Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Leaven   Listen
verb
Leaven  v. t.  (past & past part. leavened; pres. part. leavening)  
1.
To make light by the action of leaven; to cause to ferment. "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."
2.
To imbue; to infect; to vitiate. "With these and the like deceivable doctrines, he leavens also his prayer."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Leaven" Quotes from Famous Books



... Deronda's words were a cordial. "What is needed is the leaven—what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... pitying the while the frail mortal vessels it consumes with its flame. No adulation can turn such natures from their goal, and in the hour of triumph the slave is always at their side to whisper the word of warning. This discontent is the leaven that has raised the whole loaf of dull humanity to better things and higher efforts, those privileged to feel it are the suns that illuminate our system. If on these luminaries observers have discovered spots, it is well to remember that these blemishes are but the defects ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... heart the joy of giving up, of deliverance from self; and pity, to leaven his contempt, awoke for Sercombe. No sooner had he yielded his pride, than he felt it possible to love the man—not for anything he was, but for what he ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... Foster, and to this effect: "Where mystery begins, religion ends." The apophthegm pleased me much, and I was glad to hear such a truth from any pulpit, since it shows an inclination, at least, to purify Christianity from the leaven of artificial theology, which consists principally in making things that are very plain mysterious, and in pretending to make things that are impenetrably mysterious very plain. If you continue still of the same mind, I shall have no excuse to make to you for what I have written and shall write. ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke

... to the gates of heaven This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven; The rueful conflict, the heart riven With vain endeavour, And memory of Earth's bitter leaven ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... in the grounds of a public school any afternoon in the summer holidays, and you will get exactly the same sensation of being alone in the world as came to the dozen or so day-boys who bicycled through the gates that morning. Wrykyn was a boarding-school for the most part, but it had its leaven of day-boys. The majority of these lived in the town, and walked to school. A few, however, whose homes were farther away, came on bicycles. One plutocrat did the journey in a motor-car, rather to the scandal of the authorities, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... train of sad reflections which, the moment before their embarkation, had caused Him to sigh deeply in His spirit and say, 'Why doth this generation seek after a sign?' Absorbed in thought, He spoke, 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees,' who had been ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... end, according to many testimonies which have been made against us, God has used and blessed also our humble testimony." (9, 1.) The enmity which Missouri met everywhere was indeed a significant symptom of conditions changing for the better. It proved that the leaven of "foreign symbolism," as Schmucker pleased to style it, was doing its work. Foremost among the men that witnessed to the powerful influence of Missouri by testifying against her was B. Kurtz, who again and again denounced ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... O! belike you are the man, Signior Corvino? 'faith, you carry it well; You grow not mad withal: I love your spirit: You are not over-leaven'd with your fortune. You should have some would swell now, like a wine-fat, With such an autumn—Did ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... world will come and take away their place, and their power, and their station: but meanwhile the truth which they think that they have stifled will rise again, for Christ, who is the truth, will raise it again; and it shall conquer and leaven the hearts of men till all be leavened; and while the scribes and Pharisees shall be cast into the outer darkness of discontented and hopeless bigotry, the kingdoms of the world, which they fancied were the devil's dominion, shall become the kingdoms of God and ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley

... of State in this despotism. For instance, at Tangier there is a Bacha or Governor, a Caliph or Vice-Governor, a Nadheer or Administrator of the Mosques, a Mohtasseb or Administrator of the Markets, and a Moul-el-Dhoor or Chief of the Night Police. There is a leaven of the guild system, too, as in more advanced countries. Each trade has its Amin, each quarter its Mokaderrin. There is a Kadi, or Minister of Worship and Justice, to whom we paid our respects. Justice is quick in its action, and stern in the penalties it inflicts. The legs and hands are cut off ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... there, amidst the deepest poverty, we found the most exalted riches treasured up; there, in their satchells and baskets, we discovered not only the crumbs that fell from the master's table for the little dogs, but indeed the shew bread without leaven, the bread of angels, containing in itself all that is delectable;" and moreover, he says, that he found these friars "not selfish hoarders, but meet ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... fifty years it was followed by about thirty others. More than a dozen elementary schools for girls were also established under ecclesiastical auspices. Yet the amount of secular education imparted by all these seminaries was astoundingly small, and they did but little to leaven the general illiteracy of the population. Only the children of the towns attended the schools, and the program of study was of the most elementary character. Religious instruction was given the first place and received so much attention that ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... hid. It could not be seen. So grace, when first implanted in the heart, is often so little in degree, and so much buried up in remaining corruption, that it can scarcely be discovered at all. But the moment the leaven begins to work, it increases without ceasing, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb

... sound when their instincts are not in play, but who, in certain channels, when the senses are at riot, become puerile; the good ship, rudderless, which only rights itself when the storm has passed. They are men without the necessary leaven of introspection. Of themselves, in fact, they know nothing, learn nothing even in the remorse when the deed is done. For first of all, they are men of strength—men who can over-ride, with determination, rough-shod, the hampering results of their follies. Fate and circumstance have no power ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... afresh. Some of them must go! The bulk of the crew was to be crimped, of course, in the Swede knew what kennels of the town. But a few tried sailormen must go to leaven that sodden, sea-ignorant lump. It was like condemning men to penal servitude. No wonder they swore. And swear they did, with mouth-filling, curdling oaths, as though in vain hope their flaming words would quite ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... the red Indians that, no matter how vague and strange their legends may be, they are always founded on fact. Every tribe has an abundance of legends, and it has been found that there is always a leaven ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 47, September 30, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... of religion that I must not neglect—the Zoroastrian or Parsi faith. Far as this faith may have travelled from its original spirituality, it still preserved in the Bāb's time some elements of truth which were bound to become a beneficial leaven. This high and holy faith (as represented in the Gathas) was still the religion of the splendour or glory of God, still the champion of the Good Principle against the Evil. As if to show his respectful sympathy for an ancient and persecuted religion the Bāb borrowed some minor points of detail ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... Osterno. He only longed for the time when he could take Etta freely into his confidence and engage her interest in the object of his ambition—namely, to make the huge Osterno estate into that lump of leaven which might in time leaven ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... deobligatus at the same time. But perhaps the most remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are told that the king might have established a bona fide government "by giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary element in his Council, and inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the new policy, or to withdraw and become inactive." There is something consoling in the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral suasion. It is really too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral sense as should "induce it to ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... the leaven fermenting religion; it is palpably working in the sermons, Sunday Schools, and literature of our and other lands. This spiritual chemicalization is the upheaval produced when Truth is neutralizing error and impurities are passing off. And it ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy

... Englishman is a born Conservative, or, to use the old phrase, a Tory. Toryism is of two kinds,—political and social. The majority of the nation is certainly not, at the present day, Tory in political preferences, though there is still a large leaven of that feeling also. But very many persons who are political Liberals are social Tories: they venerate the aristocracy; they batten daily upon the "Court Circular"; they cling to class distinctions in theory, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... Day of Atonement" deals with the preparation and deportment of the high-priest on that day. That on "The Passover" treats of the Lamb to be sacrificed, of the search for leaven, so that none be found in the house, and of all the details of the festival. "Measurements" is an interesting and valuable account of the dimensions of the Temple at Jerusalem. "The Tabernacle" deals with the ritual worship of ...
— Hebrew Literature

... young America, starting off many little minds with wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome emotions. She leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England childhood days,—pictures which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,—pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... faith alike enchain; There was a loss, there comes a gain; We stand at fault betwixt the twain, And that is veiled for which we pant. Our lives are short, our ten times seven; We think the councils held in heaven Sit long, ere yet that blissful leaven Work peace ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... indeed, content himself with the fragmentary forms of any sectarian creed. But in the few writings which he made some effort to adapt to the popular understanding, he seems to think it possible that the faith of Pantheism might some day leaven all religions alike. I shall endeavour briefly to sketch the story of that faith, and to suggest its significance for the future. But first we ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... would divide Its weary woes, and lift their load away. I know not that our shares would then be even, For she you mourn may yet make glad your sight, While against me are banded death and heaven; But now the gloom of winter and of night With thoughts of sweet and bitter years for leaven, Lends to my talk with you a ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... table by the window, and—as indifference to Zeppelins is not confined to the sterner sex—a sprinkling of ladies, plump and matronly, or of the masculine walking type, with two charmingly pretty girls and a gay young war widow to leaven the mass. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... only a man; your coward and rash being but tame and savage beasts. His courage is still the same, and drink cannot make him more valiant, nor danger less. His valour is enough to leaven whole armies; he is an army himself, worth an army of other men. His sword is not always out like children's daggers, but he is always last in beginning quarrels, though first in ending them. He holds honour, though delicate as crystal, yet not so slight and brittle ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... intensely eager race after happiness—one trusting to the fleetness of his horse,—another to the nose of his ass,—a third to his own legs; this checkered lottery of life, in which so many stake their innocence and their leaven to snatch a prize, and,—blanks are all they draw—for they find, too late, that there was no prize in the wheel. It is a drama, brother, enough to bring tears into your eyes, while it ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... of great sacrifices are yet not capable of the little ones which are all that are required of them. God seems to take pleasure in working by degrees; the progress of the truth is as the permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed: a multitude of successive small sacrifices may work more good in the world than many a large one. What would even our Lord's death on the cross have been, except as the crown of a life in which he ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... can accomplish I do not know," said Miller, "but I'll do what I can. There are eight or nine million of us, and it will take a great deal of learning of all kinds to leaven that lump." ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... he spoke to them: The kingdom of heaven is like to leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various

... ordinance was performed by the Sciritae (4) outside the main body. At the present time the rule is so far modified that the duty is entrusted to foreigners, (5) if there be a foreign contingent present, with a leaven of Spartans themselves ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon

... connection, to ponder the constant use Christ makes of nature symbolism, drawing the attention of His hearers to the analogies in the law we see working around us to the same law working in the spiritual world. The yearly harvest, the sower and his seed, the leaven in the loaf, the grain of mustard-seed, the lilies of the field, the action of fire, worms, moth, rust, bread, wine, and water, the mystery of the wind, unseen and yet felt—each one of these is shown to contain and exemplify a great and ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... by Presbyterians less interested in creeds than in vital religion, and barring no person on "account of any speculative principles," the new institution furnished an education that was "liberal" in the political as well as in the intellectual sense of the term. From this center emanated a new leaven. Here young men came from all the Middle and Southern country to receive the stamp of a new Presbyterianism compounded of vital religion and the latter-day spirit of Geneva. In this era, by such men as John Madison, Oliver Ellsworth, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... Gouvion St. Cyr had but recently given a peremptory reason against select companies. "There are not many brave men in the world," said he; "when you collect them all in the same corps, there is not enough leaven elsewhere to make the dough rise." Deprived of the most resolute of its members, the Council found itself in the hands of Napoleon like dough, soft and unresisting. The grand reasons, the elevated and powerful arguments which the captive prelates ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... frothing floods Right and left asunder riven, As our cutter madly scuds, By the fitful breezes driven, When exultingly she sweeps Like a dolphin through the deeps, And from wave to wave she leaps Rolling in this yeasty leaven,— Ragingly that never sleeps, Like the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... other man, "in which to assure you that the fullest acknowledgments will be given in the case of the stores, and that their owner will be paid for them liberally and ungrudgingly. And, granting that much of what you have said is true, and that the leaven of self-seeking is to be found in every man's nature, and that greed is the predominating motive with those men who, more than others, work for the building-up of an Empire and the profitable union of Britain with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... leaven was working in him that in other times begat Rubens and Jordaens and the Van Eycks, and all their wondrous tribe, and in times more recent begat in the green country of the Ardennes, where the Meuse washes the old walls of Dijon, the great artist of the Patroclus, whose ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various

... neighborhoods understandingly; science, that they might teach and answer little children, and share the joy of knowledge that was spreading swiftly in the earth; political history and economy, that they might listen and talk to their brothers and husbands and sons, and leaven the life of the age as the bread in the mixing; business figures, rules, and principles, that they might sympathize, counsel, help, and prudentially work with and honestly strengthen the bread-winners. The good work was begun in the schools ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... as she looked out across the grey sea. He was, it appeared, telling her nothing that she did not know. For she was wise and shrewd—of that pure leaven of womankind which leaveneth all the rest. And she knew that a man must not be judged by his life—not even by outward appearance, upon which the world pins so much faith—but by that occasional glimpse of the soul of him, which may live on, pure through ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... existence. And why? What could betray intelligent and educated men, persons esteemed wise in their generation, into an attempt which amazes the civilized world, and at which posterity will be appalled? We answer, it was the old leaven which has worked always industriously in the breast of man since the creation—AMBITION. Corrupted by the idea that a model republic must have slavery for its basis, knowing that the free States could not much longer tolerate the theory, certain leading individuals ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... branch of the Square Deal Club in every town and city. It must be done carefully, conservatively, and as secretly as possible." The lawyer's cautious fear of too much haste now displayed itself. "The most we can hope to do is send to the state convention some men who will leaven that lump of ring politics. Party usage and tradition are so strong that we must renominate Governor Harwood, I suppose, for a complimentary ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... existed in the Protestant community at Diarbekir, growing out of the old leaven of baptismal regeneration, from which the church itself had not been thoroughly purged. The church then contained eleven members,—eight men and three women. Six of the men were Syrian Jacobites, and four of these were formerly deacons ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson

... and dynastic character of the movements that detached the English hierarchy from the Roman see had for one inevitable result to leaven the English church as a lump with the leaven of Herod. That considerable part of the clergy and people that moved to and fro, without so much as the resistance of any very formidable vis inertiae, with the change of the monarch or of the monarch's ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... were thinking the same thoughts—rejoicing in our happy fortune in these occasional meetings which flashed across the horizon of our lives and disappeared, not without leaving behind them an abiding effect; an earnest appreciation of human nature and the amount of leaven that must exist in the world. We thought instinctively of Mdlle. Martin, the little Receveuse des Postes de Retraite at Grace: and of Mdlle. de Pressense at Villeneuve, who had welcomed us even as the Comtesse had now done; and we felt that we ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... Some leaven of bitterness must, nevertheless, have been working within him, or he could never have produced that piece of perplexing cynicism, 'Fifine at the Fair'—the poem referred to as in progress in a letter to Miss Blagden, and which ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... proper character? I ought never to have come, and now I am persecuted away. Under one roof with those two I will not remain, and you take care of yourselves. They bring nothing but mischief; their nature is like leaven, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... ministry and means of grace, is brought directly "into the house," and operates there constantly as a spiritual leaven. It is the purpose of God that our homes be entrenched within the sacred enclosures of His church. The former, in its relation to the latter, is like "a wheel within a wheel,"—one of the parts which make up the great machinery of the kingdom of grace, operating harmoniously and in its ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... I entered again upon the theatre of its world; but I mixed now more in its greater than its lesser pursuits. I looked rather at the mass than the leaven of mankind; and while I felt aversion for the few whom I knew, I glowed with philanthropy for the crowd which ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... loose, and drove the rams to pasture on the margin of the river. After breakfast, which was but a sorry meal, we determined to make our first attempt at baking. Simon, a man of dauntless resolution, undertook the task, using a piece of stale bread as leaven. It was a serious business, and we all helped or looked on; but the result, notwithstanding the multitude of councillors, was a lamentable failure. Better success, fortunately, attended the labours of Hannibal, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... Achilles heel—music, for instance, or chess. When next you are in town don't forget to go to that little chess club of theirs over Aldgate East station. It is better than a play to watch their faces. And with all this materialism they have a mysterious feminine leaven of enthusiasm and unworldliness. What pecuniary advantage could Marten expect to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... continued to hang about, and either harassed the new owners and stole their goods, or made friends with them, and managed after a while to slip back upon some excuse into their old homes. No sternness of the Puritan leaven availed to hinder the new settlers from being absorbed into the country, as other and earlier settlers had been absorbed before them; marrying its daughters, adopting its ways, and becoming themselves in time ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... remote from a theatre of indulgence, they get a week of holiday at Sydney, where they arrive in numbers, and, for the time they stay, wallow in every species of debauchery. In such a state of society the public standard of morality must necessarily fall to a very low degree. The leaven spreads from the corrupted part into the whole mass. Just as the slang of London thieves is become the classical language of Sydney, so do necessarily a familiarity with crime, hatred to law, and contempt for virtue, make their way into the minds and hearts of those who are untainted with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various

... called covque, which was baked in holes dug in the sides of hills or the banks of rivers, in the form of ovens, many of which are still to be seen. They had even invented a kind of sieve, called chignigue, to separate the bran from the flour, and employed leaven in baking their bread. From the grains already mentioned, and the fruits or berries of different trees, they made nine or ten different kinds of fermented liquors, which they made and kept in jars ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... forth with ever-increasing splendor. I have often thought that if I were a preacher, if I had the honor to occupy the pulpit so grandly filled by my friend near me, one of my sermons should be from the text, "A little leaven shall leaven the whole lump." Nor do I know a better illustration of these words than the influence exerted by our Pilgrims. That small band, with the lesson of self-sacrifice, of just and equal laws, of the government of a majority, of unshrinking ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... all right. I thought there had been somebody at the door. In this wretched, enslaved country we dare not even call our souls our own. The spy and the hangman, sir—the spy and the hangman! And yet there is a candle burning, too. The good leaven is working, sir—working underneath. Even in this town there are a few brave spirits who meet every Wednesday. You must stay over a day or so and join us. We do not use this house. Another, and a quieter. They draw fine ale, however—fair, mild ale. You will find yourself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... so much more important than they are to day? It is a commonplace, yet mainly of educational meetings, to note that the next generation is now at school; but how seldom do we recognise its pioneers, albeit already among our own contemporaries? At any rate we may see here and there that their leaven is ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... and perpetuate the old line under favorable conditions. Hence, too, the petty dimensions of aristocratic French life: little fortunes, little ambitions, little establishments, little families, among that very class in society which by cultivating the sentiment of honor should leaven the practical, materialistic temper of the multitude. At the present time, when the burghers amass in trade far greater fortunes than the aristocracy possess, when the learned secure greater power by intellectual vigor, when ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... was a bundle of ceremonies, not a living principle. To Father Bevis, on the contrary, religion was everything or nothing. If it had anything to do with a man at all, it must pervade his thoughts and his life. It was the leaven which leavened the whole lump; the salt whose absence left all unsavoury and insipid; the breath, which virtually was identical with life. One mistake Father Bevis made, a very natural mistake to a man who had been repressed, misunderstood; and disliked, ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt

... ministering to the faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister, transformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness, and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... 'brother'[16] is fond of showing himself," answered the brigadier. "I don't like all these Free Staters about. They may be able to stir up the new crop of rebels into doing something desperate. Raw guerillas, with a leaven of hard-bitten cases, are always a source of danger. But I think that we worked our own salvation in the skirmish this morning. They would hardly believe that we should have such a small force with so many guns. No; our luck ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... vast philanthropy to gold; Religion, taking every mortal form But that a pure and Christian faith makes warm, Where not to vile fanatic passion urged, Or not in vague philosophies submerged, Repulsive with all Pharisaic leaven, And making laws to stay the laws of Heaven! And on the other, scorn of sordid gain, Unblemished honor, truth without a stain, Faith, justice, reverence, charitable wealth, And, for the poor and humble, laws which give, Not the mean right to buy the right to live, But life, and home, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod

... sir," said the foreman, muttering to himself, "Methought 'twas working in him! The leaven! ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... "Leaven'd" has no sense in this place: we should read "Level'd choice". The allusion is to archery, when a man has fixed upon his object, ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... still believe that Christianity is in this land. To-day it is like a little grain of mustard seed, but it has entered the soil, has germinated, and is springing up. It is like the little lump of leaven which the woman hid in three measures of meal; but it has begun to work, and will go on working, diffusing itself, until the whole is leavened. God has promised to give to his Son the heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession; and in that promise ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... swarm in the blood of an individual they seem to leave there something pernicious for parasites resembling themselves, or to bring away with them something necessary to the life of their successors. A glass of sugar and water, where leaven has already fermented and yielded alcohol, is incapable of producing a second crop of leaven; similarly the blood of an individual, once contaminated, becomes uninhabitable afterward for like microbes. The individual has acquired immunity. Such is the principle of vaccination.—Paris ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various

... will vary according to the point of view adopted. From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environment of history; and so far as any saint's example is a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes whom every one ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... you bore with and befriended me, who cannot count; Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, my civic conscience ever; John H. Mulchahey, without whose wise counsels in the days of good government and reform the battle with the slum would surely have gone against us; Jane Addams and Mrs. Emmons Blaine, leaven that shall yet leaven the whole unsightly lump out yonder by the western lake and let in the light; A. S. Solomons, Silas McBee, Mrs. Roland C. Lincoln, Lilian D. Wald, Felix Adler, Endicott Peabody, Lyman Abbott, Louise Seymour Houghton, Jacob H. Schiff, John Finley,—Jew and Gentile who taught ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... that the Bible is the sole rule of faith, she has not committed herself to any one theory of inspiration. She has not believed the Scriptures because they are written, but, being written, she has found them true. She has believed in the supernatural power of the Gospel because in her sight its leaven has wrought in the individual and in society what it claims for itself. John Wesley believed that there were God-breathed teachings outside of the Bible. He believed this because of his feeling that the Divine Fatherhood ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell

... heart was beating very fast, her coldness was all assumed. It was so much happiness to throw away, if indeed there was a chance. She turned and faced him, nervous, gaunt, hollow-eyed, the wreck of his former self. Pity triumphed in spite of herself. What was this leaven of weakness in the man, she wondered, which had so suddenly broken him down? He had only to hold on his way and he would be Prime Minister in a year. And at the moment of trial he had crumpled up like a piece of false metal. A wave of false sentiment, a maniacal ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Father beyond Caesar's; He maintained a responsibility of human beings coextensive with the stage and inseparable from the smallest trifle of their existence. He did not limit His marvellous tongue to antiquities and traditions. He used the mustard-seed in the field and the leaven in the lump for His everlasting designs. His finger was stretched out to the cruel stones of self-righteousness flying through the air, and phylacteries of dissimulation worn on the walk. He was so political, He would have saved Jerusalem ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... When that leaven began to work in me I was fit for the daringest thing that offered; so I paused to ask if my Lord Cornwallis were yet in ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... reverence for the God of Israel, and doubtless Athaliah often led her train to the temple of Jehovah; yet the infection of the character and principles of the daughter of Ahab was at work. A poisonous leaven spread through the royal family. The younger princes of Judah were contaminated; and when Jehoshaphat died, this influence of Athaliah was first manifest in the character of Jehoram. It is written of him ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous

... they are, Gervaise!" at length the rear-admiral exclaimed. "If the whole court was culled, I question if enough honesty could be found to leaven one puritan scoundrel. Tell me if you know this hand, Oakes? I question if you ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... dough is formed. This is then dried, either in the sun or at a moderate temperature, and cut into cakes. By drying, many of the yeast cells are rendered temporarily inactive, and so it is a slower acting leaven than the compressed yeast. A dry yeast will ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder

... persevering, practical assertion of woman's right to speak to mixed audiences is the best one we can make, and that we had better keep out of controversies, as our hands are full. On the other hand, we fear that the leaven of the Pharisees will be so assiduously worked into the minds of the people, that if they come to hear us, they will be constantly thinking it is a shame for us to speak in the churches, and that we shall lose that ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... delivered my final conclusion that equal distribution is the only solution that will realize the ideals of Socialism, and that it is in fact the economic goal of Socialism. This is not fully accepted as yet in the movement, in which there is still a strong leaven of the old craving for an easy-going system which, beginning with "the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange," will then work out automatically without interference with ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... rests, of course, against the collective church of the community or the nation, rather than against any local congregation. It may be that there are a hundred churches in a city, and that ten of them are working efficiently to leaven society with Christian ideas and principles, while the other ninety are content to fill up their membership lists and furnish the consolations of religion to the people who make up their congregations. The church of that city would probably be a failure, but the ten congregations which had ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... be languid, our march would be slow, were it not for the revolutionary leaven which Godwin's generation set fermenting. They taught how malleable and plastic is the human mind. They saw that by a resolute effort to change the environment of institutions and customs which educate us, we can change ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... the Redemption from Egypt, but there is not much Nature to worship in the Ghetto and the historical elements of the Festival swamp all the others. Passover still remains the most picturesque of the "Three Festivals" with its entire transmogrification of things culinary, its thorough taboo of leaven. The audacious archaeologist of the thirtieth century may trace back the origin of the festival to the Spring Cleaning, the annual revel of the English housewife, for it is now that the Ghetto whitewashes itself and scrubs itself and paints itself and pranks itself and purifies its pans ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... before political authority, crawling and groveling before religious superstition, but to him this was no subject for jest or indifferent neglect—it was a serious condition which should be ameliorated, and hope lay in working into the inert social mass the leaven of conscious individual effort toward the development of a distinctive, responsible personality. He was profoundly appreciative of all the good that Spain had done, but saw in this no inconsistency with the desire that this gratitude might be given cause to be ever on the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... a life-long toil till our lump be leaven— The better! What's come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven: Works done ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... Wyclifite heresy had lingered or from the class of scholars whose theological studies drew their sympathy to the movement over sea. It was that the lump was now ready to be leavened by this petty leaven, that men's hold on the firm ground of custom was broken and their minds set drifting and questioning, that little as was the actual religious change, the thought of religious change had become familiar to the people as a whole. And with religious change was certain to come religious revolt. ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... Host, to designate the Rule, is worthy of particular consideration. Its import is that, as bread without leaven, which is called the Host, is made of the finest flour, so the Rule is composed of what is most perfect in the Gospel; and as this bread, by the words of consecration, is changed into the Body of Jesus Christ, the true Host immolated on the altar, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... dreadful enquiry I ask you to note how carefully the Parables—those exquisite short stories—speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'—'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took,'—and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and almost every verse of the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says 'Render unto Caesar the things ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... did Saturn's Queen still turn her hand to leaven That war begun. The shepherd folk rush from the battle-wrack Into the city of the king, bearing their dead aback, Almo the lad, Galaesus slain with changed befouled face. They bid Latinus witness bear, and cry the Gods for grace. Turnus is there, and loads the tale of bale-fire ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil

... in complete sympathy with you in the matter of all your Officers and men being new to this style of warfare and without any leaven of experienced troops on which to form themselves. Still I should be wrong if I did not express my concern at the want of energy and push displayed by the 11th Division. It cannot all be want of experience as 13th have shown dash and self-confidence. Turks were almost negligible ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... till our lump be leaven. The better! What's come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth we shall practice in heaven. Work done least ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... fair, so pure of earthlier leaven, That none hath won through higher and harder ways The deathless life of death which earth calls heaven; Heaven, and the light of love on earth, and praise Of silent memory through subsiding days Wherein the light subsides not whence the past Feeds full with life the future. ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... rebuked; and manifests itself in the middle of the nineteenth century by the voracity with which merely material phenomena are seized as unmistakable indications of preternatural agencies. The innate leaven of superstition triumphs over common sense and scientific realism, and men and women are awed by coincidences that reason scouts, but credulity receives with open arms. Salome, I regret exceedingly that I am forced to trouble you, but there are some important letters which I wish ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... But I suppose you are one of those who think that evil is naturally stronger than good. Delusion springs from this, that the wicked are in earnest and the good are lukewarm. Good is stronger than evil. A single really good man in an ill place is like a little yeast in a gallon of dough; it can leaven the mass. If St. Paul or even George Whitfield had been in Lot's place all those years there would have been more than fifty good men in Sodom; but this is out of place. I want you to give me the benefit of your experience, Evans. When I went to Robinson and spoke kindly to him he trembled ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... And ruin-stones. Into thy vigorous substance thou hast wrought Whate'er the hand of Circumstance hath brought; Yea, into cool solacing green hast spun White radiance hot from out the sun. So thou dost mutually leaven Strength of earth with grace of heaven; So thou dost marry new and old Into a one of higher mould; So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold, [101] The dark and bright, And many a heart-perplexing opposite, And so, Akin by blood to high and low, Fitly ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... livers of the country round, and the shabby gentlemen of a village in the vicinity. When he could get no other company he would smoke and drink with his own servants, who in their turns fleeced and despised him. Still, with all this apparent prodigality, he had a leaven of the old man in him, which showed that he was his true-born son. He lived far within his income, was vulgar in his expenses, and penurious on many points on which a gentleman would be extravagant. His house servants ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... Charlemagne was of these, and his name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the Great, or ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... the leaven of the Pharisees is still extant, and runs as follows: —Self-deceit 0.33 want of charity 0.5 outward show 0.33, humbug infinity, insert Sim or not as required. Reader, let each one who would seem to be righteous take ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... silently and secretly among men. He took his illustrations from organic life. Its progress was to be like the seed hidden in the earth, and growing day and night by its own inherent germinating force. The object of the parables of the sower, the tares, the mustard seed, the leaven, was to show that the crude catastrophic conception of the coming of the kingdom must give place to the deeper and worthier idea of growth—an idea in harmony with the entire economy of God's working in the world ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought, nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought, not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief. In effect, the old English vice called CANT, which is MORAL TARTUFFISM, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... money with loathing. It was like the cursed stuff that Achan had brought into the camp—an evil leaven fermenting in their common life, and raising ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... image offends his sense of propriety and is therefore "harsh." Some words are "harsh" because they are "appropriated to particular arts" (the phrase comes from his Life of Dryden). Thus, in Measure for Measure, a "leaven'd choice" is "one of Shakespeare's harsh metaphors" because it conjures up images of a baker at his trade. Johnson also uses "harsh" to describe a word used in a sense not familiar to him. And "harsh" is sometimes used synonymously with ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... tendency of some of the Staff of that day that he would declare with a wink that he positively preferred to stay away; and on the occasion of the accession of Mr. Anstey, wrote this sturdy Conservative "I hope he's a Tory. We want some leaven to the set of sorry Rads that lead poor old Punch astray at present." But few independent readers, and fewer still of Keene's personal friends, will take very seriously his sweeping assertion and political pronunciamentoes—at least, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... how unsuspecting is my heart! You have never known, belike, the happiness that belongs to perfect faith. Come in with me! Let me teach you the sweetness of an untroubled trust. Let me convert you to the faith that there exists a happiness without leaven of regret!" This warm young generous sweetness which makes Elsa open to any appeal, blind to grossest fraud, merely exasperates Ortrud's ill-will. She reads in it plain pride of superiority. As she could not admit in the Knight of the swan a god-sent hero, she cannot see in Elsa an uncommonly good-hearted ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... accomplishments rare enough in an age when everybody is ready to contract for their display by the column. His style is nervous and original, not harassingly pointed like a chestnut-burr, but full of esprit or wit diffused,—that Gallic leaven which pervades whole sentences and paragraphs with an indefinable lightness and palatableness. It is a thoroughly American style, too, a little over-indifferent to tradition and convention, but quite free of the sic-semper-tyrannis swagger. Uncle Bull, who is just like his nephew in thinking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... aside the curtains of her litter and permitted the people to look upon her face. Thrown much into the society of Europeans in her uncle's home, she was imbued with European ideas. It was no doubt she who first instilled the leaven of reform into the mind of ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... relations, has much to say about their construction and specific powers and duties. Its mission is not only to regenerate the heart of the individual but to penetrate and transform society. "Its work is to leaven the whole mass of human interests with a divinely purifying power. It touches every act and every relation of humanity with a life from above, and interpenetrates all that a man can do with a new spirit and a heavenly light. It affects governments, moulds ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell

... soil uncultivated here," he said; "and, I may add, without the sinful leaven of self-commendation, that, since my short sojourn in these heathenish abodes, much good seed has been scattered ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... and when asked to find the book of Jude, he replied, after a fruitless search, "That book is torn out of my Bible and I can't find it." He was ordained just the same. Our friends may be sure, however, that the leaven has been cast into the meal, and in due time will leaven the mass. But, oh, the darkness, the moral corruption, the sorrow and ruin that comes from the long delay. Where we can put one good minister into the field we need a score, and where one boy or girl is in school there should be a dozen. May ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various

... demand multiplied comforts and conveniences, and expect attractive and healthful accommodations. Where they purchase and improve lands and buildings of their own they provide useful models to their less particular neighbors, and thus the leaven of a better type of living does its work ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe



Words linked to "Leaven" :   leavening, rise, sourdough, yeast, barm, raise, bring up, get up, baking powder, substance, elevate, imponderable, prove



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com