"Untilled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... natural drainage. The fall of the greater rivers is so slight that they meander hither and thither in "S's," as they say here, and only require a little surplus on the average rainfall to overflow the more valuable land. And it is astonishing how quickly good land left untilled reverts to its primeval condition, or, in the expressive language of the country, "goes back to bog." This has ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... be said, either, that the American farmer studied the philosophy of agriculture. He owed his crops less to intelligent cultivation of the soil than to provident Nature in a new and untilled country. Both his methods and his implements were bad, and resulted in that land spoliation which has been the bane of American industry. "Agriculture in the South," said John Taylor, of Caroline, "does not consist so much in cultivating land as in killing it"; and the statement ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... upon the further bank to set. Now wish I those wings noble Perseus had, Bearing the head with dreadful adders[371] clad; Now wish the chariot, whence corn fields were found, First to be thrown upon the untilled ground: I speak old poet's wonderful inventions, Ne'er was, nor [e'er] shall be, what my verse mentions. Rather, thou large bank-overflowing river, Slide in thy bounds; so shalt thou run for ever. 20 Trust me, land-stream, thou shalt no envy lack, If I a lover be by thee held back. Great floods ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... governments have what they call Beglerbergs at the head of them, and the rest are governed by Bashaws. Most of these countries are fruitful, but neglected through the laziness of the Turks, and oppressions the Christians lie under, who chuse [sic] rather to let the land lie untilled, than cultivate it for others. It is thin of inhabitants, occasioned by frequent plagues and continual wars, which carry off great numbers. They are very temperate, robust, and good soldiers. Their ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... and possibly intellectually, the people of that region would compare with the rest of the country of that day or of this day. There was little schooling and no literary training. But the woodsman has an education of his own. The region was wild in the sense that it was almost uninhabited and untilled. The forests, extending from the mountains in the East to the prairies in the West, were almost unbroken and were the abode of wild birds and wild beasts. Bears, deer, wild-cats, raccoons, wild turkeys, wild pigeons, wild ducks and similar creatures ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... A field untilled, a web unwove, A flower withheld from sun or bee, An alien in the courts of Love, And—teacher unto ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the solitude of a little village. It is a harmas, the name given, in this district [the country round Serignan, in Provence], to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plow; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the word, and, by Jove! they took all that for granted, such was their beautiful confidence in us, and never even tried to think—until one day, when, quite by accident, I feel sure, one of them found herself arriving at logical conclusions involuntarily. Her brain was a rich soil, although untilled, which began to teem of its own accord; and that, my dear fellow, was the beginning of the end of the old state of things. But I believe myself that all this unrest and rebellion against the old established abuses amongst women is simply an effort of nature ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so frequently, so lawlessly, and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate is simply indescribable, yet it is a growing resort for consumptives; it stands with all its gay prosperity just in the edge of a lonesome, untilled belt of land one hundred and fifty miles wide, like Mardi Gras on the austere brink of Lent; it has no Sunday laws, and that day finds its bar-rooms and billiard-saloons as freely open and as fully attended ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... methods of cultivation simple and primitive, and they themselves were often lazy and improvident. Near their town they had great orchards of gnarled apple-trees, planted by their forefathers when they came from France, and old pear-trees, of a kind unknown to the Americans; but their fields often lay untilled, while the owners lolled in the sunshine smoking their pipes. In consequence they were sometimes brought to sore distress for food, being obliged to pluck their corn while it was ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... devoured them. They knew so little too; all they were told was so indefinite and garbled that sometimes they thought the whole was some horrid dream—thought so, at least, until they looked at their empty stables, their untilled land, their children who cried from hunger, their mothers who wept ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... impossible (independent of their needs) not to feel an earnest sympathy; they have evidently not only aspirations, but considerable mental gifts, though these have unhappily been cultivated to such little purpose for the object they have in view that they might almost as well have been left untilled. In spite of what I ventured to urge respecting the advantage of knowing 'science, history, politics, English literature, and the art of composition,' they 'don't see why' they shouldn't get on ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... toil when the bleeding hand Of the pioneer grew numb, When the untilled tracts of the barren land Where the weary ones had come Could offer nought from a fruitful soil To stay the strength of the ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... say—confound it! You've done gloriously; you've played the thing through to perfection; you've made an inimitable success of it; but Wallencamp doesn't offer scope wide enough for your powers. I offer you a field hitherto untilled, left to the wandering winds and the birds of the air, extensive enough in its forlorn iniquity, I assure you, to engage your patient and continued efforts. It may prove productive of good results yet, who knows? Is it my fault that I ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... dejected-looking men standing humbly a bit off, three women sitting among the bushes up the slope, that was all. The house where the eviction was to be held was a miserable hovel, whose roof did not amount to much, sitting among untilled fields, with a small dung heap before the door. It was ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore! The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles, To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles! Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with sheaves, And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all her leaves; Where the olive buds and burgeons, to its promise ne'er untrue, And the russet fig adorns the tree, that graffshoot never knew; Where honey from the hollow oaks doth ooze, and crystal rills Come dancing down ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... now endure King Sicinius? Let him call the Commons, if he will, to the Sacred Hill. The way thither—aye, and to other hills besides—is open if he would go. They have made this dearth for themselves, suffering their lands to be untilled; let them therefore ...
— Stories From Livy • Alfred Church
... the devil. We have had no news from my father in America for two years. No remittances ever come from him. He may be dead, for all we know. Our land lies half untilled; we cannot pay for the hire of day labourers. We live from hand to mouth; my mother is not strong; I earn what I can; one of my sisters is obliged to work at Levanto. Think what that means, for us! Perhaps that is why you call ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Dakota Mrs. Darrow had asked me to go into the untilled suffrage field. In many places they had never heard a suffrage address nor had a suffrage meeting ever been held. I zigzagged across from the southeast to the northwest corners and in Minot was arrested ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of those erudite rods. I myself—why conceal the fact?—was not without a certain satisfaction as I piously carried that most delicate and precious apparatus, the historic five-franc graphometer. The scene of operations was an untilled, flinty plain, a harmas, as we call it in the district. (Cf. "The Life of the Fly", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapter 1.—Translator's Note.) Here, no curtain of green hedges or shrubs prevented me from keeping an eye upon my staff; here—an ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... spread out beneath the warm sun, might mingle on its surface the fruits of the torrid with those of the temperate zones. Instead of this, Italy presents to the traveller's eye a deplorable spectacle of wretched cabins, untilled fields, and a population oppressed by sloth and covered with rags. The towns are filled mostly with idlers and beggars. With all my inquiries, I could never get a clear idea of how they live. The alms-houses are numerous; for when a Government puts down trade, it must build hospitals and poor's-houses, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Neither was he a freethinker. He inherited his religious views from his parents, and never considered them enough to change. He simply viewed religion as a part of the fabric of government, giving sturdiness and safety to established order. His own spiritual acreage was left absolutely untilled. His services were for sale; and so plastic were his convictions that once having espoused a cause he was sure it was right. Doubtless it is self-interest, as Herbert Spencer says, that makes the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Germans were industriously shelling the dugouts and supporting trenches where our supports were located and along the Gravenstafel Ridge. Huge shells fell like hail. Those that failed to burst in the air exploded the minute they struck the hard untilled clay of the fallow fields and fragments flew in every direction. One fell on the roadway about twenty feet away from me. Two men who were standing under cover of the broken wall of the windmill crumpled ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... party-quarrels, not that they had any new cause of complaint or any just grievance to proceed upon; but the evil result which had necessarily been produced by their former riotous contests were now made the ground of attacks on the patricians. A great part of the country was left unsown and untilled, while the war gave no opportunities for importation from other countries. The demagogues, therefore, seeing that there was no corn in the market, and that even if there had been any, the people were not able to buy it, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... renderings in this collection appear for the first time. If any one thinks he has reason to complain of their quality, let him try to do better. The field lies untilled for any one ...
— Hymns from the Greek Office Books - Together with Centos and Suggestions • John Brownlie
... this breed which I have ever seen are to be found among the dogs which are kept to guard the quarries of Solenhofen, in Bavaria, whence come all the fine lithographic stones which are so extensively used in printing. These quarries are scattered over several square miles of untilled country, and the separate pits are to be numbered by the score. As much valuable stone is necessarily left over night in the quarries, their care is confined to packs of watch-dogs which are turned loose at night and appear as if by instinct to spend the hours of ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... tree there chirped the titmouse: "Osmo's barley will not flourish, Nor will Kaleva's oats prosper, While untilled remains the country, And uncleared remains the forest, Nor the fire ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... dwelling far away. But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there, Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wear His soul with grief and groaning, and weeping; yea, and he As the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o'er the untilled sea." ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... socialism, and that was swept aside and a group of impractical socialists put in its stead, and where is Russia now? Broken to bits, its population dying of hunger, its industries unworked, its soil untilled, and Germany coming on with her great feet, stamping down the few who are brave enough to interpose themselves between Germany and her end. If we were to quit, Germany would do to us, or try to do to us, what she ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... in the sun. Down toward Stratford there are flat islands covered with sedge, long rows of weeping-willows, low hazel, hawthorn, and places where "Green Grow the Rushes, O." Then, if the farmer leaves a spot untilled, the dogrose pre-empts the place and showers its petals on the vagrant winds. Meadowsweet, forget-me-nots and wild geranium snuggle themselves below the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... since his birth; a mother meant simply a giver of life, and a father meant, even less. Until he had read the reverse and obverse sides of life, his sense of morality had lain dormant and untilled. Such was his misfortune. The solitary relative he laid claim to was an aged aunt, his father's sister. For her he had purchased a beautiful place in the town of his birth, vaguely intending to live ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... one of them would have willingly labored on Olaf Gueldmar's land, had not the wages he offered been above the usual rate of hire,—and times were bad in Norway. But otherwise, the superstitious fear of him was so great that his fields might have gone untilled and his crops ungathered,—however, as matters stood, none of them could deny that he was a good paymaster, and just in his dealings with those whom ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... excommunication. For the sake of peace he had become a crusader and set forth upon the conquest of Jerusalem. But Saladin, another philosopher of the same class, had soon come to an agreement with his Christian colleague. The position of a little city surrounded with untilled land and an empty sepulcher was really not worth the trouble of decapitating mankind through the centuries. The Saracen monarch, therefore, graciously delivered Jerusalem over to him, and the Pope again excommunicated Frederick ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sound of mallet and chisel, of mortar, pestle, and trowel, the ringing sound of hammer on anvil, or roar of forge, which, to my practical mind, would have had a far sweeter sound. There is virgin land in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone yet untilled; there are buildings in the town yet unfinished; there are roads for commerce yet to be made; the trade of the African interior yet waits to be admitted into the capacious harbour of Sierra Leone for the enrichment of the fond nursing-mother ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... They represented that something different toward which her untutored and stinted heart groped blindly. Otherwise her mind, by no means a poor one, lay fallow and untilled. The beauty and wonder of the world, the pity and terror of fate, the divine agony of love which sacrifices and endures, did not as yet exist for her. She merely sensed that there was something different, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler |
