"Anvil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cave heard all these strange noises; the crowing of the cocks, the hammering on the anvil, the chopping of wood, the music of the koto, the clappering of the hard wood, the tinkling of the bells, the shouting of Uzume and the boisterous laughter of the gods. Wondering what it ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... anvil, see God's goods across the counter, put God's wealth in circulation, teach God's children in the school,—so shall the dust of your labor build itself into a little sanctuary where you and ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... Accordingly I again advanced, bearing a green branch on high, but the repulsive gestures then becoming much more violent than before I stopped at some distance from the party. Honest Vulcan, our blacksmith (two or three men being near him) was at work with his bellows and anvil near the riverbank. This man's labour seemed to excite very much their curiosity; and again the overseer and Bulger advanced quietly towards those natives who had approached nearest to the blacksmith. Hearing at length much laughter, I concluded that a truce had been effected as ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Jack was a philosopher and no subject was out of his field. Hartigan liked Shives, enjoyed the shop with its smoke and flying sparks, and took a keen relish in the unfettered debate that filled in the intervals between Shives's ringing blows on the anvil. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... are excellent blacksmiths, producing a result that would astonish an English workman, considering the rough nature of their tools, which are confined to a hammer, anvil, and tongs; the latter formed of a cleft-stick of green wood, while the two former are stones of various sizes. Their bellows consist of two pots about a foot deep; from the bottom of each is an earthenware pipe about two feet long, the points of which ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... anvil rest, Dews upon the gowan's breast; Young hearts heave with tender thought, Low winds sigh, with odours fraught, Stars bedeck the blue above, Earth is full of joy and love; Row, lads, row; row, lads, row; Let your oars in concert beat Merry time, like dancers' feet; Row, lads, row; row, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of cursing, that Jesus, of His great mercy, should show some miracle who should be rightwise king. So in the greatest church of London there was seen against the high altar a great stone and in the midst thereof there was an anvil of steel, and therein stuck a fair sword, naked by the point, and letters of gold were written about the sword that said, "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... off. Him and me ain't friends no more, so's you could notice. Seven years now since I hit him for cussin' me for somethin' that wa'n't my fault! But, by gee whiz, old Bully Presby could go some! We tipped an anvil over that day, and wrecked a bellows before they pulled us off each other. I've always wondered, since then which of us is ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... ye who at the anvil toil, And strike the sounding blow, Where, from the burning iron's breast, The sparks fly to and fro, While answering to the hammer's ring, And fire's intenser glow!—Oh, while ye feel 'tis hard to toil And sweat the long day through, Remember, it is harder still To have ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... to be expected. Iron is not to be found in Java; indeed, it is extremely rare in the whole Archipelago; consequently it bears a high price, and the art of the blacksmith is held in a sort of reverence. The term for a son of the anvil signifies 'learned.' The inhabitants of this island trace their origin to a monkey, which they call 'woo-woo.' They are, for the most part, Mohammedans, but not strict, as they will not hesitate to drink wine at the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the links of Union: shall we light The fires of hell to weld anew the chain, On that red anvil ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Governor Wolcott, who seemed to have been expecting some such outcome of the battle, gave his answer clear as an anvil-blow: ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... (SPERM WHALE).—This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... ventilated. Where there has not been sufficient warmth, their provisions—even brandy—became so frozen as to require to be cut by a hatchet. The mercury in a barometer has frozen so that it might be beaten on an anvil. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... to have Theophile Gautier direct this part of the Presse in order not to contend with Balzac, but the novelist was so unreasonable that M. de Girardin had to intervene. "My beautiful Queen," once wrote Theophile to Delphine, "if this continues, rather than be caught between the anvil Emile and the hammer Balzac, I shall return my apron to you. I prefer planting cabbage or raking the walls of your garden." To this, Madame de Girardin replied: "I have a gardener with whom I am very well satisfied, thank you; continue ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... came out in all its bright importance. The lusty bellows roared Ha ha! to the clear fire, which roared in turn, and bade the shining sparks dance gayly to the merry clinking of the hammers on the anvil. The gleaming iron, in its emulation, sparkled too, and shed its red-hot gems around profusely. The strong smith and his men dealt such strokes upon their work, as made even the melancholy night rejoice, and brought a glow into its dark face as it hovered ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... blow was that you gave me; why, one would think that your muscles were made of steel. I thought that I could hit a good downright blow, seeing that I have been hammering at the anvil for the last seven years; but strike as I would I could not beat down your guard, while mine went down, as if it had been a feather, before yours. I knew, directly that I had struck the first blow, and felt how ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... to place his advice at the service of any of the Allied Commanders-in-Chief, and Owd Jerry the smith, who knew how to keep silent, but whose opinion, when given, fell with the weight of his hammer on the anvil. He refuted his opponents by asking them questions, after the manner of Socrates. The subject of conversation was the village school-mistress, who had recently been placed in charge of some thirty children, and was winning ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... must enjoy a part, For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same, And himself with it, that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn; For a good poet's made as well as born, And such wert thou! Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakspeare's ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... and on working the bellows a strong flame was produced. All our tools were composed of coral; two long pieces served as tongs, and another as a hammer. Having heated the iron, Dick knocked it out into a long thin bar, and then placing it on the mass of coral which served as an anvil, cut it with successive sharp blows of his knife into small pieces. Each of these had to be re-heated, and taken up and dropped into a small hole with a blow from the hammer, when the head was produced by another sharp blow. In this way he formed a number of small nails ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... could not get anything published at all except in the toy magazines, which paid little and late and died early. The other writer could get published, but not sold. Both were young and needed only to pound their irons on the anvil to get them hot, but they blamed the world for being cold to true art. In time they would make the sparks fly and would be in their turn assailed as mere blacksmiths by the next line of younger apprentices. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Fatalism mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Out of my doors, knave, if thou likest it not. I cry you mercy! is your ears so fine? I tell thee, knave, these get when I do sleep; I will not have my Anvil stand for thee. ...
— Cromwell • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... endeavoured to force her way through; the javelins rattled on her head like hammers on an anvil. She began to yell like ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... cut into the rock of the fell on three sides, and having a roof of thatch. The glare of the fire, now rising, now falling, streamed through the open door. It sent a long vista of light through the blank and pulsating haze. The vibrations of the anvil were all but the only sounds on the air; the alternate thin clink of the smith's hand-hammer and the thick thud of the striker's sledge echoed in unseen ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... matter: White jet comes from Norway, black jet comes from England, black glass jewellery comes from Germany. Jet is the lightest, the most precious, the most costly. Imitations can be made in France as well as in Germany. What is needed is a little anvil two inches square, and a lamp burning spirits of wine to soften the wax. The wax was formerly made with resin and lampblack, and cost four livres the pound. I invented a way of making it with gum shellac and turpentine. It does not cost more than thirty sous, and is much better. Buckles are ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a forge and seen a blacksmith at work? It is quite exciting, I assure you, to see the flames being fanned by the bellows, and myriads of sparks flying upwards and outwards on all sides, while the blacksmith hammers the red-hot metal on the anvil and shapes it into horseshoes and other useful things made ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... natural. Drive thy straw deeper, Mounsieur Mustardseed! there squats a pestilent sweet notion in that chamber could spellican but set him capering. Prithee your mousemilk hand on this smooth brow, mistress! Your nectar throbbeth like a blacksmith's anvil. Master Moth, draw you these bristling lashes down, they mirk the stars and call yon nothing Quince to mind—a vain, official knave, in and out, to and fro, play or pleasure; and old Sam Snout, the wanton! Lad's days and ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... she ought to do, intended doing, and could not. She groped desperately, but overwhelming, insistent, there had developed in her a sudden, preventing tumult—in paradox, a confusion in rhythm—like the beating of a great hammer on an anvil, only incredibly more swift than blows from human hands. Over and over again she repeated to herself the one word: "wait," "wait," "wait," but mechanically now, without thought as to the reason. Then, all at once, soft, all-enfolding, kindly ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Earth is from Heaven so is Tartarus from Earth. A brazen anvil falling down from Heaven to Earth nine days and nine nights would reach the earth upon the tenth day. And again, a brazen anvil falling from Earth nine nights and nine days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth night. ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... person, at the same time administering a dose of some good physic. 3. Take garden parsley, make it into a tea and let the patient drink freely of it. 4. Take the scales that will fall around the blacksmith's anvil, powder them fine, and put them in sweetened rum. Shake when you take them, and give a teaspoonful ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... shall be as hard as a stone, and as firm as a smith's anvil." (Septuagint, "He hath stood ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... blacksmith's anvil sounds With slow and sluggard beat, Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds Wakes up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... ungentle son-in-law, truly. I shall ever walk the worse for his rudeness. This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly. Cursed be the smith who forged it, and the anvil ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... heat of which is urged by a pair of double bellows of a very simple construction, being made of two goats' skins; the tubes from which unite, before they enter the forge, and supply a constant and very regular blast. The hammer, forceps, and anvil, are all very simple, and the workmanship (particularly in the formation of knives and spears) is not destitute of merit. The iron, indeed, is hard and brittle, and requires much labour before it can be made ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... would laugh for glee, and seizing the heaviest hammer he could see he would swing it with such force upon the anvil that it would be splintered into ...
— Stories of Siegfried - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... they will not go far," returned Gallito and rubbed his hands. His reply had been quick and sharp as the beat of a hammer on an anvil; but now he spoke more softly: "But will she go at all, my friend? You, like myself, have ever played for high stakes. Then you know and I know that this is a world where a man may never look ahead and calculate and say, 'because there is this combination of circumstances, these results will certainly ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... whole, this army was justly thought the equal of twice its own number of raw yeomanry, suddenly called to the field from the anvil, the workshop, or the plough. Its strongest arm was its artillery; its ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... ere its core grows cold And the moist life of all that breathes shall die; Or as the new-born seer, perchance more wise, Would have us deem, before its growing mass, Pelted with stardust, atoned with meteor-balls, Heats like a hammered anvil, till at last Man and his works and all that stirred itself Of its own motion, in the fiery glow Turns to a flaming vapor, and our orb Shines a new sun for earths that ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... millions, free and brave, Whose shores two mighty oceans lave: Your cultured fields, your marts of trade, Keels by the hand of genius laid, The shuttle's hum, the anvil's ring Echo your voice that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rather to subdue the wicked by meekness. Every wound is not healed by the same plaster; assuage inflammations by lenitives. Be not intimidated by those who seem worthy of faith, yet teach things that are foreign. Stand firm, as an anvil which is beaten: it is the property of a true champion to be struck and to conquer. Let not the widows be neglected. Let religious assemblies be most frequent. Seek out every one in them by name. Despise not the slaves, neither suffer ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... that follow'd, evidence their truth;" I answer'd: "Nature did not make for these The iron hot, or on her anvil mould them." "Who voucheth to thee of the works themselves," Was the reply, "that they in very deed Are that they purport? None hath sworn so ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... his memory, always sensitive to exterior impressions, called up the ceaseless clang of hammers. From the rising of the sun till the earth began to darken with the shadows of twilight the iron sang or groaned on the anvil, jarring the walls of the house and the floor of the garret, where Mariano used to play, lying on the floor at the feet of a pale, sickly woman with serious, deep-set eyes, who frequently dropped her sewing to kiss the little one with sudden violence, as though she feared she ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... on the road passed beneath a clump of trees, which hid a few houses, and they could distinguish the vibrating and regular blows of a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil; and presently they saw a wagon standing on the right side of the road in front of a low cottage, and two men shoeing a horse under ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... uniform, he put on his old clothes, his sabots and his leather apron, and for ten long days the hammer beat incessantly upon the anvil. ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Mistress Burthen! Ye will be after breaking my heart, ye will; and me waiting for you these long years, and now at last come all the way over from old Ireland to find ye as hard and obdurate as the blacksmith's anvil in the corner of Saint Patrick's street, in Ballybruree," were the first words that caught my ear. "Shure you will be afther relenting and not laving me a disconsolate widower, to go back to Ballyswiggan all alone ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... of instruments and performers composing the great orchestra was 1,011; and an organ of immense proportions and power, built expressly for the occasion, was employed. The grand chorus and solo vocalists numbered 1,040. Besides, one hundred anvils (used in the rendering of Verdi's "Anvil Chorus") were played upon by a hundred of the city's firemen in full uniform; while to all this was added a group of cannon, the same being used in the performance of the "Star-spangled Banner." The vast chorus, the orchestra, and all the leading performers (among ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... appear to be the children of the great solitudes, the slumbering sunlit vastnesses; nay, rather do they spring from the unbroken friction of many spirits, sparks bursting from the anvil of the great, restlessly driven ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... glory in the shuttle's song; There's triumph in the anvil's stroke; There's merit in the brave and strong Who dig the mine or fell ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... iron on the anvil without heating it at the forge; he simply hammered it hot and forged nail after nail, without the use of either anvil or bellows. None of the judges had ever seen a blacksmith wield a hammer more masterfully, and the Haerjedal smith was proclaimed ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... time, was undeveloped; but for use in poetry, especially, there were a great number of periphrastic but vividly picturesque metaphorical synonyms (technically called kennings). Thus the spear becomes 'the slaughter-shaft'; fighting 'hand-play'; the sword 'the leavings of the hammer' (or 'of the anvil'); and a ship 'the foamy-necked floater.' These kennings add much imaginative suggestiveness to the otherwise over-terse style, and often contribute to the grim irony which ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... have become a positive magnet in the fall; the forge and anvil of the sun have had their effect. In the spring it is negative to all intellectual conditions, and drains one ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... movement will conquer the territory not with arms in their hands, but with the gold-rocker, the plough, the loom, and the anvil, the steam-boat, the railway, and the telegraph. Commerce and agriculture, disenthralled by the influences of free institutions, will cause the new empire to spring into life, full armed, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. Its Pacific ports will be thronged with ships of all nations, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... again. She sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry grass—if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the summer sun." And there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and flat as an anvil's face. "No iron like that!" Not a weed nor a shell: "death's altar by the lone shore." The drear analogies succeed one another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. The dead grass, the dead rock. . . . But now, what is this on the turf? A gay ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the ground. They never use chairs or benches, but always squat upon the floor, and all their work is done upon the ground. Carpenters have no benches, and if they plane a board they place it upon the earth before them and hold it fast with their feet. The blacksmith has his anvil on the floor; the goldsmith, the tailor and even the printer use the floor for benches, and it is the desk of the letter writer and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... sparks struck as it were from the anvil of events. They were written on trains, in hotels, in the intervals between public addresses. During the past year beginning October 1, 1917, Dr. Hillis, in addition to his work in Plymouth Church, and as President of The Plymouth Institute, has visited no less ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... heights near the cemetery: the view so well known to visitors to that city. The people of Rouen who have spread out into the enormous suburb of St. Sever, on the left bank of the Seine,[42] are busy by thousands in the manufactories,—the sound of the loom and the anvil comes up to us even here; and down by the banks of the river, away westward, as far as the eye can see, up spring clean bright houses of the wealthy manufacturers and traders of Rouen,—rich, sleek, and portly gentlemen with the ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... is well, for you will never feel the crown on your brows, good uncle! You are ground between the Spanish hammer and the Bearnais anvil; there will soon be nothing ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... making the iron ribbons for the sleigh runners he had to go across to the smithy; and there stood a cottar at work roughing horseshoes. Red glowing iron once more, and steel. The clang of hammer on anvil seemed to tear his ears; yet it drew him on too. It was long since last he heard that sound. And ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... returning to his hotel. They had disposed themselves in pairs on opposite sides of the way, so that when he was between them their clubs could all play upon him together, like the hammers of the Cyclops on their great anvil. The passing of the group of women, escorted by Blazius and Leander, none of whom perceived them, had warned them of the approach of their victim, and they stood awaiting his appearance, firmly grasping ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... now, during which I could count every throb of my heart, and throat, and temples—my whole frame was transfigured into an anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not move, nor speak, nor weep—no wretchedness was ever more supreme than this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first to break ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... following in the wagon, with their little stock of household goods,—not forgetting his hammer, more potent than Prospero's wand. The minister, the doctor, and Squire Kinloch, who constituted the aristocracy, yielded precedence in date to Ralph Hardwick, Knight of the Ancient Order of the Anvil. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... most things, and all the myriad ways between these two extremes; would Oscar be conquered by it and allow remorse and hatred to corrupt his very heart, or would he conquer the prison and possess and use it? Hammer or anvil—which? ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... nuns would learn If, on a rock, by Lindisfarne, Saint Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame The sea-born beads that bear his name: Such tales had Whitby's fishers told, And said they might his shape behold, And hear his anvil sound: A deadened clang—a huge dim form, Seen but, and heard, when gathering storm And night were closing round. But this, as tale of idle fame, The ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... thrones, they are unwilling to admit that he can be practical. If Mr. Burritt should prove as good a statesman as a theorist, he would be an exception to most who belong to the aerial school. As a writer he stands deservedly high. In his "Sparks from the Anvil," and "Voice from the Forge," are to be found as fine pieces as have been produced by any writer of the day. His "Drunkard's Wife" is the most splendid thing of the kind in the language. His stature is of the middle ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task which Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind will ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... sitting by the anvil, and considering the iron work, the vapour of the fire wasteth his flesh, and he fighteth with the heat of the furnace: the noise of the hammer and the anvil is ever in his ears, and his eyes look still upon the pattern of the thing that he maketh; he setteth his mind to finish his work, and watcheth ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... human ear (left ear, seen from the front, natural size), a shell of ear, b external passage, c tympanum, d tympanic cavity, e Eustachian tube, f, g, h the three bones of the ear (f hammer, g anvil, h stirrup), i utricle, k the three semi-circular canals, l the sacculus, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... and the rich. He was delicacy itself, incapable of a strong expression, and happier far when he could hint, and not express his sentiments. Had I been subject only to his examination, my ordeal would not have been severe. It was the blacksmith whom I found hard and unimpressible as his own anvil, dark as his forge, and as unpitying as its flames. The thin examiner held the high office of deacon of the church. Whether it was the particularly dirty face of his friend that set him off to such advantage, or whether he had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... some heart, some frankness and honesty, but he was a bluff, rough sailor, and when excited, oaths of the hottest sort flew from his lips, like sparks from an anvil. Because of his roughness and profanity, and because, perhaps, of the fact of his surrounding himself with a lot of natural children, the Duchess was determined to persevere in her retirement from the Court circle, and in keeping her innocent ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Aug. 15, and Sept. 15, 1773.—It is strange however that, while in these three places Boswell mentions Burke's name, he should leave a blank here. In Boswelliana, p. 328, Boswell records:—'Langton said Burke hammered his wit upon an anvil, and the iron was cold. There were no sparks ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... some human being. He found himself at length at the mouth of a rocky cave in which a fire seemed burning. He entered, and saw a huge forge, and a crowd of men in front of it, blowing bellows and wielding hammers, and to each anvil were seven men, and a set of more comical smiths could not be found if you searched all the world through! Their heads were bigger than their little bodies, and their hammers twice the size of themselves, but the strongest ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... born entirely of the occasion. It took me several years to put the thoughts in form—to paint the pictures with words. No man can do his best on the instant. Iron to be beaten into perfect form has to be heated several times and turned upon the anvil many more, and hammered long ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... thunderclaps. The lower craters, on the contrary, incessantly gave forth a succession of reports too rapid to be reckoned. These sounds, although unremitting, were clear and distinct, the one from the other. I can find no better comparison for them than the strokes of a hammer falling on an anvil. Had the ancients heard a similar noise, I can readily conceive whence arose the idea of their imagining a forge in the centre of Etna, with the Cyclops ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... Brigitte had not taken this attitude of your godmother, whom she has always found supple to her will, as a personal insult to herself. Very painful explanations, approaching at last to violence, have taken place. Thuillier, placed between the hammer and the anvil, has been unable to stop the affair; on the contrary, he has, without intending it, made matters worse, till they have now arrived at such a point that Mademoiselle Brigitte is packing her trunks ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... to the thoroughfare to the left, leading down to the Admiralty. There he paused for a moment, and, turning around, listened intently. He was possessed of particularly keen hearing and it seemed to him as though from afar off he could hear the sound of a thousand muffled hammers beating upon an anvil; of a strange, methodical disturbance in the air. He grasped the railing with one hand and gazed upward with straining eyes. Just at that moment he saw distinctly what appeared to be a flash of lightning ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the feet; and as I did so the wind came, hard and biting, against my face. There, just below me, not fifty feet away, were rolling the great waves, white-capped and roaring, pounding like vast sledges upon the anvil of the sand. My entire being thrilled at the majestic sight, and for the moment I forgot everything as I gazed away across those restless, heaving waters, seemingly without limit, stretching forth into the dim northward as far ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... roughly exceeded Types B, D and E by a 2:1 ratio. Type C exceeded Types B, D and E with a ratio of about 7:5 in frequency of occurrence. Types B and D were the two most easily cracked nut forms when using a hammer and anvil for a cracking device. It should be noted at this time that all of the abnormal fruit types were found in conjunction with normal fruit types. Thus, one individual tree used as a collection might produce both a normal nut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... Sally, right on the minute," answered the poet-by-stealth, and he hurried across the street with hungry alacrity. The poem-maker was tall and loose-jointed, and the breadth of his shoulders and long muscular limbs decidedly suggested success at the anvil or field furrow. He made a jocular pass at placing his arm around the uncompromising waist-line of his portly wife, and when warded off by an only half-impatient shove he contented himself by winding one of her white apron strings around one of his long fingers as they leaned ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... parliament of England granted, and the nation paid such incredible sums as enabled their sovereign not only to maintain invincible navies and formidable armies, but likewise to give subsidies to all the powers of Europe. He knew that a treaty of this kind was actually upon the anvil between his Britannic majesty and the czarina, and he began to be apprehensive of seeing an army of Russians in the Netherlands. His fears from this quarter were not without foundation. In the month of November, the earl of Hyndford, ambassador from the king of Great Britain at the court of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... feet or more in height, such as no fire would easily burn through, and around each of them a kind of bower of faggots open to the front. Moreover, to the posts hung new wagon chains, and near by stood the village blacksmith and his apprentice, who carried a hand anvil and a sledge hammer for the ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... in Garrets dream for wicked Rhyme Where nothing but their Lodging is sublime. Observe their twenty faces, how they strain To void forth Nonsense from their costive Brain. Who (when they've murder'd so much costly time, Beat the vext Anvil with continual chime, And labour'd hard to hammer statutable Rhyme) Create a BRITISH PRINCE; as hard a task, As would a Cowley or a Milton ask, To build a Poem of the vastest price, A DAVIDEIS, or LOST PARADISE. So tho' ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... be not more exports than imports, if there be not more influences and mightier influences raying out from him than are coming into him, he is a poor creature, and at the mercy of circumstances. 'Men must either be hammers or anvil';—must either give blows or receive them. I am afraid that a great many of us who call ourselves Christians get a great deal more harm from the world than we ever dream of doing good to it. Remember this, 'you are the salt of the earth,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... princess, and he killed millions. We are going after him, even if he drives to the edge of space. And I am going because of a promise I made long ago, and because of the love that I have for Maya. And because of you, Jack Odin. The sword is forged now. It is white-hot upon the anvil. The sparks leap out like stars as the hammer of the smith clangs down. And I will follow Grim Hagen as far as a man can go—even a league beyond the outer shell of space—or a day's journey beyond the grave." (So Gunnar's tale was ended. ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... which he was first confined, the walls were found covered with verses written by him in finely formed characters with the tongue of his shoe-buckle. Every letter he sent to James Melville contained a number of verses 'warm from the anvil.' His nephew, in one of his letters enclosing a remittance of money, had remarked: 'I shall send you money, and you shall send me songs. I have good hope that you will run short of verses for my use before I run short of gold for yours,' to ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... cultivated by some teacher of a village school, who communicated by a method, which genius of a transcendental order knows so well how to employ, a taste for these sublime inquiries, so that at length they gradually worked their way to the anvil and the loom?" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... and our wickedness, and of brethren. What have we, a hardened age, avoided? What have we in our impiety left unviolated! From what have our youth restrained their hands, out of reverence to the gods? What altars have they spared? O mayest thou forge anew our blunted swords on a different anvil against ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... a portion of which, called the Hanging Rocks, huge masses of stone hang suspended over your head. At the side of this defile, is a recess, called the Devil's Blacksmith's Shop. It contains a rock shaped like an anvil, with a small inky current running near it, and quantities of coarse stalagmite scattered about, precisely like blacksmith's cinders, called slag. In another place, you pass a square rock, covered with beautiful dog's tooth spar, called ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... questions. From within the building, muffled by the evidently thick walls, came the faintest sound of metal beating on metal—a mere rippling, tinkling sound, light and musical, such as might have been made by fairy blacksmiths beating on a fairy anvil. But far away as it sounded, it was ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... safety. Majorities are breaking up and dissolving; and the ever changing course, in Germany, especially, undermines the last vestige of confidence that the ruling class had in themselves. To-day one set is anvil, the other the hammer; to-morrow it is the other way. The one tears down what the other painfully builds up. The confusion is ever greater; the discontent ever more lasting; the causes of friction multiply and consume in a few months more ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... a part of this powder on an anvil with a hammer, it exploded very violently, the comparison of which to that prepared by ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... tells an amusing anecdote illustrating the pleasure derived from a book, not assuredly of the first order. In a certain village the blacksmith having got hold of Richardson's novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, used to sit on his anvil in the long summer evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience. It is by no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all. At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... dine somewhere and we will get out our batteries. You are to be procureur-du-roi at Mantes, and I am to be prefect; but we must seem to have nothing to do with the election, for don't you see, we are between the hammer and the anvil. Simon is the candidate of a party which wants to overturn the present ministry and may succeed; but for men as intelligent as you and I there is but one course ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... merchant in this city, a wealthy rival house attempted to crush him, by reducing prices of iron to cost, but Mr. Garrett, nothing dismayed, employed another person to attend his store, put on his leather apron, took to his anvil, and in the prosecution of his trade, as an edge-tool maker, prepared to support himself as long as this ruinous rivalry was kept up. Thus in the sweat of the brow of one of the heroes and philanthropists of this age, was laid ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the crowd going and coming. Please give me your promise again to sit tight and see it through—or go home and leave it all to me." Mr. Vandeford was surprised to feel how hard his heart beat, and he was afraid that it sounded like the echo of an anvil chorus ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... It is thus he speaks, and, like all partial parents, even thinks he feels toward his offspring; but observe his acts narrowly from first to last. He has a manufacturer's heart, with all his genius. He loves machinery—the sound of the mill, the anvil, the spinning-jenny, the sight of the ship upon the high-seas, or steamboat on the river, the roar of commerce, far more than the work of the husbandman. We are an agricultural people, we of the South and West—and especially we Southerners, with our ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... is our guide! From field, from wave, The plough, the anvil, and the loom, We come, our country's rights to save, And speak a tyrant faction's doom. And hark! we raise, from sea to sea, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... "and I intend to throw that star in such a way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape between the hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons of ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... considered them merely in the capacity of blacksmiths, and condemned them to the anvil. This arose from the chief Cyclopian Deity being called Acmon, and Pyracmon. He was worshipped under the former title in Phrygia; where was a city and district called Acmonia, mentioned by Alexander [604]Polyhistor. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... of Fig. 4 Plate 19 (where the strong man having an anvil on his breast or belly, suffers another man to strike with a sledge hammer and forge a piece of iron, or cut a bar cold with chizzels) tho' it seems surprising to some people, has nothing in it to be really wondered at; for sustaining ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... round the top of which he raised a pyramid for the roof, mighty pretty, I assure you, and joined very well together, with iron spikes, which he made himself; for he had made him a forge, with a pair of wooden bellows and charcoal for his work, forming an anvil cut of one of the iron crows, to work upon, and in the manner would he make himself hooks, staples, spikes, bolts, and hinges. After he had pitched the roof of his innermost tent, he made it so firm between the rafters with basket-work, thatching that over again ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... high in the heavens, certainly at an altitude of many miles, the flaming thing swept across my view, comet-shaped and stretching over at least ten degrees of arc, swift as a meteor, brilliantly flesh-red, sputtering sparks like an anvil, and leaving behind it a long ruddy trail that only slowly faded out amid ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... then through the bottom of the boat. There was only one way, and that was to make some bolts eight inches long, and this I did from some pieces of three-eight iron rod I found. Nine bolts took me a whole day to make—from six in the morning till six in the evening. My anvil was a granite rock, which I had to carry on my shoulders from the beach; but it ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... consisted of a large cellar or dungeon, fitted with huge beams of oak fixed close to the floor. Thick iron collars were attached by iron chains to the beams. The collar being placed round the prisoner's neck, it was closed and riveted upon an anvil with heavy blows ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... fertile districts, and systematically replacing the Mongolian culture. But the ignorance of this lower class of Russians is almost as noticeable as that of the natives themselves. As soon as we entered a village, the blacksmith left his anvil, the carpenter his bench, the storekeeper his counter, and the milkmaid her task. After our parade of the principal street, the crowd would gather round us at the station-house. All sorts of queries and ejaculations would pass ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet Than did the primitive Peruvians, Or those old ante queer diluvians, That lived in the unwash'd earth with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith, Tubal, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... the dark, sullen smithy, striketh quick on the anvil below, Thus Fate on the heart of the old man struck rapidly blow after blow: Wife, children, and hope passed away from the heart once so burning and bold, As the bright shining sparks disappear when ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... the smith, He that smoothed with the hammer Him that smote on the anvil; Saying of the solder, It is good; And fixing the idol with nails, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... assumed by Regin, who, also, in order to fitly equip the young man for the coming fight, should forge him a sword, which no blow could break. Twice Regin fashioned a marvellous weapon, but twice Sigurd broke it to pieces on the anvil. Then Sigurd bethought him of the broken fragments of Sigmund's weapon which were treasured by his mother, and going to Hiordis he begged these from her; and either he or Regin forged from them a blade so strong that it divided the great anvil in two without being dinted, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... viands, the sculptors displayed their talents in moulding classical subjects in pastry, and turning boiled fowls into figures of Ulysses and Laertes. The architects built up temples and palaces of jellies, cakes, and sausages; the goldsmith, Robetta, produced an anvil and accoutrements made of a calf's head, the painters treated roast pig to represent a ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they kept, invited the dewy-feathered sleep that visited him, and held him for the ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Patience in six plates, with various things of fancy. In the first, in a chariot, is Patience, who has in her hand a standard, on which is a rose among thorns. In the second may be seen a burning heart, beaten by three hammers, upon an anvil; and the chariot of this second plate is drawn by two figures—namely, by Desire, who has wings upon the shoulders, and by Hope, who has an anchor in the hand, and behind them Fortune, with her wheel broken, is led as a prisoner. In the next plate is Christ on a chariot, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... it tell of plans laid glowing On the anvil of thy heart; Times thou'st raised thy hand for throwing In life's battle many a dart? How each plan unstricken lingered Till the mouldful heat was gone? How each dart was faintly fingered, Resting in the end unthrown; Of the Faith thou ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... in the lane a lonely hut he found, No tenant ventured on the unwholesome ground: Here smokes his forge, he bares his sinewy arm, And early strokes the sounding anvil warm; Around his shop the steely sparkles flew, As for the steed he ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... plates, under his magic touch, are also turned into the most useful things. For instance, the steam hammer used in the government workshop is rigged on steel columns from the debris of an engine room of a wrecked vessel. The hammer is the crank of a disused shaft of a cotton machine, the anvil is from an old "monkey," that drove the piles for the Suakim landing stage in 1884; the two cylinders are from an effete ice machine, and the steam and exhaust pipes come from a useless locomotive of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... coats, marching to pour their blood as an offering on the altar of the Calf. I see them in homespun and broadcloth, I see them in smock and gaiters, I see them in cap and apron, the servants of the Calf. They swarm on the land and they dot the sea. They are chained to the anvil and counter; they are chained to the bench and the desk. They make ready the soil, they till the fields where the Golden Calf is born. They build the ship, and they sail the ship that carries the Golden Calf. They fashion the pots, they mould the pans, they carve the tables, they turn the chairs, ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... home "Gros-Jean," as he was before. But he has no choice; the appointment being once made and confirmed, he cannot decline, nor resign, under penalty of being a "suspect;" he must be the hammer in order not to become the anvil. Whether he is a wine-grower, miller, ploughman or quarry-man, he acts reluctantly, "submitting a petition for resignation," as soon as the Terror diminishes, on the ground that "he writes badly," that "he knows nothing ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that sword was Wotan's and subject to his will; he grinds it to powder, and makes one of his own, with which he will face either man or god. In the making of it he sings the glorious Sword-song; and when it is made he tests it by splitting the anvil with it. Here the first act ends. There are two Siegfried themes to notice; the first, the Hero, ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... contributions, by means of which a MEMORIAL CHURCH may be erected near the site of the ancient college of the Vaudois, at Pra del Tor, Val Angrogna, and so still further illustrate the accuracy of the ancient motto of the Vaudois, "The hammers are broken, the anvil remains." ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... is like Siegfried, the noble child, That song-and-saga wonder, Who, when his fabled sword was forged, His anvil ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... on an old battered anvil, and seemed with his bright eyes to be beholding something in the land of dreams. A gallant dream it was he dreamed; for he saw himself with his brothers and friends about him, seated on a throne, the justest king ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... raised the window a fraction of an inch when an old rusty, heavy anvil and a bent worn plowshare crashed down to the floor directly over the spot where I should have been if he had not dragged me away. I started back, aghast. Nothing had been overlooked to ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... Jared Chick, quietly, his Quaker calm undisturbed. He drew forth a white-hot iron and deftly hammered it into a circle around the snout of the anvil. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... said to have carried a horse on his shoulders. According to Guyot-Daubes there was, in the last century, a Major Barsaba who could seize the limb of a horse and fracture its bone. There was a tale of his lifting an iron anvil, in a blacksmith's forge, and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the darkness deepened, the mists thickened, and a look of unreality came over familiar objects. And then through the wavering gloom there suddenly towered a great dark mass topped by something which rose against the wild dimness like a colossal blacksmith's anvil. It might have been Vulcan's own forge, so strange and fabulous a thing it seemed! The boy's heart leaped with his pony's leap. His imagination spread its swift wings ere he could think; but in another instant he reminded himself. This was not an ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... lay a hand flour-mill and several baskets of cotton. In another part of the court was a granary erected on posts about six feet above the ground, having billets of fire-wood piled below it. At another place, under a tree in the village, he saw a blacksmith's anvil fixed in a block; the forge was of masonry, having an air hole, but the ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... "you are very big and strong and obstinate. You will have your own way however I may plead. Go, then, and strike your great blows upon the anvil of life. You say that I am passing the threshold, that as yet I am ignorant. Very well, I will make my way in with the throng. I will look about me, and see what this thing, life, is, and how much more it may mean to me because I chance to be the possessor of many ill-earned ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... statues, bronzes, engravings, gems, laces—in fact, heirlooms, and bric-a-brac of all sorts. There were many lovely Creole girls present, in exquisite toilets, passing to and fro through the decorated rooms, listening to the band clash out the Anvil Chorus. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... to Mackay, and gave him land on which to build his home. More important to Mackay than even his hut was his workshop, where he quickly fixed his forge and anvil, vise and lathe, and grindstone, for he was now in the place where he could practise his skill. It was for this that he had left home and friends, and pressed on in spite of fever and shipwreck to serve Africa and lead her to the worship of Jesus Christ by working and teaching as ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... he decided to be done with dallying, and to bring Ruth between the hammer and the anvil of his will. It was the last Sunday in July, exactly three weeks after Sedgemoor, and the odd coincidence of his having chosen such a day and hour you shall ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... sharp thrill of benevolence, Mr. Spratt retraced his steps, an eager look in his eyes. He found the old man standing in the broad, open door of Bill Kepsal's blacksmith shop. The blacksmith's assistant was banging away with might and main at his anvil, and Uncle Dad wore a pleased, satisfied smile on his thin old lips. He always said he loved to stand there and listen to the faint, faraway music of the hammer on the anvil, so different from the hammers and anvils they used to have when ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... hand on his hair, made a row of them, without looking at the addresses, on his window-sill, where, happening to be seven in number, they were almost a model of Monypenny, which is within hail of Thrums, but round the corner from it, and so has ways of its own. With the next clang on the anvil the middle letter fell flat, and now the likeness to Monypenny ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... hammer strikes an anvil the air around is violently disturbed. This disturbance spreads through the molecules of the air in much the same way as ripples spread from the splash of a stone thrown into a pond. When the sound waves reach the ear they agitate ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... course indistinguishable, and yet the movement and attitude of the groups conveyed pathos and patient endurance as well as any individual speech or gesture in the ordinary theatre. Some groups carried hammer and anvil, and others staggered under enormous blocks of stone. Love for the ballet has perhaps made the Russians understand the art of moving groups of actors in unison. As I watched these processions climbing the ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... strokes of a hammer upon an anvil. Eli intended to shoot. He was a man of his word. He made no threat that he was not prepared to execute, and Indian Jake knew that Eli would shoot on the ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... deformed and squalid man, with a beard, and hair neglected; half naked; his habit reaching down to his knee only, and having a round peaked cap on his head, a hammer in his right hand, and a smith's tongs in his left, working at the anvil, and usually attended by the Cyclops, or by some of the gods or goddesses for whom he ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... note died, the fire leaped, dropped and left us in dusk and silence. Kitty buried her face against Helen's dress. My heart was pounding until in my own ears it sounded like an anvil chorus. I don't know whether I was very happy or very miserable. I would have died to hear that voice ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of life Our fortunes must be wrought; Thus on its sounding anvil shaped Each burning deed ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... invention of a chemist named Goldschmidt, of Essen, Germany. It is a compound of iron oxide, such as comes off a blacksmith's anvil or the rolls of a rolling-mill, and powdered metallic aluminum. You could thrust a red-hot bar into it without setting it off, but when you light a little magnesium powder and drop it on thermit, a combustion is started that quickly reaches fifty-four ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... come off the other landing craft. A dozen pairs of four-foot wagon wheels, with axles. Hoes, in bundles. Scythe blades. A hand forge, with a crank-driven fan blower, and a hundred and fifty pound anvil, and sledges and cutters ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... a blacksmith until he was twenty years old, when he fell in love with the fair daughter of a painter. The story goes that the father would not permit his daughter to marry any man that was not an artist, and the blacksmith abandoned his anvil for the easel. He had a genius for art, and soon painted better than his masters. He won his bride, and achieved a great reputation in his new art. The picture of The Misers, which you saw at Windsor Castle, was executed ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... shirt rolled up the old Justice of the estate was standing in the yard between the barns and the farm buildings and gazing attentively into a fire which he had kindled on the ground between stones and logs, and which was now crackling merrily. He straightened around a small anvil which was standing beside it, laid down a hammer and a pair of tongs so as to have them ready to grasp, tested the points of some large wheel-nails which he drew forth from the breast-pocket of a leather apron he had tied around him, put the nails down ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... where it is not safe to sit under the tree, and let the ripe fruit drop into your mouth; where the "competition of species" works with ruthless energy among all ranks of being, from kings upon their thrones to the weeds upon the waste; where "he that is not hammer, is sure to be anvil;" and he who will not work, neither shall he eat. It may lead them to devote that energy (in which they surpass so far the continental aristocracies) to something better than outdoor amusements or indoor dilettantisms. ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... shoreward, and the ship is headed to the south. The expedition is important—yes, and it was much more important than Master Day imagined; for something more serious than profits on muslin and brocade was on the anvil ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... Fans deserves especial notice for its excellence. The anvil is a big piece of iron which is embedded firmly in the ground. Its upper surface is flat, and pointed at both ends. The hammers are solid cones of iron, the upper part of the cones prolonged so as to give a good grip, and the blows are given directly downwards, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... those you would thrust upon me as compatriots are not always the nearest. The families of our souls are scattered through the world. Let us re-unite them! Our task is to undo these chaotic nations, and in their place to bind together more harmonious groups. Nothing can prevent it; on the anvil of a common suffering, persecution will forge the common affection ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... many of the African smiths, when considered from their point of view, show sounder sense than if they were burdened with the great weights we use. They are unacquainted with the process of case-hardening, which, applied to certain parts of our anvils, gives them their usefulness, and an anvil of their soft iron would not do so well as a hard stone. It is true a small light one might be made, but let any one see how the hammers of their iron bevel over and round in the faces with a little work, and he will perceive that only a wild freak would induce any sensible native smith ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... story's known. the ringing of those plates on plates Still ringeth round the world— The clangor of that blacksmith's fray. The anvil-din Resounds ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... the mother of invention, made them deft and handy with axe and adze, bradawl and waxed end, anvil and forge. The squire himself was no mean blacksmith, and could shoe a horse, or forge a plough coulter, or set a tire as well as the village Vulcan ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... his eye steadily upon the progress of the vessel. While the artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting and kneeling postures, excavating the rock, or boring with the tools, and while their numerous hammers, and the sound of the smith's anvil continued, the situation of things did not appear so awful. In this state of suspense, with almost certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise upon those who were at work on the lower parts of the sites of the beacon ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... of the primitive civilization, had soon an expectant group in its widely flaring doors, for the smith had had enough of the war, and had come back to wistfully, hopelessly haunt his anvil like some uneasy ghost visiting familiar scenes in which he no more bears a part;—a minie-ball had shattered his stanch hammer-arm, and his duties were now merely advisory to a clumsy apprentice. This was a half-witted fellow, a giant in strength, but not ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... plantation, plunging through the undergrowth until he reached a narrow and little frequented footpath. He was deaf to all sounds, for the thumping in his ears had become now like a sledge-hammer beating upon an anvil. He was not sure that he saw anything. His feet fled over the ground mechanically. Only when he reached the borders of the wood, and crossed the meadow leading to the main road, he drew himself a little more upright. He must remember, he told ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... away from the high tree-tops, the garish street light would have kept it dim. The trees were silent and stirless, as quiet as the graves beneath them—more quiet; in fact; for there issued from a grated hole among the tombs the sound of an anvil, deep down and muffled, but unmistakably ringing, as if Governor Winthrop were forging chains in his vault. Then came a rush, a deadened roar, and an emanation of dank gaseous breath, such ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... nitro-glycerin carried about exposed cannot explode, even if you drop a coal of fire into it; if the liquid is confined, or is under pressure, then an explosion will ensue; if paper be moistened with it and put on an anvil and a smart blow given with a hammer, a sharp detonation ensues; if gunpowder or the fulminates of mercury, silver or gun-cotton be ignited in a vacuum by a galvanic battery, none of them will explode; if any gas be introduced so as to produce a gentle pressure during the decomposition, then a rapid ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... like such stuff, 'tis safer far Than thy Philippics, or Pharsalia's war. What sadder end than his, whom Athens saw At once her patriot, oracle, and law? Unhappy then is he, and curs'd in stars Whom his poor father, blind with soot and scars, Sends from the anvil's harmless chine, to wear The factious gown, and tire his client's ear And purse with endless noise. Trophies of war, Old rusty armour, with an honour'd scar, And wheels of captiv'd chariots, with a piece Of some torn British ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... pantheon, but he was indispensable to the dynasty, and to none more than his father and mother, who were often unkind to him; he had his smithy in Olympus in the vicinity of the gods, and the marvellous creations of his art were shaped on an anvil, the hammer of which was plied by 20 bellows that worked at his bidding; in later traditions he had his workshop elsewhere, and the Cyclops for his servants, employed in manufacturing thunderbolts for Zeus; he was wedded to Aphrodite, whom he caught playing false with Ares, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... blood. For though it takes a great deal to rouse us Germans, when once aroused our feelings run deep and strong. Every one is filled with this passion, with the soldier's ardor. But when the waters of the deluge shall have subsided, gladly will we return to the plow and to the anvil. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... little rest or peace of mind wherever he lead the revel; it was not four-and-twenty hours that he had been at the quiet homestead before the mill was set a-running, the chestnut-trees shaken, the pigeons fired into, a new bell of greater compass put upon the brindle cow, the blacksmith's anvil at the corner of the road set a-dinging, fresh weather-cocks clapped upon the barn, corn-crib, stable, and out-house, the sheep let out of the little barn, all the boats of the neighborhood launched ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... proclaimed aloud, Freedom for Persia! Need I blush for him? To him the empire owes its greatest blessing, The prosperous rule of virtuous Feridun." Tus wrathfully rejoined: "Old man! thy arrow May pierce an anvil—mine can pierce the heart Of the Kaf mountain! If thy mace can break A rock asunder—mine can ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... so valuable as arms, of whatever style and fashion they might be. The bellows blew, and the hammer clanged continually upon the anvil, while the blacksmiths were repairing the broken weapons of other wars. Doubtless, some of the soldiers lugged out those enormous, heavy muskets, which used to be fired with rests, in the time of the early Puritans. Great horse-pistols, too, were found, which would go off with a bang like a cannon. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ponderous hammer rings on the anvil of destiny. Enter, thou massive figure, Bismarck, and in deadly earnest take thy ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel |
