'Hara had persuaded this man to use his influence to get a sufficient capital to start a bacon factory. And the town of Culloch possessed no other advantages except an energetic and foreseeing parish ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... dip her left sleeve in the burn, where three lairds' lands met—making the "bottle clunk," with joyous smugglers, on a lucky run of gin or brandy—or if his thoughts at all approached his acts—he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed by the furrow which his own ploughshare had turned. That his thoughts were thus wandering we have his own testimony, with that of his brother Gilbert; and were both wanting, the certainty that he composed the greater part of his immortal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the summer ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... assist, or there to prevent? But "Curiosity"! He may be there from mere "curiosity"! Curiosity to witness the success of the execution of his own plan of murder! The very walls of a court-house ought not to stand, the ploughshare should run through the ground it stands on, where such an argument could ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Let the ploughshare of repentance make the land ready for the seed, and then there will be some hope of lasting success. Some other time we may have something to say about the birds, which pick up the seed; but for the present let it suffice that we insist upon the ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... glimm'ring o'er the green, All die away.—— For now the sun, slow moving in his grandeur, Above the eastern mountains lifts his head. The webs of dew spread o'er the hoary lawn, The smooth clear bosom of the settled pool, The polish'd ploughshare on the distant field, Catch fire from him, and dart their new got beams Upon die ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... gigantic ploughshare of rock, set up against the sky, its thin, keen, purple blade edged with glittering frost; for so sharp is its point, that only a dazzling line marks the eternal snow ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... more than any other to awaken the interest of the world in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh. But before his day another man had startled the world with what we may call the discovery of Egypt. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte, the man whose sword was a ploughshare turning up the fallow fields of Europe, and sowing strange crops of tyranny and liberty, and whose ambition it was to set up a new throne in the land of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies. The mighty ruins of Karnak and the imperishable pyramids filled ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... and proprietor, the aspect of the country would be decidedly uninteresting, and would present scant attraction to the man riding or walking through it. In such a world the tourists would be few. Personally, I should detest a world all red and ruled with the ploughshare in spring, all covered with harvest in autumn. I wish a little variety. I desiderate moors and barren places: the copse where you can flush the woodcock; the warren where, when you approach, you can ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the Israelites built them up again under taskmasters. Also Judah's brethren, who had kept quiet up to that moment, fell into a rage, and stamped on the ground with their feet until it looked as though deep furrows had been torn in it by a ploughshare.[275] And Judah addressed his brethren, "Be brave, demean yourselves as men, and let each one of you show his heroism, for the circumstances demand that we do ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... rounded off in exactly the same way both at stem and stern, the other has a mast, placed about midship, a yard hung across it, and a sail close reefed to the yard, while the bow is armed with a long projecting beak, like a ploughshare, which must have been capable of doing terrible damage to a hostile vessel. The rowers, in both classes of ships, are represented as only eight or ten upon a side; but this may have arisen from artistic ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... more stupid than other folks; it must be so, for the most common things which he saw every day, and which wise people took as a matter of course, were enough to puzzle him and fill his mind with wonder. The stars, the flowers, the sunset, the sound of the wind, the very pebbles turned up by the ploughshare, gave him strange feelings which he did not understand and which he carefully hid. They would have been explained, he knew, if he had expressed them, by the sentence, "Peter's not all there"; and he was sometimes quite inclined to think that this was really the case. To-day his thoughts ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... chain? Consider, friends, your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumberous is the gilded coach! The pride of man is our reproach. Were we designed for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through the soil; To sweat in harness through the road; To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legged kind! What force is in our nerves combined! Shall, then, our nobler jaws submit To foam and champ ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... of God (according to HIS OWN translation of it) was the hammer with which, selon son metier, he was to drive his views of the truth into the thick skulls of the people. If he could twist iron, and hammer a ploughshare into a sword, or reverse the form, why should he be unable to effect a change in their opinions? It was perfectly useless to continue the argument; but I prophesied trouble, as the king was already discontented, and an influx of missionaries would not improve his ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... away his young life, with resolute mien. The triumph was with him. Out of the jaws of death he had rescued the leader whose freedom he considered essential to the success of a patriotic undertaking, and he was satisfied to pay the cost of the venture. He had set his foot upon the ploughshare, and would not shrink from the ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... quiet, To the quiet of the hearthstone. There were generals and captains, In the army and the navy, There were colonels, there were majors, There were officers and soldiers; Men who went from farm and fireside, Men who went from shop and ploughshare. All the States rose up in answer To the martial proclamation. There were Pike and Brown and Chandler, Boyd, Macomb, and Scott and Winder, Dudley, Harrison, and Hampton, Miller, Wilkinson, and Bainbridge, Hull and Perry, Jones, Decatur— All these ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... pagan; but wait till you feel it,— That jar of the earth, that dull shock, When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of Salt Lake ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... because he knew them within his reach. Could he not mould the people at his will? Could he not, transfigured in his snowy garments, call aloud in the streets of Jerusalem, "Behold your King?" And the fierce warriors of his nation would start at the sound; the ploughshare would be beaten into the sword, and the pruning-hook into the spear; and the nation, rushing to his call, learn war yet again indeed,—a grand, holy war—a crusade—no; we should not have had that word; but a ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... great shyness she appraised his hands and his feet—those strong forceful hands that had dominated the lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood—that remote, incredible ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... For it would have been Another world." "Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good." Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... as a Rook—the tail being long and extremely slender, and composed of separate vertebrae, each of which supports a single pair of quill-feathers. In the flying Birds of the present day, as before mentioned, the terminal vertebrae of the tail are amalgamated to form a single bone ("ploughshare-bone"), which supports a cluster of tail-feathers; and the tail itself is short. In the embryos of existing Birds the tail is long, and is made up of separate vertebrae, and the same character is observed in many ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... The peaceful mattock, ploughshare, spade, Sickle, and pruning-hook he made, Eschewing martial labours. Thus bees will rather honey bring, Than hurtfully employ their sting ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, That fate is thine—no distant date: Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight Shall be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... had been pent in narrow channels, like wild steeds bound to the ploughshare, broke away with exultation; the springs poured down from the mountains, and the air was blind with rain. Valleys and uplands were covered; strange countries were joined in one great sea; and where the highest trees had ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... leading down to the Rice Lake, and may have been the sources from whence its channel was filled. Some convulsion of nature at a remote period, by raising the waters above their natural level, might have caused a disruption of the banks, and drained their beds, as they now appear ready for the ploughshare or the spade. In the month of June these flats are brilliant with the splendid blossoms of the Castilegia coccinea, or painted-cup, the azure lupine (Lupinus perennis), and snowy Trillium; dwarf roses (Rosa blanda) scent the evening ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... of us are old enough to have had a great many mysteries of our early days cleared up. We have seen at least the beginnings of the harvest which the ploughshare of sorrow and the winter winds were preparing for us, and for the rest we can trust. Brethren! remember your mercies; remember your losses; and 'for all the way by which the Lord our God has led us these many years in the wilderness,' let us try to be thankful, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our novelists call their hero "Aylmer Valence," which means nothing, or "Vernon Raymond," ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... pair of horses to sell; one nine, the other ten years old, for which he asks a thousand dollars.... He must sell something to enable him to clear out. When a man is about retiring from public life, and sees nothing but a ploughshare between him and the grave, he naturally thinks ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... scent of life is never fuller in the woods than now, for the ground is yielding up its memories. The spring when it comes will not restore this fullness, nor these deep and ample recollections of the earth. For the earth seems now to remember the drive of the ploughshare and its harrying; the seed, and the full bursting of it, the swelling and the completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the woods throughout the weald the earth has borne fruit; the barns are full, and the wheat is standing stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... slave. "That word is a ploughshare which suits only loose soil, and mine, now that my master is waiting for me, can not be tilled even by the sharpest. Another time! But if, meanwhile, you have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one, and out of the very throes of decay a joyous life struggled outward and upward. Even the storms that swept down the dead leaves nurtured the tender buds that took their places. There were no episodes of snowy silence; over the quickening fields the farmer's ploughshare hard followed the furrows left by the latest rains. Perhaps it was for this reason that the Christmas evergreens which decorated the drawing-room took upon themselves a foreign aspect, and offered a weird contrast to the roses, seen dimly through the windows, as the southwest wind beat their soft ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... appear and vanish again like a shadow, taking the direction of a lonely house. An old woman declared that she had seen him go into this house. But the next night the house was gone, as though by enchantment, and the ploughshare had passed over where it stood; so that none could say, what had become of her whom they sought, far those who had dwelt in the house, and even the house itself, were ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to the cottage, and seems now to be a pasture, and a rather remarkably unfertile one. A little farther on, the ground was whitened with an immense number of daisies,—daisies, daisies, everywhere; and in answer to my inquiry, the driver said that this was the field where Burns ran his ploughshare over the daisy. If so, the soil seems to have been consecrated to daisies by the song which he bestowed on that first immortal one. I alighted, and plucked a whole handful of these "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flowers," which will be precious to many friends in our own country as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their estates were confiscated; their fortresses on either side of the Tyber were besieged by the troops of St. Peter and those of the rival nobles; and after the ruin of Palestrina or Praeneste, their principal seat, the ground was marked with a ploughshare, the emblem of perpetual desolation. Degraded, banished, proscribed, the six brothers, in disguise and danger, wandered over Europe without renouncing the hope of deliverance and revenge. In this double hope, the French ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... inspired when, in reminding the farmers of their duty to put more land under the plough, he compared the compulsory powers of the Board of Agriculture to a sword in its scabbard, and hoped there would be no necessity to rattle it. Everybody knows that the sword in question is a converted ploughshare, and that it rests with the War Office to turn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... wars and conquests there comes at last to the troubled earth the glorious reign of peace. But no new steel cruisers, no standing army. These are the devil's tools in monarchies; the Republic's weapons are the ploughshare ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... has now laid down the external pomp of Protector, and, like Cincinnatus, has withdrawn to retirement, but not with the same view. This modesty is to captivate the crowd, who are to call on him to convert the ploughshare into an Imperial sceptre! I have excellent information to this effect, having found means to obtain it from behind the ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... anticipate that in less than a quarter of a century there would remain of all these numerous tribes but a few scattered bands, squalid, degraded, with scarce a vestige remaining of their former lofty character—their lands cajoled or wrested from them, the graves of their fathers turned up by the ploughshare—themselves chased farther and farther towards the setting sun, until they were literally grudged a resting-place on the ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... thought has never, I will venture to say, occurred to any public man of any party; and, if any man were frantic enough to make the attempt, he would find, before three days had expired, that there is no better sword than that which is fashioned out of a ploughshare. But, if not by the sword, how is the country to be governed? I understand how the peace is kept at New York. It is by the assent and support of the people. I understand also how the peace is kept at Milan. It is by the bayonets of the Austrian ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other people's sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... famous for having detected the pretended madness of Ulysses, by which he sought to avoid going upon the expedition to Troy. Ulysses was ploughing and Palamedes placed the infant Telemachus in front of the ploughshare. Ulysses revealed his sanity ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... hard on us, Sir Preacher—but coming with the commendations which you have brought me, I doubt not but your meaning was good. But we are a wilder folk than you inland men of Fife and Lothian. Be advised, therefore, by me—Spur not an unbroken horse—put not your ploughshare too deep into new land—Preach to us spiritual liberty, and we will hearken to you.—But we will give no way to spiritual bondage.—Sit, therefore, down, and pledge me in old sack, and we ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... twenty inches thick, and as dazzlingly white as if it was snow. This great field is ploughed up with a massive four-wheeled implement called a "salt-plough." It is run by steam and needs two men to manage it. The heavy steel ploughshare breaks up the salt crust, making broad, shallow furrows and throwing the salt in ridges on both sides. The plough has hardly moved on before the crust begins to form again. This broken crust is worked in water by men with ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... come, there was a happy time for Prussia: ploughshare instead of sword; busy sea-havens, German towns, getting built; churches everywhere rising; grass growing, and peaceable cows, where formerly had been quagmire and snakes. And for the Order a happy time? A rich, not a happy. The Order was victorious; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... tempered the air to the shorn flock and brought the springs out of the rocks for the supply of the herd. Tliebse had the care of smiths and all the cunning workmanship of forges, and at his fete libations were poured in honor of him upon the hatchet and the ploughshare. Domestic happiness and good-fellowship among neighbors were presided over by the three sisters denominated fates in the mythology of the Greeks, and who besides interfered on the field of battle to ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... hasn't," he says. "It's neither ploughshare, whittle, hook, nor crook, nor aught I've yet seen men handle." By this time he was scratting in the dirt to prise ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... of the forge-fire illumined with a fitful flicker the dark interior, showing the rod across the corner with its jingling weight of horseshoes, a ploughshare on the ground, the barrel of water, the low window, and casting upon the wall a grotesque shadow of Jube's dodging figure as he ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... universally accepted. To deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this: and a rich crop has resulted from his ploughshare. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and when 700 years more or less had elapsed since the birth of the Lord, Willebrord with eleven others did irrigate the said land with the waters of their holy preaching. Moreover, with the help of his companions he did busy himself with breaking up the ground with the ploughshare of discipline, yet not without much difficulty; and in a short space the task of spreading the faith did prosper wondrously beneath their hands; for God worked with them, and did confirm their words with ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... man who reposes In his ancestral shade, The peasant at his ploughshare, The worker at his trade, Each one his all his perilled, Each has the same great stake, Each soul can but have patience, Each heart ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... with a back of thorns he ever and anon threatened all who came near him; with a tail of poison he defiantly lashed, and a wicked eye that sought objects afar off—he was the most pertinacious brute unchained. Moreover he had a snout like a ploughshare, with which he had frequently driven Mr. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... proud Reason her comparing power, Warm every clime, and brighten every hour. In Life's first cradle, ere the dawn began Of young Society to polish man; The staff that propp'd him, and the bow that arm'd, The boat that bore him, and the shed that warm'd, 230 Fire, raiment, food, the ploughshare, and the sword, Arose, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... extremely slender, and composed of separate vertebrae, each of which supports a single pair of quill-feathers. In the flying Birds of the present day, as before mentioned, the terminal vertebrae of the tail are amalgamated to form a single bone ("ploughshare-bone"), which supports a cluster of tail-feathers; and the tail itself is short. In the embryos of existing Birds the tail is long, and is made up of separate vertebrae, and the same character is observed in many existing Reptiles. The tail of Archoeopteryx, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Rome whose iron legions took their city, put thousand on thousands to the sword, destroyed the beautiful temple once hallowed by a Saviour's feet and then drew a ploughshare over Zion that it might become a ploughed field as foretold? The Rome that sculptured on its triumphal arches the figures of the captive Jews it had led in boastful mockery at the chariot wheels ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... is best. The interpretation of this proverb is not obvious, and later writers do not appear to have adopted it from Fergusson. It is quite clear that sok or sock is the ploughshare. Seil is happiness, as in Kelly. "Seil comes not till sorrow be o'er;" and in Aberdeen they say, "Seil o' your face," to express a blessing. My reading is "the plough and happiness the best lot." The happiest life ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... employment afloat during the long stagnation in the service occasioned by the interregnum of peace that lasted almost from Waterloo up to the time of the Crimean war, he determined, like Cincinnatus, to "beat his sword into a ploughshare." In other words, he abandoned the fickle element on which he had passed the early days of his manhood and emigrated to the West Indies, to see whether he might not improve his fortunes by investing what little capital he had in a coffee and cocoa plantation in ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... more wondrous than man; Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan, Through the foam of the firth, man makes his perilous way; And the eldest of deities Earth that knows not toil nor decay Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out, With breed of the yoked horse, the ploughshare turneth about. ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... castles of Umbria or the Campagna to their castles in town; and their feuds meant battles also between the citizens who obeyed or thwarted them. Houses were sacked and burnt, and occasionally razed to the ground, for the ploughshare and the salt-sower to go over their site. A few years later, when Pope Borgia dredged the Tiber for the body of his son, the boatmen of Ripetta reported that so many bodies were thrown over every night that they ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... museum shelf at last? The passion of the heart testified to by some battered trinket, the sweat of the brain by some maggot-eaten manuscript, the agony of death, at best, by some round shot turned up by the ploughshare? And how shall any one dare complain of this, since have not empires before now only been saved from oblivion by a few buried potsherds, and whole races of mankind by childish picture-scratchings on a reindeer bone? Tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse. The individual—his arts, his possessions, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our novelists call ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... borders of the noble Penobscot, which rolled its silver tide from the interior lakes to mingle with the waters of the ocean. The footsteps of civilized man seemed scarcely to have pressed the soil, which the hardy native had for ages enjoyed as his birthright; and the axe and ploughshare had yet rarely invaded the hunting grounds, where he pursued the wild deer, and roused the wolf from his lair. A few French settlers, who adhered to D'Aulney, had built and planted around the fort, which stood ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... knew nothing of it; you did not take it. But since no one accused you or even suspected you, why could you not have been less aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions? But we will plough no longer in that field. The ploughshare has struck against a rock and grits, denting its edge in vain. My veil is gone,—my ample, historic, heroic veil. There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered through—I will not say stolen tissue, but certainly through tissue which was obtained without rendering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... side by side, with like unwearied care, Each Ajax laboured through the field of war: So when two lordly bulls, with equal toil, Force the bright ploughshare through the fallow soil, Join'd to one yoke, the stubborn earth they tear, And trace large furrows with the shining share; O'er their huge limbs the foam descends in snow, And streams of sweat down their sour foreheads flow. A train of heroes followed through the field, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... who thronged behind in a great crowd, pricked up their ears and bent their brows, thinking the Monk was foretelling the entry of Charles of Valois into his good town of Paris, over which he was fain—at any rate, so they believed—to drive the ploughshare. ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... in agricultural science, the Peruvians might be supposed to have had some knowledge of the plough, in such general use among the primitive nations of the eastern continent. But they had neither the iron ploughshare of the Old World, nor had they animals for .draught, which, indeed, were nowhere found in the New. The instrument which they used was a strong, sharp-pointed stake, traversed by a horizontal piece, ten or ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... and another half the size for tobacco. These we began to dig and hoe; but the ground was hard, and though we all worked like slaves, we saw there was nothing to be made of it without ploughing. A ploughshare we had, and a plough was easily made—but horses were wanting: so Asa and I took fifty dollars, which was all the money we had amongst us, and set out to explore the country forty miles round, and endeavour to meet with somebody who would sell ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the mountains my heart leaped with joy. We all slept in the one flea-infested, windowless room of the "tavern" that night; and before dawn I was up and untethered the horses, and Polly Ann and I together lifted the two bushels of alum salt on one of the beasts and the ploughshare on the other. By daylight we had left ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... bear up Dominion: Knowledge, Will,— These two are strong, but stronger yet the third,— Obedience, the great tap-root, that still, Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred, Though the storm's ploughshare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... destroyed, and they remained in ruins until the Israelites built them up again under taskmasters. Also Judah's brethren, who had kept quiet up to that moment, fell into a rage, and stamped on the ground with their feet until it looked as though deep furrows had been torn in it by a ploughshare.[275] And Judah addressed his brethren, "Be brave, demean yourselves as men, and let each one of you show his heroism, for the circumstances demand that we ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... buildings of the lower town covered the spacious summit of Mount Acra; and a part of the hill, distinguished by the name of Moriah, and levelled by human industry, was crowned with the stately temple of the Jewish nation. After the final destruction of the temple by the arms of Titus and Hadrian, a ploughshare was drawn over the consecrated ground, as a sign of perpetual interdiction. Sion was deserted; and the vacant space of the lower city was filled with the public and private edifices of the AElian colony, which spread themselves over the adjacent hill of Calvary. The holy places were polluted with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... with a ploughshare marks the town, And, homes allotting, gives each place a name, Here Troy, there Ilion. Pleased to wear the crown, A forum good Acestes hastes to frame, And laws to gathered senators proclaim. Rear'd high on Eryx, to the stars ascends A temple, to Idalian Venus' fame. A priest Anchises' sepulchre ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... skreck (stampede) like a span of oxen when they wind a lion. And then they'd fire—ah, they did fire—anyhow, anywhere, but mostly at the clouds, there was no stopping them; and so, you see, I thought that you would like to turn your sword into a ploughshare, as the Bible says—but no ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... inches. The spreading out of the moraine is here very striking.] Now I submit that this is not the Place to seek for the scooping power of a glacier. The opinion appears to be prevalent that it is the snout of a glacier that must act the part of ploughshare; and it is certainly an erroneous opinion. The scooping power will exert itself most where the weight and the motion are greatest. A glacier's snout often rests upon matter which has been scooped ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a charming Tyrolese story about her. At midnight on Epiphany Eve a peasant—not too sober—suddenly heard behind him "a sound of many voices, which came on nearer and nearer, and then the Berchtl, in her white clothing, her broken ploughshare in her hand, and all her train of little people, swept clattering and chattering close past him. The least was the last, and it wore a long shirt which got in the way of its little bare feet, and kept tripping it up. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... should be a genial and ameliorating influence in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows black under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still presents, as it did in the primeval time, rivers which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned. In this state it is offered to man, not in the barbarous and isolated condition of the early ages, but to a being who is already in possession of the most potent secrets of the natural world, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... liberality, dismiss and impart their broad light bark, which served to cover those lowly huts, propped up with rough-hewn stakes, that were first built as a shelter against the inclemencies of the air. All then was union, all peace, all love and friendship in the world. As yet no rude ploughshare presumed with violence to pry into the pious bowels of our mother earth, for she without compulsion kindly yielded from every part of her fruitful and spacious bosom, whatever might at once satisfy, sustain, and indulge her frugal children. Then was the time when ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... friendly priest who had heard and absolved the follies of his youth; his last sigh was breathed upon the lips of the lady of his love. Surely there is no sword like that which is beaten out of a ploughshare. Surely this state of things was not unmixedly bad; its evils were alleviated by enthusiasm and by tenderness; and it will at least be acknowledged that it was well fitted to nurse poetical genius in an imaginative and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... chains, a curiously shaped ploughshare, an odd little spade used in mending the dikes, and digging clay for bricks, and also the long and ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... was able to forget the lofty dreams to which a smooth career had pointed, and which fate, at his first steps, had mocked. He had given up the idea that the world should acknowledge this title: "a great patriot, who is the holder of a high office." He who does not desire this should keep to the ploughshare. Ambition should only have well-regulated roads, and success should only begin with a lower office in the state. But he whose hobby it is to murmur, will find a fine career in field labor; and he who wishes to bury himself, will find himself ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... read the inscription; A veil hath enveloped my sight, What though through the painted windows Glows brightly the sunbeam's light. Thus gleams, O hall of my fathers, Thy image so bright in my mind, From the earth now vanished, the ploughshare Leaves of thee no ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... into ploughshares and the figure of Peace standing in the middle, with Bellona crouching at her feet—was said to be an easy winner. I was Peace, of course, in chiffon draperies, with my hair down. I hadn't the faintest notion what sort of thing a ploughshare was, but I'd clever people to help me, and so it was all right. But oh, my best one! the difficulty I had in getting a Bellona! They all wanted to be Peace, and some of them were so absolutely horrid about it that I couldn't help telling them they were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... insidious pressure of the current and was being drawn toward the rocks,—at first so slowly that there was scarcely a ripple off her bows; then, as she lumbered onward, she began to turn over the water as a ploughshare turns over ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... with resolute mien. The triumph was with him. Out of the jaws of death he had rescued the leader whose freedom he considered essential to the success of a patriotic undertaking, and he was satisfied to pay the cost of the venture. He had set his foot upon the ploughshare, and would not shrink from the ordeal which ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... to the winds, pity will also fly away with it Must—that word is a ploughshare which suits only loose soil Tender and uncouth natural sounds, which no language knows There is nothing better than death, for it is peace Tone of patronizing instruction assumed by the better informed Wait, child! What ...
— Quotations From Georg Ebers • David Widger
... series of dreadful storms, arose on the coast of the peninsula, as if the Gulf Stream, like a vast ploughshare, had thrown the Atlantic up from its furrow and tossed it over the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... his pay and places; and for fear of his wife at home, that only being in life whom he dreaded. I have asked about men in my own company (new drafts of poor country boys were perpetually coming over to us during the wars, and brought from the ploughshare to the sword), and found that a half of them under the flags were driven thither on account of a woman: one fellow was jilted by his mistress and took the shilling in despair; another jilted the girl, and fled from her and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... spear through Launceor's shield Clove as a ploughshare cleaves the field And pierced the hauberk triple-steeled, That horse with horseman stricken reeled, And as a storm-breached rock falls, fell. And Balen turned his horse again And wist not yet his foe lay slain, And saw him dead ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... equal to those which attest the long duration of the Roman power. While Captain Smyth was engaged in his survey of the coast, a farmer in the island of St. Pietro, successively a Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman station, passed his ploughshare over an amphora of Carthaginian brass coins, of which Captain Smyth purchased about 250. “They were,” he states, “with two exceptions, of the usual type: obverse, the head of Ceres; and reverse, a horse or palm-tree, or both.” Some presented to me by Carlo Rugiu, one ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... chivalry compelled both kings and knights to care for the right personal training of their people; it perished utterly when those kings and knights became demoboroi, devourers of the people. And it will become possible again only, when, literally, the sword is beaten into the ploughshare, when your St. George of England shall justify his name, and Christian art shall be known as its Master ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... special traits make them attractive. Carlyle is one of these few, and no revelations can prevent his interesting us. He was not quite finished in his parental existence. The bricklayer's mortar of his father's calling stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns. We do not wish either to have been other than what he was. Their breeding brings them to the average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a simpler ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a third part, of its domain, which was thereupon regularly occupied by Roman farms. Many nations have gained victories and made conquests as the Romans did; but none has equalled the Roman in thus making the ground he had won his own by the sweat of his brow, and in securing by the ploughshare what had been gained by the lance. That which is gained by war may be wrested from the grasp by war again, but it is not so with the conquests made by the plough; while the Romans lost many battles, they scarcely ever ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in the distance, with some poor cabins here and there; the sun is setting behind the hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The peasant is a short, thick-set man, old, and clothed in rags. The four horses that he urges forward are thin and gaunt; the ploughshare is buried in rough, unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in that scene of sweat and toil. It is a fantastic personage, a skeleton armed with a whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified horses and belabors them, thus ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... earth loosened by the rude Abyssinian ploughshare, and washed down by the rain from the hills of Ethiopia which man has stripped of their protecting forests, contributes to raise the plains of Egypt, to shoal the maritime channels which lead to the city built by Alexander near the mouth of the Nile, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... movement. He was a wise and tactful man, who succeeded not only in living on terms of friendship with one of the worst landlords in Ireland, but in obtaining many concessions from him. When he came to live in Culloch the landlord had said to him that what he would like to do would be to run the ploughshare through the town, and to turn "Culloch" into Bullock. But before many years had passed Father O'Hara had persuaded this man to use his influence to get a sufficient capital to start a bacon factory. And the town of Culloch possessed no other advantages except ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... blundering in the scheme which had been so well concerted between them. Then he sent for Malherbe, who straightway perpetrated more poems to express the King's despair, in which Henry was made to liken himself to a skeleton with a dried skin, and likewise to a violet turned up by the ploughshare and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Rice Lake, and may have been the sources from whence its channel was filled. Some convulsion of nature at a remote period, by raising the waters above their natural level, might have caused a disruption of the banks, and drained their beds, as they now appear ready for the ploughshare or the spade. In the month of June these flats are brilliant with the splendid blossoms of the Castilegia coccinea, or painted-cup, the azure lupine (Lupinus perennis), and snowy Trillium; dwarf roses (Rosa blanda) scent the evening air, and grow as if planted ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... blue, divided the rich green of the earth from the azure of the heavens. Far as the eye could reach, it beheld the wildest luxuriance of nature refined and subdued by the hand of cultivation and taste. Man had reverenced the grandeur of the Creator, and made the ploughshare turn aside from the noble shade-tree, and left the streams rejoicing in their margins of verdure; and far off, far away beneath the shadow of the misty blue hills,—of a paler, more leaden hue,—the waters of the great sea seemed ready ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... and children played at battles on the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, that the same weak half-blind old man who tried ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... aggressive, but he is strong on Defence. Possession with him is ten points of the law—it is everything. Let the independence of his country be threatened, and he is at once a man of action. He figuratively converts his ploughshare into a sword, although the uses of that weapon are unknown to him. At the time of the Jameson Raid it may safely be asserted that there did not exist a single Boer—young or old—who was not in possession of a serviceable firearm and the full complement ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... "That word is a ploughshare which suits only loose soil, and mine, now that my master is waiting for me, can not be tilled even by the sharpest. Another time! But if, meanwhile, you have any message ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... this nymph is fashioned like a sort of boar's-snout armed with six strong spikes, a multiple ploughshare, eminently adapted for burrowing in the soil. A double row of hooks surmounts the dorsal ring of the four front segments of the abdomen. These are so many grappling-irons, with whose assistance the creature is enabled to progress in the narrow gallery dug by the snout. Lastly, a sheaf of sharp ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... character of an officer at the head of a corps of gallant Frenchmen, if circumstances should require this; whether as a major- general, commanding a division of the American army; or whether, after our swords and spears have given place to the ploughshare and pruning- hook, I see you as a private gentleman, a friend and companion, I shall welcome you with all the warmth of friendship to Columbia's shores; and, in the latter case, to my rural cottage, where homely fare and a cordial reception shall be substituted for delicacies and costly living. ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... patent—they lack the psychic function, that peculiar element, whatever it may be, which raises civilized man so high above them. That this element can be developed in savages I do not for one instant deny. The ploughshare of evolutionary civilization will bring it to the surface sooner or later, and when it does insanity follows. I have only to point to the American negro to prove the truth of my proposition; even he is partially exempt, simply because his civilization is of such recent ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... It is a gigantic ploughshare of rock, set up against the sky, its thin, keen, purple blade edged with glittering frost; for so sharp is its point, that only a dazzling line marks the eternal snow ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... man of the ploughshare and not of the sword. I want to get back to my quiet farming life again, and that is impossible while war devastates ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... than any other to awaken the interest of the world in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh. But before his day another man had startled the world with what we may call the discovery of Egypt. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte, the man whose sword was a ploughshare turning up the fallow fields of Europe, and sowing strange crops of tyranny and liberty, and whose ambition it was to set up a new throne in the land of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies. The mighty ruins of Karnak and the imperishable pyramids filled him with amazement, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... custom sunk before the efforts of the clergy in the seventeenth century; but there must still be many alive who, in childhood, have been taught to look with wonder on knolls and patches of ground left uncultivated, because, whenever a ploughshare entered the soil, the elementary spirits were supposed to testify their displeasure by storm and thunder. Within our own memory, many such places, sanctified to barrenness by some favourite popular superstition, existed, both in Wales and Ireland, as ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... cannot pinch, passion swerve, or trial shake it. But the man Lessing, harassed and striving life-long, always poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his own right-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin's ploughshare drive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was hardly kindled, and who, through all, was faithful to himself, to his friend, to his duty, and to his ideal, is something more inspiring for us than the most glorious utterance of merely intellectual power. The figure of Goethe is ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... of the ground. This, indeed, was his real discovery, not to mention the layer of humus which he felt certain would be found amassed on the plateau, and the wondrous fertility which it would display as soon as a ploughshare had passed through it. And so with his pick he now began to open the trench which was to drain the damp soil above, and fertilize the dry, sterile, thirsty ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... were only a few books, at least they were good ones; and now they are so plentiful, all they do is to confound the judgment, unsettle the reason, drive the good books out of cultivation, and draw a ploughshare of innovation over every ancient landmark; seduce the women, womanize the men, upset states, thrones, and churches; rear a race of chattering, conceited coxcombs who can always find books in plenty to excuse them from doing their duty; make the poor discontented, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spake the Oracle? 'Care for no name at all! Say but just this: We praise one helpful whom we call The Holder of the Ploughshare. The great ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... of the ploughshare that doesn't rust. Perhaps you are right; but before you go to work, take a sip of this. Our wine is still the best. When people have something to do, at least they don't mutiny, like those poor fellows among ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Nowhere did the revolutionary ploughshare cut deeper than among the clergy and the religious orders. Nearly forty monasteries and convents were suppressed in Paris, and strange scenes were those when the troops of monks and friars issued forth to secular life, some crying "Vive Jesus le Roi, et la Revolution," ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... have house and land in Kent."—This admirable song has been frequently reprinted. Miss De Vaynes, in her very valuable "Kentish Garland" (i., 142), observes:—"We have met with no other song in the Kentish dialect except Jan Ploughshare's" (printed on p. 372, vol. i., of the "Garland"). Rimbault in his "Little Book of Songs and Ballads" (1851), gives the following lines from an old MS. ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... for having detected the pretended madness of Ulysses, by which he sought to avoid going upon the expedition to Troy. Ulysses was ploughing and Palamedes placed the infant Telemachus in front of the ploughshare. Ulysses revealed his sanity by stopping ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... He drove a stout bay horse, and as he walked along in the furrow he watched the rich black earth turn up before the ploughshare. He hated no man, and no man hated him. The war had never invaded his valley, and he sang from the sheer pleasure of living. The world about him was green and growing, and the season was good. His nephew, ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to rally was so crazed with consternation, that it was plain the sceptre had departed from their master. The capacity as well as the power for any effectual action was indeed evidently taken from them, and the ploughshare was driven over the ruins of their cause on the ever-memorable eleventh day of April, when William and Mary were ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... simplicity, although they may be understood and appreciated by the high-minded, are held in contempt by the low and the uneducated, because imagined to be within their own attainment. Had Cincinnatus ruled in England, he would never have abandoned a kingdom for a ploughshare; such an act would have been looked upon, at least by more than half the nation, as proceeding from weakness rather than from true strength of mind. The English, notwithstanding all their talk about equality, have not enthusiasm enough to understand or to ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... swords of your soldiers have been sent for to be sharpened, and not at all to be beaten into ploughshares. I permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my earnest writings—"Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of the Sword"—and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope, namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the national passions towards ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... his personal enemies; their estates were confiscated; their fortresses on either side of the Tyber were besieged by the troops of St. Peter and those of the rival nobles; and after the ruin of Palestrina or Praeneste, their principal seat, the ground was marked with a ploughshare, the emblem of perpetual desolation. Degraded, banished, proscribed, the six brothers, in disguise and danger, wandered over Europe without renouncing the hope of deliverance and revenge. In this double hope, the French court was their surest asylum; they ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... priests amongst the Egyptians. But the reason why the hog is had in so much honor and veneration amongst them is, because as the report goes, that creature breaking up the earth with its snout showed the way to tillage, and taught them how to use the ploughshare, which instrument for that very reason, as some say, was called HYNIS from [Greek omitted], A SWINE. Now the Egyptians inhabiting a country situated low and whose soil is naturally soft, have no need of the plough; ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of humanity, happiest man among men, Who, with hammer, or chisel, or pencil, with rudder, or ploughshare, or pen, Laboureth ever and ever with hope through the morning of life, Winning home and its darling divinities—love-worshipped children and wife, Round swings the hammer of industry, quickly the sharp chisel rings, And the heart of the toiler has throbbings that ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... treeless and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... been pent in narrow channels, like wild steeds bound to the ploughshare, broke away with exultation; the springs poured down from the mountains, and the air was blind with rain. Valleys and uplands were covered; strange countries were joined in one great sea; and where the highest trees had towered, only a little greenery ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... noon, while he and his whole family were 'at the Lecture,' in church, a Puritan form of edification. A ladder had been placed against the wall, the bars of a window on the second story had been wrenched away with a ploughshare (which was left in the room), and 140l. of Lady Campden's money were stolen. The robber was never discovered—a curious fact in a small and lonely village. The times, however, were disturbed, and a wandering ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... garden-spot. Then, swiftly running to the top of the little bluff beyond, they gazed over the smiling panorama of emerald prairie, laced with woody creeks, level fields, as yet undisturbed by the ploughshare, blue, distant woods and yet more distant hills, among which, to the northwest, the broad river wound and disappeared. Westward, nothing was to be seen but the green and rolling swales of the virgin prairie, broken here and there by an outcropping of rock. And as they looked, a tawny, ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... of things survives only in the case of a few castes, but prior to the introduction of a metal currency must apparently have been the method of remuneration of all the village industries. The Lohar or blacksmith makes and mends the iron implements of agriculture, such as the ploughshare, axe, sickle and goad. For this he is paid in Saugor a yearly contribution of 20 lbs. of grain per plough of land held by each cultivator, together with a handful of grain at sowing-time and a sheaf at harvest from both the autumn and spring crops. In Wardha he gets 50 lbs. of grain ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... kind of chase is carried on by Rooks, Crows, and Magpies, who follow the plough to seize the worms which the ploughshare turns up in the open earth. In autumn they cover the fields, animated and active, pilfering as the ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the labors, and dangers of border life, in all of which woman bears her part. While the primeval forest falls before the stroke of the man-pioneer, his companion does the duty of both man and woman at home. The hearthstone is laid, and the rude cabin rises. The virgin soil is vexed by the ploughshare driven by the man; the garden and house, the dairy and barns are tended by the woman, who clasps her babe while she milks, and fodders, and weeds. Danger comes when the man is away; the woman must meet it alone. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... is past— Our once dear love, whose rain lies Like a fair flower, the meadow's last. Which feels the ploughshare's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... neither of these standards is appropriate for all kinds of land, but each for some kind: for some land is easy and some difficult to plough, and oxen are unable to break up some land except by great effort and often they leave the ploughshare in the furrow broken from the beam: wherefore in this respect we should observe a triple rule on every farm, when we are new to it, namely: find out the practice of the last owner; that of the neighbours, and make some ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover. There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses, Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours, With tears! There sigh and moan and the tired peasant Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting, Shall wonder at thy grief, ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... her husband's house, she finds at the door a broom; or, if he takes possession of her's, a ploughshare is placed there: both allegorical of their duties. The distaff of the bride is carried by an old woman ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... smoke of battle, rise unpityingly over heaps of unburied dead from the Potomac to the Mississippi. Maxime Valois knows at last the penalty of the fatal conspiracy. A sacrificed generation, ruined homes, and the grim ploughshare of war rives the fairest fields of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... feature of Christendom is quantity, power, variety, fulness; not as yet co-operation, harmony, peace, union. Powers are first developed, which are afterward to be harmonized. The sword is not yet beaten into a ploughshare, nor has universal peace arrived. Yet such is the inevitable tendency of things. As knowledge spreads, as wealth increases, as the moral force of the world is enlarged, law, more and more, takes the place of force. Men no longer wear swords by their sides ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and numeric point of view. Added to these was the handful of Jesuits at Mont Desert, and we might say a colony of Swedes on the sea-coast, between the two large rivers just named, the memory of which is traditional, and the vestiges of which are sometimes turned up by the ploughshare. These people probably fell beneath some outbreak of savage vengeance, which left no name or ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... vanished, All his life henceforth a dreary and tenantless mansion, Haunted by vain regrets, and pallid, sorrowful faces. Still he said to himself, and almost fiercely he said it, "Let not him that putteth his hand to the plough look backwards;[35] 245 Though the ploughshare cut through the flowers of life to its fountains, Though it pass o'er the graves of the dead and the hearths of the living, It is the will of the Lord, ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... that it may profit or be made glorious by a comparison with what is different. Yet it is not to be supposed that all that is recorded has some signification; but those things which have no signification of their own are interwoven for the sake of the things which are significant. Only by the ploughshare is the earth cut in furrows; but that this may be, other parts of the plough are necessary. Only the strings of the harp and other musical instruments are fitted to give forth a melody; but that they may do so, there ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... blanching cheeks, and his timorous, wavering glances. Ceaselessly now rang out the clanging peal of the tocsin. Thought of no danger to come restrained their furious anger. Quick into weapons of war the husbandman's peaceful utensils All were converted; dripped with blood the scythe and the ploughshare. Quarter was shown to none: the enemy fell without mercy. Fury everywhere raged and the cowardly cunning of weakness. Ne'er may I men so carried away by injurious passion See again! the sight of the raging wild beast would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... bridge, one of the stone piers of which rose from it. The grass which grew upon it was short, thick, and delicate. On the opposite side of the river lay a field for bleaching the linen, which was the chief manufacture of that country. Hence it enjoyed the privilege of immunity from the ploughshare. None of its daisies ever met the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Adams to his wife, "has a pair of horses to sell; one nine, the other ten years old, for which he asks a thousand dollars.... He must sell something to enable him to clear out. When a man is about retiring from public life, and sees nothing but a ploughshare between him and the grave, he ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... mainly for the reason that public affairs were so strained. He said his own crop of corn which he intended putting into the lot near Old Ti upon which he "had let the light of day" could wait a bit, under the circumstances, for there might be occasion to "beat his ploughshare into ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... beheld a man ploughing in a field hard by, and, as he ploughed, he whistled lustily. And drawing near to the field, I sat down upon a gate and watched, for there are few sights and sounds I am fonder of than the gleam of the ploughshare and the sighing whisper it makes as it turns the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... mantlet. They are pretty contrivings the both of them, but I set not such store on them as does my brother of France." And here I should say that the cat was like to a tent made of hides long and narrow and low upon the ground, with a pointed end as it might be a ploughshare, which could be brought up to the walls by men moving it from within, and so sheltered from the stones and darts of the enemy. As for the mantlet, it was made in somewhat the same fashion, only it was less in size, nor was it to be brought near to the wall. King Philip loved dearly to sit ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... asked to drive a ploughshare over the very foundation of our position; to break down and destroy the bulwark by which we may secure the results of a great war and a great history, by which we may preserve from defilement this place, where alone in our organism the people never lose their supremacy, except by the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... them in the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men,' said he, Were slain in that ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... of her resources. The lines on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other people's sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil that ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... feather, And returned to ways of quiet, To the quiet of the hearthstone. There were generals and captains, In the army and the navy, There were colonels, there were majors, There were officers and soldiers; Men who went from farm and fireside, Men who went from shop and ploughshare. All the States rose up in answer To the martial proclamation. There were Pike and Brown and Chandler, Boyd, Macomb, and Scott and Winder, Dudley, Harrison, and Hampton, Miller, Wilkinson, and Bainbridge, Hull and Perry, Jones, Decatur— All these names adorn the record, Mark the ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... wrenched off the iron share from a plough, remarking that it would be an excellent tool wherewith to bore a hole in the castle wall—a remark which his comrade received in silence, though not without surprise. When they arrived at the castle Elbegast seemed anxious to see the ploughshare at work, for he begged Charlemagne to ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... thin and delicate partition between the two cavities of the nose. It is so named from its resemblance to a ploughshare. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... thing in life," continued the young man, "and that is that peace is not for this world. Peace is what God gives us when He takes us into His rest. Beat your sword into a ploughshare if you like, but beat ...
— When William Came • Saki
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