"Besom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admiral, the waters of oblivion have him whom the waters of God might not drown. Conquered lies unconquered Agamemnon; how else lies Julius Caesar? Nabuchodonosor, eater of grass, what is he? Kings pass, and their royal seat gathereth a little dust. Anon with a besom of feathers cometh. Time the chamberlain, and scareth to his hiding-place the lizard on the wall. Think soberly, O ye kings! how your crowns are but yellow metal, and your purple robes the food of moths, and the sceptres of your power no better than hedge-twigs for the driving ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... seized the broom and threw it into the fire; but, although the besom burned, the deathless Kashtshei still remained alive. Then the Tsarevna said to him: "My beloved, you do not love me sincerely, for you have not told me truly where is your death; nevertheless, I am not angry, but love you ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... old men, aye, even to the decrepit dotards. My master is mad, not as you are, but with another sort of madness, quite a new kind. The livelong day he looks open-mouthed towards heaven and never stops addressing Zeus. "Ah! Zeus," he cries, "what are thy intentions? Lay aside thy besom; do not sweep ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... little Esther Ansell trudged its unclean pavements, its extremities were within earshot of the blasphemies from some of the vilest quarters and filthiest rookeries in the capital of the civilized world. Some of these clotted spiders'-webs have since been swept away by the besom of the social reformer, and the spiders have scurried ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... thought Gubblum. "He's as daft as a besom." Then Gubblum remembered with what lavish generosity he had bribed the pot-boy to no purpose. "He cover't a shilling dammish," he thought; "I'll dang ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... disciplined men as opposed to mere guerrilleros. The city is built in blocks, on the American system; the wide thoroughfares cross each other at right-angles, and all of them could be swept as with a besom by a few guns en barbette behind a breastwork at either end. In this sort of work, accuracy of aim is not called for, as in that warfare up in the mountains. If it were, not much reliance could be placed on the Republican artillery. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... have been told that between my seventh and my eighth year I had been sent, not only to church, but to school; but my grandmother deeming me too tender for the besom discipline of a schoolmaster,—from which even the Quality were not at that time spared,—I was put under the government of a discreet matron, who taught not only reading and writing, but also brocaded waistcoats for gentlemen, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... a blissful dream and watched my road unfold. The sun set the pine-boles aflare where the hedge is sparse, and stretched the long shadows of the besom poplars in slanting bars across the white highway; the roadside gardens smiled friendly with their trim-cut laurels and rows of stately sunflowers—a seemly proximity this, Daphne and Clytie, sisters in experience, wrapped in the warm caress of ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... there is not an office, nor an office-bearer, but is distinctly determined in the making of the tabernacle; there is not a tackle, nor the quantity of it, not a curtain, nor the colour thereof, not a snuffer, nor a candlestick, nor a besom that sweeps away the filth, nor an ash-pan that keepeth the ashes, but all are particularly set down; yet, ye will not get a bishop, nor an archbishop, nor this metropolitan, nor that great and cathedral man, no not within all the Bible. The Lord ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... the morning, behold! the world was not consumed; it was not the besom of destruction, after all, but the gentle hand of mercy. How deeply and warmly and spotlessly Earth's nakedness is clothed!—the "wool" of the Psalmist nearly two feet deep. And as far as warmth and protection ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... throwing an onion after a bride is doubtless well known. It had the same origin as the old Scotch custom of throwing a besom after a cow on its way to market, to avert the evil-eye, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the dire instigation of hunger, in the stupor and recklessness of their misery, they accepted any terms the landlords chose to impose, and so whole villages disappeared from the landscape, swept off with the besom of destruction. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... that it was Amazonian, but that is only half the truth. Ideographically the Chinese represent wife by a woman holding a broom—certainly not to brandish it offensively or defensively against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft, but for the more harmless uses for which the besom was first invented—the idea involved being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the English wife (weaver) and daughter (duhitar, milkmaid). Without confining the sphere of woman's activity to Kueche, Kirche, Kinder, as the present German ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... resist an attack was made in the vicinity, where we were. It was none too soon, as Hood, upon taking command immediately moved out to Decatur with nearly his entire army, fell upon McPherson's corps, with the besom of destruction, killing the gallant McPherson early in the engagement, and with his vastly superior force, beating back the Army of the Tennessee so fast, that there is no telling what might have happened, ...
— Personal recollections and experiences concerning the Battle of Stone River • Milo S. Hascall
... sweeper is much oftener a poor countryman, who has wandered to London in search of employment, and, finding nothing else, has spent his last fourpence in the purchase of a besom, with which he hopes to earn a crust. Here his want of experience in town is very much against him. You may know him instantly from the old habitue of the streets: he plants himself in the very thick and throng of the most crowded thoroughfare—the rapids, so to speak, of the human current—where ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... pointing to the enigmatical walls of Palenque and Chi Chen Itza, and to the polished ruins of Cuzco, and the valley of Anahuac. Researches in this field of observation have just commenced. Bigotry and lust of conquest, led the early Spanish adventurers to sweep as with the besom of destruction every object and monument of art which stood in their way. Cortez razed the walls of ancient Mexico to the ground as he entered it, and his zealous followers committed to the flames whatever was light and combustible. This ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... ye tak' sic freedoms here?" The bauld gudewife began; Wi' that a foursome yell got up— I to my heels and ran. A besom whiskit by my lug, An' dishclouts half-a-score: Catch me again, tho' fidgin' fain, At kissin 'hint the door. There 's meikle ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Do I know if mouse or songbird feels? I only know they make me light and salutary meals: And if, as 'tis my nature to, ere I devour I tease 'em, Why should a low-bred gardener's boy pursue me with a besom? ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... there were no fragments, for the wind was a clean sweeper; it had bodily vanished. The walls stood. He dragged himself unsteadily to his feet, and looked about for his spade. It was nowhere to be seen; the besom of the gale had whirled it to some ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... Here's the besom of Reformation, Which should have made clean the floor; But it swept the wealth out of the nation, And left us dirt good store. Will you buy the state's spinning-wheel, Which spun for the roper's trade? But ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... days are gone by, now, and Israel worships strange gods. Old Nassau will never be what she was before the fire of '55. Those precious heirlooms of our day are sunk from sight forever, dear and mossy as they were,—swept down, like cobwebs, before the flame-besom. 'Fuit Ilium!' The old bell will never again ring out the gay 'larums of a 'Third Entry' barring-out. Homer's head no longer perches owl-like and wise over the central door-way. 'Ai, Adonai!' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... size and inventive taste resembled a poached egg, and betrayed the insular goldsmith. A train three yards long completed this gorgeous figure. She had commenced life a shrimp-girl, and pushed a dredge before her, instead of pulling a silken besom after her. Another stately queen (with an "a") heated the atmosphere with a burnous of that color the French call flamme d'enfer, and cooled it with a green bonnet. A third appeared to have been struck with the beauty of a painter's palette, and the skill with which ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... To confirm this, he brought considerable arguments from such symbols as these:—As soon as you are risen, ruffle the bedclothes; leave not the print of the pot in the ashes; receive not a swallow into your house; never step over a besom; nor keep in your house creatures that have hooked claws. For these precepts of the Pythagoreans the Tuscans only, as ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... a practice of sleeping in the kitchen; he considered that a house could only be well guarded at night from the ground floor. There was his bed, in the corner against the brush and besom cupboard, all made up. Its creaselessness, so characteristic of Aguilar, had not been disturbed. The sight of the narrow bed made Audrey think what a strange existence was the existence of Aguilar. ... Then, with a boldness ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... land unto the cellar, Clean the peasant's hut he keeps, With a coarse and clumsy besom Every tiny ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... "that there is no place like England," for men who are in "easy circumstances," and who therefore think no more of direct or indirect taxation, and of those multitudinous burthens which highly-civilized life imposes, than a besom-maker's ass does of the load under which it daily journeys. But how many thousands are there (children of sad parents — Toil and Sorrow) who find their utmost efforts scarcely sufficient to keep them out ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the constricted waterway. High above stands a great lake which is held in check only by an artificial barrier, and which, if once unchained, must pour its resistless torrent through this narrow gorge like a besom of destruction overwhelming everything before it. There were all the elements of an unparalleled disaster. Years of immunity had given a feeling of security for all time without some extraordinary and unexpected occasion. But the occasion appeared ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... lowe, Goe waken Time from sleepe: Goe whysper in his ear, that soe His besom sweepe Me to that heape ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... said Caesar promptly. "He's not to trust, but lend it on his heirship. Or lend it the ould man at mortgage on Ballawhaine. He's the besom of fire—it'll come to you, sir, at the father's death, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... wall of stone, lay a succession of heights and hollows covered with grass. In front of the cottages lay sand and sea. The place was cleaner than most fishing villages, but so closely built, so thickly inhabited, and so pervaded with "a very ancient and fishlike smell," that but for the besom of the salt north wind it must have been unhealthy. Eastward the houses could extend no further for the harbour, and westward no further for a small river that crossed the sands to find the sea—discursively and merrily at low water, but with sullen, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... your sweetness a little further in the world. Believe me, I am not so foolish as to despise charity or true efforts to increase the comfort of the poor; but I know that poverty and pain and wretchedness can never be driven from the world by any besom of the law, and I do see that humanitarianism, sprung as it is from materialism and sentimentalism (what a demonic crew of isms!) has bartered away the one valid consolation of mankind for an impossible hope that begets only discontent and mutual hatred among men. They are the followers ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... get them. She usually only eats bad ones, because the good ones get away. She is bony all over, and her eyes flash, and she drives about in a mortar, beating it with a pestle, and sweeping up her tracks with a besom, so that you cannot tell which way she ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... French Ambassador at Berlin (Buchholz, i. 130).] But his primary fixed resolution was to stand out of the quarrel; and he abides by that; suppresses any wishes of his own in regard to the Polish Election;—keeps ward on his own frontiers, with good military besom in hand, to sweep it out again if it intruded there. "What King you like, in God's name; only don't come over my threshold with his brabbles ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... all the nymphs are simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled slippers that out-color the sky! With what a "Faugh!" the great gerund-grinder would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away! And Shenstone, or rather his memory, caught the besom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... his white manse dwelt by the white kirk on the top of the windy hill. This was, by every earthly canon, a good man, but a stern and unsupple. He had not been long in this parish, and he was sweeping with a strong, new besom. The old minister, to his mind, had been Erastian and lax, weak in doctrine and in discipline of the fold. Mr. M'Nab meant not to be weak. He loathed sin and would compel the sinner also to loathe it. Now he came up, tall and darkly clad, and in ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... the back parlours of the little country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own respectable—and respectful—way, held its courts of justice, Loveday's story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws of God and the ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... hath scattered mouldered words to the winds, and if I have come like a besom to cross-spiders, and as a ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... possessions, however widely dispersed, were consolidated into one vast fountain of wealth to the imperial realm; the empire of the seas was fixed on an immovable basis, and the proud Hollander compelled to take down the besom from the mast-head of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... dearie?" he said. "I don't stand in need of hedge-stealings. I'm a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I won't trust women no more! Silly old besom! I do beleft she'd ha' stole the Squire's big ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... should lend her torch to light my dearth—her wings to bear me up—her anchor wherewith to moor my hark of life wherever cast, and to the poor waif I cherished I owed this immeasurable good. Had Mrs. Clayton anticipated him with her infallible besom—that housewifely detective, that drags more secrets to light than ever did paid policeman—I should never have grasped this talisman of love and hope, never have waked up as I did wake up from that hour to the endurance which immortalizes endeavor, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... You kid, fetch this or bring that. You kid, go to the drift for water, or take the besom and sweep the stoep, or scrub out the room there—do you hear, you kid?" These orders came thick and fast when at last she was old enough to work; and she was old enough when she was very young, and did work like a little ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the active state, relieved and stimulated her, and she hurried from one needed reform to another. She drew others into the vortex. She inspired the chambermaid to unwilling yet amazing effort, and the lodging-house endured such a blast from the besom that it stood in open-windowed astonishment uttering dust like the breath of a dragon. Having swept and garnished the bed-chambers, Virginia moved on the dining-room. As the ranger had said, this, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... a fair one, and we who have the whip-hand of you will not listen to it. Be good enough to vanish. Permit yourself to be swept quietly into the dunghill. All that there was about you of value has departed from you; and allow me to say that you are now—rubbish." And then the ruthless besom comes with irresistible rush, and the rubbish is swept into the pit, there to be hidden for ever from the sight. And the pity of it is this—that a man, if he will only restrain his greed, may eat his cake and yet have it; aye, and in so doing will have twice more the flavour ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... long the Saxon churl Our land encumbered hath; Arise my Prince, my Earl, And brush them from thy path: Rise, mighty Smith, and sveep 'em vith The besom of your wrath.' ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... indeed! "Making Ossa like a wart." Yet the rubbish must be removed; and it is mine and every man's duty to handle the spade and besom. But men want to work miracles; and, because the mountain does not vanish at a word, they rashly conclude it cannot be diminished. They are mistaken. Political error is a pestilential cloud; dense with mephitic and deadly vapours: but a wind has arisen in the south, that ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the Broom.—In some parts of England a singular custom prevails. When a married woman leaves home for a few days, the husband hangs a broom or besom from the window. When, how, and where did this originate, and what ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... them. She consented to follow their counsel. The first thing the witches did (for, as the sequel will show, they were witches deeply learned in Satan's wicked ways) was to impose on the novice a vow of secrecy; then to direct her, when going to bed, to take with her the besom, and, when her husband was asleep, to rise and come to them, leaving the besom beside him, and it would assume her appearance, so that he could not ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... while he donned the working clothes he had bought in a secondhand shop and brought with him in a bundle; then he led him to the "killing beds." The work which Jurgis was to do here was very simple, and it took him but a few minutes to learn it. He was provided with a stiff besom, such as is used by street sweepers, and it was his place to follow down the line the man who drew out the smoking entrails from the carcass of the steer; this mass was to be swept into a trap, which was then closed, so that no one might slip into it. As Jurgis came in, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... driven waves, three hundred pines Straggle the marches between sand and soil. Like maps of stone-walled fields their branching roots Hold the silt still so that thin grass grows there, Its blades whitened with travelling powdery drift The besom of the lightest breeze sets stirring. That woman's gaze toils worn from remote years, Yet forward yearns through the bright spacious noon, Beyond the farthest isle, whose filmy shape Floats faint on the sea-line. I, scooping ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... from the highways through which the retreating armies passed with famine and death in their rear, and I hide my face with awe before the inscrutable ways of Providence, sweeping in such various directions the besom of destruction over the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... had, with a sort of instinctive caution, turned the key when I closed the door. I soon calmed down, therefore, into a state of tranquillity; from that into a drowsiness, and finally into a deep sleep; out of which I did not awake, until the housemaid, with her besom and her matin song, came to put the room in order. She stared at finding me stretched upon the sofa; but I presume circumstances of the kind were not uncommon after hunting dinners, in her master's bachelor establishment; for she went on with ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... last obeyed the spur, and he rode on and into the city, the gates of which were deserted. There he beheld on all sides that the Lord had indeed put the besom of destruction into the hands of the Reformers; and that not one of all the buildings which had been polluted by the papistry—no, not one—had escaped the erasing fierceness of its ruinous sweep. The presence of the magistrates lent the grace of authority to the zeal of the people, and all things ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... and to take my own part. When I was fourteen I was put out to service to a small farmer and his wife, with whom, however, I did not stay long, for I was half-starved, and otherwise ill treated, especially by my mistress, who one day attempting to knock me down with a besom, I knocked her down with my fist, and went back to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... been accustomed to is no longer wanted, they cross their hands; and so they remain, and wither, and despair, and die. Thus when the kelp business was at an end, the Scotch Highlanders sat down in their helpless hunger, till they were swept as with a besom out of the land they cumbered. Yet what Mechi has done for his Tiptree bog on a large scale, with expensive machinery, and hired labour, might have been done by each of them on a small scale, without expense, and with his own ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... is no wine of enjoyment without dregs of vexation. And just at this moment Filadoro's mother suddenly appeared, who was such an ugly ogress that Nature seemed to have formed her as a model of horrors. Her hair was like a besom of holly; her forehead like a rough stone; her eyes were comets that predicted all sorts of evils; her mouth had tusks like a boar's—in short, from head to foot she was ugly beyond imagination. Now she seized Nardo Aniello ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... wende the hous for to swepe Nought was theyr besom / I holde it set on fyre The inwarde wo in to my herte dyde crepe To god aboue / I made my hole desyre Saynge o good lorde of heuenly empyre Let the mount with all braunches swete Entyerly growe / god gyue vs grace ...
— The coforte of louers - The Comfort of Lovers • Stephen Hawes
... leave the springs o' Calvin, For gumlie dubs of your ain delvin'! Ye sons of heresy and error, Ye'll some day squeal in quaking terror! When Vengeance draws the sword in wrath, And in the fire throws the sheath; When Ruin, with his sweeping besom, Just frets 'till Heav'n commission gies him: While o'er the harp pale Mis'ry moans, And strikes the ever-deep'ning tones, Still louder shrieks, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... its yellow furze, Mole-hills and rabbit-tracks, that lead Through besom-ling and teasel burrs That spread a wilderness indeed: The Woodland oaks, and all below That their white powder'd branches shield, The mossy paths—the very crow Croaks music in my ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... for miles round the edge of some precipices beyond which could be glimpsed the eternal snows. Sometimes an avalanche slid over a slope with the distant appearance of a great white waterfall and the echo of muffled thunder. Where the mountain was swept as by a mighty besom, the pack-train kept an anxious eye on the snow {31} amid the valleys of the upper peaks; for, in an instant, the snowslide might come over the edge of the upper valley to sweep down the slope, carrying away forests, rocks, trail, pack-train and all. The story is told of ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut |
