"Ploughshare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reason why the hog is had in so much honor and veneration amongst them is, because as the report goes, that creature breaking up the earth with its snout showed the way to tillage, and taught them how to use the ploughshare, which instrument for that very reason, as some say, was called HYNIS from [Greek omitted], A SWINE. Now the Egyptians inhabiting a country situated low and whose soil is naturally soft, have no need of the plough; but after the river Nile hath retired from the grounds it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the long duration of the Roman power. While Captain Smyth was engaged in his survey of the coast, a farmer in the island of St. Pietro, successively a Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman station, passed his ploughshare over an amphora of Carthaginian brass coins, of which Captain Smyth purchased about 250. “They were,” he states, “with two exceptions, of the usual type: obverse, the head of Ceres; and reverse, a horse or palm-tree, or both.” Some presented to me by Carlo Rugiu, one of which is here figured, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... oxen 'neath the yoke-band straining hard, What time the sharp-fanged gadfly stings their flanks Athirst for blood, and they in frenzy of pain Start from the furrow, and sore disquieted The hind is for marred work, and for their sake, Lest haply the recoiling ploughshare light On their leg-sinews, and hamstring his team; So were the Danaans scared, so feared for them Achilles' son, and shouted thunder-voiced: "Cravens, why flee, like starlings nothing-worth Scared by a hawk that swoopeth ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Rudborn, in his story of the trial of Queen Emma, conveys a totally different impression of the proceedings—at any rate, on that occasion. He says distinctly that she was not blindfolded, and that she pressed each ploughshare with the whole weight of her body: "Emma vero nullam mamphoram sive pannum ante oculos habens—super novem vomeres novem passus faciens et singulos eorum totius corporis pleno ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... listened:— "Welcome once more, my friends, who so long have been friendless and homeless, Welcome once more to a home, that is better perchance than the old one! Here no hungry winter congeals our blood like the rivers; Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of the farmer; Smoothly the ploughshare runs through the soil, as a keel through the water. All the year round the orange-groves are in blossom; and grass grows More in a single night than a whole Canadian summer. Here, too, numberless herds run wild ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Jesuits at Mont Desert, and we might say a colony of Swedes on the sea-coast, between the two large rivers just named, the memory of which is traditional, and the vestiges of which are sometimes turned up by the ploughshare. These people probably fell beneath some outbreak of savage vengeance, which left no name or ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... of the former class is Duport, once a counselor in the parliament, who, after 1788, knew how to turn riots to account. The first revolutionary consultations were held in his house. He wants to plough deep, and his devices for burying the ploughshare are such that Sieyes, a radical, if there ever was one, dubbed it a "cavernous policy."[1233] Duport, on the 28th of July, 1789, is the organizer of the Committee on Searches, by which all favorably disposed informers or spies form in his hands a supervisory ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... upper world and European types of countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian heads which look out from the canvases of Titian—speaking of ambition or craft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions have passed with iron ploughshare. These were the countenances of men who had lived in struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forces of vril had changed the character of society—men who had fought with each other for power or fame as we ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the outbreak were not speedily suppressed, what grave consequences might ensue. 'Let this happen,' he said, 'on June 2, and does any sane man doubt that twenty-four hours would swell the hundreds of rebels into thousands, and in a week every ploughshare in the Delhi States would be turned into a sword? And when a sufficient force had been mustered, which could not be effected within a month, should we not then have a more difficult game to play than Clive at Plassy or Wellington at Assaye? We should then be literally striking for ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the forge-fire illumined with a fitful flicker the dark interior, showing the rod across the corner with its jingling weight of horseshoes, a ploughshare on the ground, the barrel of water, the low window, and casting upon the wall a grotesque shadow of Jube's dodging figure as he ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Great, and when 700 years more or less had elapsed since the birth of the Lord, Willebrord with eleven others did irrigate the said land with the waters of their holy preaching. Moreover, with the help of his companions he did busy himself with breaking up the ground with the ploughshare of discipline, yet not without much difficulty; and in a short space the task of spreading the faith did prosper wondrously beneath their hands; for God worked with them, and did confirm their words ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough, The ploughshare turns them out! For many thousand men,' said he, Were slain in ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... ideal. The millionaire himself, though old, maintained a fairly middle-aged appearance—he was a thin, wiry, well-preserved man, his wizened and furrowed countenance chiefly showing the marks of Time's ploughshare. It would have been difficult to say why, out of all the feminine butterflies hovering around him, he had chosen Lydia Herbert,—but he was a shrewd judge of character in his way, and he had decided that as she was not in her first youth ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... the grain and the furrow, The plough-cloven clod And the ploughshare drawn thorough, The germ and the sod, The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, the ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Maurice, "and I ought to be, and fancy I am, the happiest man under the sun. But I am to quit the army, and turn my sword into a ploughshare, and gather oats instead of laurels; and I am not quite certain how I shall take to ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... the town had observed, "is a bloodthirsty, unsettled sort of a rascal, that the peaceable, home-loving, bread-winning citizen can never conscientiously look on as a brother till he has beaten his sword into a ploughshare and his spear ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... peevish asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... affront. An officer, who had been secured by tumultuary process during the early efforts to expand the land forces, proved to be a disappointment and had to be invited to convert his sword into a ploughshare. His reply is understood to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... most severe form of execution. In Flanders, monastic ingenuity had invented another most painful punishment for Waldenses and similar malefactors. A criminal whose guilt had been established by the hot iron, hot ploughshare, boiling kettle, or other logical proof, was stripped and bound to the stake:—he was then flayed, from the neck to the navel, while swarms of bees were let loose to fasten upon his bleeding flesh and torture him to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... field-piece as if it had been a stick. His look was terrible. He put his right hand on the muzzle, his left hand on the breach; he pulled with this, he pushed with that, and wheeled it round, as if it had been a plaything. It furrowed the ground like a ploughshare. He tore the sheet-lead from the touch-hole; then the powder-monkey rushed up with the fire, when the cannon went off, making the bark fly from the trees, and many an Indian send up his last yell and ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... full of a foolish melancholy, I felt a sad delight at being doomed to blight and loneliness; not but that I managed still (when mother was urgent upon me) to eat my share of victuals, and cuff a man for laziness, and see that a ploughshare made no leaps, and sleep of a night without dreaming. And my mother half-believing, in her fondness and affection, that what the parish said was true about a mad dog having bitten me, and yet arguing that it must be false (because God would have prevented ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Washington, whose sword was never drawn but in the cause of his country, and never sheathed when wielded in his country's cause! Franklin, the philosopher of the thunder-bolt, the printing-press, and the ploughshare! What names are these in the scanty catalogue of the benefactors of human kind! Washington and Franklin! What other two men whose lives belong to the eighteenth century of Christendom, have left a deeper ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... trusted." He could only answer, "that desperate diseases required desperate remedies. He could with truth declare that he felt no lust for power, but wished with as much fervency as any man upon this wide extended continent, for an opportunity of turning the sword into a ploughshare; but his feelings as an officer and a man had been such as to force him to say, that no person ever had a greater choice of difficulties ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... amongst the farmers and gentry, who employed me in fabricating little articles of fancy work and repairing all sorts of things most diverse in their natures and uses. At one farm-house I mended a tea-pot and a ploughshare, and at a gentleman's house, near St. Helen's, repaired a cart, and almost re-built a boat, which was used on his fish-pond. I turned my hand to any and everything. I do not say I did everything well, but I did it satisfactorily to those who employed me. I now began ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... creed, have likewise pitched upon the soldier's conduct in war as a signal illustration of the potentialities of human nature in peace. Thus Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral assimilation of industrial action to military. "Soldiers of the ploughshare," he exclaims in one of his works, "as well as soldiers of the sword! All my political economy is comprehended in that phrase." So, too, Mr. Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of Positivism, following out the same ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... through the long-revolving years The ploughshare of a Century to-day Runs peaceful furrows where a crop of Spears Once stood ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... witnessed, and said, "You have borne too hard on us, Sir Preacher—but coming with the commendations which you have brought me, I doubt not but your meaning was good. But we are a wilder folk than you inland men of Fife and Lothian. Be advised, therefore, by me—Spur not an unbroken horse—put not your ploughshare too deep into new land—Preach to us spiritual liberty, and we will hearken to you.—But we will give no way to spiritual bondage.—Sit, therefore, down, and pledge me in old sack, and we ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... tables of increase in Cotta, Anweisung zum Waldbau, p. 228. Count Buquoy, Theorie der N. Wirthschaft, p. 54, ridicules the absurd procedure of a great many farmers, as if by forcing the ploughshare deeper into the soil, they could compel it to produce a double return, and asks: if one should dig a square foot of land to the center of the earth and manure it, who would take it off his hands? As to the effect of manure, Kuhlmann's ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... out there a long time and I'd rather be there now fighting the Indians, instead of fighting our own people, although no other choice was left me. I've seen some terrible hurricanes on the plains, winds that would cut the earth as if it was done with a ploughshare, and these armies are going to be rained ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... nation against nation rise, Nor ardent warriors meet with hateful eyes, But useless lances into scythes shall bend, And the broad falchion in a ploughshare end. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... huts, propped up with rough-hewn stakes, that were first built as a shelter against the inclemencies of the air. All then was union, all peace, all love and friendship in the world. As yet no rude ploughshare presumed with violence to pry into the pious bowels of our mother earth, for she without compulsion kindly yielded from every part of her fruitful and spacious bosom, whatever might at once satisfy, sustain, and indulge her frugal children. Then was the time when innocent, beautiful young ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... in the garden, For there's many here about; And often when I go to plough The ploughshare turns them out. For many thousand men," said he, "Were ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... our ploughshare is the Sabre: Here's the harvest of our labour; For behind those battered breaches Are our foes with all their riches: There is Glory—there is plunder— Then ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Christendom is quantity, power, variety, fulness; not as yet co-operation, harmony, peace, union. Powers are first developed, which are afterward to be harmonized. The sword is not yet beaten into a ploughshare, nor has universal peace arrived. Yet such is the inevitable tendency of things. As knowledge spreads, as wealth increases, as the moral force of the world is enlarged, law, more and more, takes the place of force. Men no longer ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... strength. Like the Geotrupes, they are vigorous excavators. Grasped in the closed hand, they insinuate themselves through the interstices of the fingers and plough up your skin in a fashion to make you very quickly loose your hold. With his head, a robust ploughshare, the Beetle might very easily push the ring off its short support. He is not able to do so because he does not think of it; he does not think of it because he is devoid of the faculty attributed ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... shall return tomorrow night. And then begins our great quest. But first I shall have much to say, so that you may know what to do and to dread. Then our promise shall be made to each other anew. For there is a terrible task before us, and once our feet are on the ploughshare ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... that slept in its ashen furrows. A shining undulation passed through it, and broke, at the ends, as it were, into a curling golden foam. Then Anne stood up and tossed it backwards. Her brush went deep and straight, like a ploughshare, turning up the rich, smooth swell of the under-gold; it went light on the top, till numberless little threads of hair rippled, and rose, and knitted themselves, and lay on her head like a fine gold ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... as fine a little craft as I could wish for, but," he added, "the commander is one of the oddest fish I ever fell in with. He has not been to sea for a number of years, and having, as he says, turned his sword into a ploughshare, has devoted his mind to farming and rural sports. Unwilling to tear himself altogether from his beloved beeves and sheep, and pigs and poultry, he has brought them along with him, and has converted the little ship into a regular Noah's ark. The boats are turned into sheep-pens and hen-coops, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... a great word of glowing encouragement for all sad hearts. 'Fools and children,' says the old proverb, 'should not see half-done work '; at least, they should not judge it. When the ploughshare goes deep into the brown, frosty ground, the work is only begun. The earth may seem to be scarped and hurt, and, if one might say, to bleed, but in six months' time 'you scarce can see' the soil for waving corn. Yes; and sorrow, as some of us could witness, is the forecast of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... who succeeded not only in living on terms of friendship with one of the worst landlords in Ireland, but in obtaining many concessions from him. When he came to live in Culloch the landlord had said to him that what he would like to do would be to run the ploughshare through the town, and to turn "Culloch" into Bullock. But before many years had passed Father O'Hara had persuaded this man to use his influence to get a sufficient capital to start a bacon factory. And the town of Culloch possessed no other advantages except an energetic and foreseeing parish ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... dip her left sleeve in the burn, where three lairds' lands met—making the "bottle clunk," with joyous smugglers, on a lucky run of gin or brandy—or if his thoughts at all approached his acts—he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed by the furrow which his own ploughshare had turned. That his thoughts were thus wandering we have his own testimony, with that of his brother Gilbert; and were both wanting, the certainty that he composed the greater part of his immortal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the summer ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... assist, or there to prevent? But "Curiosity"! He may be there from mere "curiosity"! Curiosity to witness the success of the execution of his own plan of murder! The very walls of a court-house ought not to stand, the ploughshare should run through the ground it stands on, where such an argument could ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Let the ploughshare of repentance make the land ready for the seed, and then there will be some hope of lasting success. Some other time we may have something to say about the birds, which pick up the seed; but for the present let it suffice that we insist upon the ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... glimm'ring o'er the green, All die away.—— For now the sun, slow moving in his grandeur, Above the eastern mountains lifts his head. The webs of dew spread o'er the hoary lawn, The smooth clear bosom of the settled pool, The polish'd ploughshare on the distant field, Catch fire from him, and dart their new got beams Upon die ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... gigantic ploughshare of rock, set up against the sky, its thin, keen, purple blade edged with glittering frost; for so sharp is its point, that only a dazzling line marks the eternal snow ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... more than any other to awaken the interest of the world in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh. But before his day another man had startled the world with what we may call the discovery of Egypt. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte, the man whose sword was a ploughshare turning up the fallow fields of Europe, and sowing strange crops of tyranny and liberty, and whose ambition it was to set up a new throne in the land of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies. The mighty ruins of Karnak and the imperishable pyramids filled ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... and proprietor, the aspect of the country would be decidedly uninteresting, and would present scant attraction to the man riding or walking through it. In such a world the tourists would be few. Personally, I should detest a world all red and ruled with the ploughshare in spring, all covered with harvest in autumn. I wish a little variety. I desiderate moors and barren places: the copse where you can flush the woodcock; the warren where, when you approach, you can ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the Israelites built them up again under taskmasters. Also Judah's brethren, who had kept quiet up to that moment, fell into a rage, and stamped on the ground with their feet until it looked as though deep furrows had been torn in it by a ploughshare.[275] And Judah addressed his brethren, "Be brave, demean yourselves as men, and let each one of you show his heroism, for the circumstances demand that we do ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... rounded off in exactly the same way both at stem and stern, the other has a mast, placed about midship, a yard hung across it, and a sail close reefed to the yard, while the bow is armed with a long projecting beak, like a ploughshare, which must have been capable of doing terrible damage to a hostile vessel. The rowers, in both classes of ships, are represented as only eight or ten upon a side; but this may have arisen from artistic ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... more stupid than other folks; it must be so, for the most common things which he saw every day, and which wise people took as a matter of course, were enough to puzzle him and fill his mind with wonder. The stars, the flowers, the sunset, the sound of the wind, the very pebbles turned up by the ploughshare, gave him strange feelings which he did not understand and which he carefully hid. They would have been explained, he knew, if he had expressed them, by the sentence, "Peter's not all there"; and he was sometimes quite inclined to think that this was really the case. To-day his thoughts ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... chain? Consider, friends, your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumberous is the gilded coach! The pride of man is our reproach. Were we designed for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through the soil; To sweat in harness through the road; To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legged kind! What force is in our nerves combined! Shall, then, our nobler jaws submit To foam and champ ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... of God (according to HIS OWN translation of it) was the hammer with which, selon son metier, he was to drive his views of the truth into the thick skulls of the people. If he could twist iron, and hammer a ploughshare into a sword, or reverse the form, why should he be unable to effect a change in their opinions? It was perfectly useless to continue the argument; but I prophesied trouble, as the king was already discontented, and an influx of missionaries would not improve his ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... away his young life, with resolute mien. The triumph was with him. Out of the jaws of death he had rescued the leader whose freedom he considered essential to the success of a patriotic undertaking, and he was satisfied to pay the cost of the venture. He had set his foot upon the ploughshare, and would not shrink from the ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... quiet, To the quiet of the hearthstone. There were generals and captains, In the army and the navy, There were colonels, there were majors, There were officers and soldiers; Men who went from farm and fireside, Men who went from shop and ploughshare. All the States rose up in answer To the martial proclamation. There were Pike and Brown and Chandler, Boyd, Macomb, and Scott and Winder, Dudley, Harrison, and Hampton, Miller, Wilkinson, and Bainbridge, Hull and Perry, Jones, Decatur— All these ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... pagan; but wait till you feel it,— That jar of the earth, that dull shock, When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and desolate, and the ground so hard that when they tried to plough it the ploughshare broke. Yet they decided to make their dwelling-place amid this desolation, and in 1847 the building of Salt Lake ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... because he knew them within his reach. Could he not mould the people at his will? Could he not, transfigured in his snowy garments, call aloud in the streets of Jerusalem, "Behold your King?" And the fierce warriors of his nation would start at the sound; the ploughshare would be beaten into the sword, and the pruning-hook into the spear; and the nation, rushing to his call, learn war yet again indeed,—a grand, holy war—a crusade—no; we should not have had that word; but a ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... great shyness she appraised his hands and his feet—those strong forceful hands that had dominated the lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood—that remote, incredible ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... For it would have been Another world." "Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good." Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... as a Rook—the tail being long and extremely slender, and composed of separate vertebrae, each of which supports a single pair of quill-feathers. In the flying Birds of the present day, as before mentioned, the terminal vertebrae of the tail are amalgamated to form a single bone ("ploughshare-bone"), which supports a cluster of tail-feathers; and the tail itself is short. In the embryos of existing Birds the tail is long, and is made up of separate vertebrae, and the same character is observed in many ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... The peaceful mattock, ploughshare, spade, Sickle, and pruning-hook he made, Eschewing martial labours. Thus bees will rather honey bring, Than hurtfully employ their sting ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, That fate is thine—no distant date: Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight Shall be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... had been pent in narrow channels, like wild steeds bound to the ploughshare, broke away with exultation; the springs poured down from the mountains, and the air was blind with rain. Valleys and uplands were covered; strange countries were joined in one great sea; and where the highest trees had ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... leading down to the Rice Lake, and may have been the sources from whence its channel was filled. Some convulsion of nature at a remote period, by raising the waters above their natural level, might have caused a disruption of the banks, and drained their beds, as they now appear ready for the ploughshare or the spade. In the month of June these flats are brilliant with the splendid blossoms of the Castilegia coccinea, or painted-cup, the azure lupine (Lupinus perennis), and snowy Trillium; dwarf roses (Rosa blanda) scent the evening ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... of us are old enough to have had a great many mysteries of our early days cleared up. We have seen at least the beginnings of the harvest which the ploughshare of sorrow and the winter winds were preparing for us, and for the rest we can trust. Brethren! remember your mercies; remember your losses; and 'for all the way by which the Lord our God has led us these many years in the wilderness,' let us try to be thankful, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our novelists call their hero "Aylmer Valence," which means nothing, or "Vernon Raymond," ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... pair of horses to sell; one nine, the other ten years old, for which he asks a thousand dollars.... He must sell something to enable him to clear out. When a man is about retiring from public life, and sees nothing but a ploughshare between him and the grave, he naturally thinks ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... scent of life is never fuller in the woods than now, for the ground is yielding up its memories. The spring when it comes will not restore this fullness, nor these deep and ample recollections of the earth. For the earth seems now to remember the drive of the ploughshare and its harrying; the seed, and the full bursting of it, the swelling and the completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the woods throughout the weald the earth has borne fruit; the barns are full, and the wheat is standing stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... slave. "That word is a ploughshare which suits only loose soil, and mine, now that my master is waiting for me, can not be tilled even by the sharpest. Another time! But if, meanwhile, you have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one, and out of the very throes of decay a joyous life struggled outward and upward. Even the storms that swept down the dead leaves nurtured the tender buds that took their places. There were no episodes of snowy silence; over the quickening fields the farmer's ploughshare hard followed the furrows left by the latest rains. Perhaps it was for this reason that the Christmas evergreens which decorated the drawing-room took upon themselves a foreign aspect, and offered a weird contrast to the roses, seen dimly through the windows, as the southwest wind beat their soft ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... appear and vanish again like a shadow, taking the direction of a lonely house. An old woman declared that she had seen him go into this house. But the next night the house was gone, as though by enchantment, and the ploughshare had passed over where it stood; so that none could say, what had become of her whom they sought, far those who had dwelt in the house, and even the house itself, were ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to the cottage, and seems now to be a pasture, and a rather remarkably unfertile one. A little farther on, the ground was whitened with an immense number of daisies,—daisies, daisies, everywhere; and in answer to my inquiry, the driver said that this was the field where Burns ran his ploughshare over the daisy. If so, the soil seems to have been consecrated to daisies by the song which he bestowed on that first immortal one. I alighted, and plucked a whole handful of these "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flowers," which will be precious to many friends in our own country as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their estates were confiscated; their fortresses on either side of the Tyber were besieged by the troops of St. Peter and those of the rival nobles; and after the ruin of Palestrina or Praeneste, their principal seat, the ground was marked with a ploughshare, the emblem of perpetual desolation. Degraded, banished, proscribed, the six brothers, in disguise and danger, wandered over Europe without renouncing the hope of deliverance and revenge. In this double hope, the French ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... inspired when, in reminding the farmers of their duty to put more land under the plough, he compared the compulsory powers of the Board of Agriculture to a sword in its scabbard, and hoped there would be no necessity to rattle it. Everybody knows that the sword in question is a converted ploughshare, and that it rests with the War Office to turn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... wars and conquests there comes at last to the troubled earth the glorious reign of peace. But no new steel cruisers, no standing army. These are the devil's tools in monarchies; the Republic's weapons are the ploughshare ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... has now laid down the external pomp of Protector, and, like Cincinnatus, has withdrawn to retirement, but not with the same view. This modesty is to captivate the crowd, who are to call on him to convert the ploughshare into an Imperial sceptre! I have excellent information to this effect, having found means to obtain it from behind the ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... anticipate that in less than a quarter of a century there would remain of all these numerous tribes but a few scattered bands, squalid, degraded, with scarce a vestige remaining of their former lofty character—their lands cajoled or wrested from them, the graves of their fathers turned up by the ploughshare—themselves chased farther and farther towards the setting sun, until they were literally grudged a resting-place on the ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... thought has never, I will venture to say, occurred to any public man of any party; and, if any man were frantic enough to make the attempt, he would find, before three days had expired, that there is no better sword than that which is fashioned out of a ploughshare. But, if not by the sword, how is the country to be governed? I understand how the peace is kept at New York. It is by the assent and support of the people. I understand also how the peace is kept at Milan. It is by the bayonets of the Austrian ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other people's sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... famous for having detected the pretended madness of Ulysses, by which he sought to avoid going upon the expedition to Troy. Ulysses was ploughing and Palamedes placed the infant Telemachus in front of the ploughshare. Ulysses revealed his sanity ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius |
