"Cumber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... met below, They, too, have long roam'd to and fro; They ramble, leaving, where they pass, Their fragments on the cumber'd grass. And often to some kindly place Chance guides the migratory race, Where, though long wanderings intervene, They recognise a former scene. The dingy tents are pitch'd; the fires Give to the wind their wavering spires; In dark knots crouch round the wild flame ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... is fair," he answered, "but she is a married woman, and I will have no Umpondwana brats among my people. Let her go, and take a girl if you will." For Van Vooren did not wish that the few men who remained with him should cumber themselves just then with women and children, since they were needed ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... enough, And Concubines a Number; Yet Ise possess more happiness, And he had more of Cumber; My Joys surmount a wedded Life, With fear she lets me mow her; A Wench is better ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... awful people, these Finns and ... Greeks," he thought. "Useless, good-for-nothing, disgusting people. They only cumber the earth. What is the ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... And, on his courser mounting light, 445 He seem'd to vanish from my sight: The moonbeam droop'd, and deepest night Sunk down upon the heath.— 'Twere long to tell what cause I have To know his face, that met me there, 450 Call'd by his hatred from the grave, To cumber upper air: Dead, or alive, good cause had he To be ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... oh Holly," she said, "this people founded the city, of which the ruins yet cumber the plain yonder, four thousand years before this cave was finished. Yet, when first mine eyes beheld it two thousand years ago, was it even as it is now. Judge, therefore, how old must that city have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show thee after what fashion ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... guide him. That Dadalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings, to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise indeed we do, but that, very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known: and so is our brain delivered of much matter, which never was begotten by knowledge. For, there being ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and T-light, in the midst of which he rehearses, are as significantly palaces or meadows to him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as all the real grass and real woodwork with which the manager will cumber the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... upon your household calendar. Under no circumstances is it conceivable that the churn and the wash-boiler shall be required for use upon the same day. Clearly the use of the one presupposes and compels the neglect of the other. Then why cumber your house with these two articles, equally large and equally unwieldly, when, by means of the beautiful invention that I have the honor of presenting to your notice, the two in one can be united, and money and house-room alike can be saved? I trust, ...
— Our Pirate Hoard - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... lad: thews that lie and cumber Sunlit pallets never thrive; Morns abed and daylight slumber Were ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the worthless ones are too often left to cumber the earth; it is the precious ones who are taken," he said, thinking of her as he looked into her tired face, and remembered all ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... be smashed in a moment, if that I did not slay the man very quick. For so mighty was he, that he did leap this way and that way after me, as though the great rock did cumber him no more than it had been but ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... of human beings, it is naught unless it is valued; but, being valued, it is a treasure beyond price. Cold, glittering, and dumb, it stands among the tasteless splendors with which the wealthy ignorant cumber their dreary abodes,—a thing of ostentation merely,—as uninteresting as the women who surround it, gorgeously apparelled, but without conversation, conscious of defective parts of speech. "There is much music, excellent voice, in that little organ," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... again with the forces of St. Luc. You would be there, Dagaeoga, to help in the fighting. Go, I am useless. It is not a time to cumber ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... could not rise, and his breath was taken from him; the hole that he had made was filled up behind him; fresh volumes from the shaken height came pouring down upon him; his flanks and his back were wedged fast in the cumber, and he stood still and trembled, being ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... shall cumber Egypt no longer," the murket muttered after a little; "and the quarrel between them shall be at an end. The hour approacheth when every Hebrew shall leave Egypt—shall be driven forth if he leave it ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... that such words as Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Sin, Satan, and Serpent should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise Lost"? Would it not rather have been surprising that they should not? Such trifles at best come under the head of what old Warner would have called cumber-minds. It is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting great poets. Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the Brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a trencher," ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... foot on the corrie, Sage counsel in cumber, Red hand in the foray, How sound is thy slumber! Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a feeling of consternation and pity, as she thought of the orphan boy, she accepted his greeting with duteous welcome as he said, "Kinswoman, I am come to cumber you, whilst I inquire into this matter. I give your son thanks for the honesty and faithfulness he hath shown in the matter, as befitted his father's son. I should wish myself to examine ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and a rearrangement and different allocation of the functions of government, this challenges the closest thought of the publicist. That the problem is here crying aloud for solution is apparent. The publications which cumber the counters of our book-stores, those for which the greatest popular call to-day exists—treatises relating to trade interests, to collectivism, to socialism, even to anarchism—tell the tale in part; in part it is elsewhere and otherwise told. Only ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... start, the sudden quickening of his glance told her how shrewdly she had struck home. Fearlessly, then, sure of herself, she continued. "To that end they use you. When you shall have served it you will but cumber them. When they shall have used you to procure their security from me, then they will deal with you as they have ever sought to deal with you—so that you trouble them no more. Ali, at last ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... said nay. But, father prior, I am myself, it may be, an intruder of this kind; for my sojourning hath been long among you, and my retinue, though far fewer than the Douglas's, are nevertheless enough to cumber you for their daily maintenance; and though our order is to send out purveyors to lessen your charge as much as may be, yet if there be inconvenience, it were fitting we should ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... our aim, it were all, in sooth, That any soul needs, to climb to heaven, And we would not cumber the way of truth With dreary dogmas, ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Conscience! indeed I do you wrong, But I'll quickly right it; my cloak shall not cumber you long. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... there is an assurance that they have enough to eat and drink and to spare, and idleness is joined therewith; just as we still see, the richer cities are the more shamefully do men live in them; but where there is hunger and cumber there the sins are so much the fewer. Therefore God permits, in regard to those that are His, that their education should be severe, ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... your laws to oppress and trample on. But now we are free—free by the very act which left us neither house nor hearth, food nor covering—which bereaved me of all—of all—and makes me groan when I think I must still cumber the earth for other purposes than those of vengeance. And I will carry on the work, this day has so well commenced, by a deed that shall break all bands between MacGregor and the Lowland churls. Here Allan—Dougal—bind these Sassenachs neck and heel ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it strikes in and makes poets—perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know exactly what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the cub, and does himself oppose Betwixt his cumber'd mother and her foes; With desp'rate courage he receives her wounds, And men and boats his active tail confounds. Their forces join'd, the seas with billows fill, And make a tempest, though the winds be still. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... that would furnish forth a whole legion of the poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!" But I cannot pursue these memories. They are too painful. For who speaks of CHEPSTOWE now? Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered his shrieking message? His very name has flickered out; and when I spoke of him the other day, I was asked, by a person of some intelligence, if I referred to CHEPSTOWE who had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... with what at a distance resembled loose boards, but which were actually the long marble seats of the stadium. Urging our horses over piles of loose blocks, we reached the base of the theatre, climbed the fragments that cumber the main entrance, and looked on the spacious arena and galleries within. Although greatly ruined, the materials of the whole structure remain, and might be put together again. It is a grand wreck; the colossal fragments ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... not all. It would also follow that the names of substances would not only have, as in truth they have, but would also be supposed to have different significations, as used by different men, which would very much cumber the use of language. For if every distinct quality that were discovered in any matter by any one were supposed to make a necessary part of the complex idea signified by the common name given to it, it must follow, that men must suppose the same word to signify different things in different ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... slowly from their bodies in thin and trickling streams. You think of Ossian's heroes, of Thor and his hammer, of the Anakim or of the steeple-high Brobdignagian cavalry, and almost expect to hear groans issuing from the colossal trunks that cumber ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... French differ from us and from the Spaniards, is that they do not embarrass or cumber themselves with too much Plot. They only represent so much of a Story as will constitute One whole and great Action sufficient for a Play. We, who undertake more, do but multiply Adventures [pp. 541, 552]; which (not being produced from one another, as ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... not the dark thee cumber; What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light, Like tapers ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... men, and go in, and take all the loot you can find. The jewels we will divide among the men when at Meerut. Tell off another party to loot the rest of the rooms, but only take what is really valuable and portable. We cannot cumber ourselves with baggage. It would serve the rajah right if I were to burn his castle down; he may think himself lucky to ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... strove to protect yon miserable hunchback who will be burned to ashes for his sins ere three more days have gone by. How explain you such conduct as that, Sir Oliver? Are you and your dame rearing up a heretic brood, to cumber the land in days ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... times beholds Some sunken feature of the mummied Past, But oftener only the embroidered folds And soiled magnificence of her rent robe Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties That sweep the dust of aeons in our eyes And with their trailing pride cumber the globe.— For lo! the high, imperial Past is dead: The air is full of its dissolved bones; Invincible armies long since vanquished, Kings that remember not their awful thrones, Powerless potentates and foolish sages, Impede the slow steps of ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... cumber: What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... brave; We have fired our last bullet, have made our last rally, And Caucasus gives us a grave. Here the soft pipe no more shall invite us to slumber —The thunder our lullaby sings; Our eyes not the maiden's dark tresses shall cumber, Them the raven shall shade with his wings! Forget, O my children, your father's stern duty— No more shall he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... "That's 'appen for them as doesn't like them. I niver knowed a cumber do me no harm, an' I eat 'em like a happle." Whereupon the hawker took a "cumber" from his barrow, bit off the end, and chewed it till the sap squirted. "What's wrong with that?" he said, holding up the ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... head the plunging pilot rears, Clogg'd with his clothes, and cumber'd with his years: Now dropping wet, he climbs the cliff with pain. The crowd, that saw him fall and float again, Shout from the distant shore; and loudly laugh'd, To see his heaving breast disgorge the ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... shall grow—the reed"? I choose those rocky hills that, on our left, Drag down the skiey waters to the woods: Such loved I from my youth: to me they said, "Bandits this hour usurp our heights, and beasts Cumber our caves: expel the seed accurst, And yield us back to God!"' The King gave ear; And Cedd within those mountains passed his Lent, Driving with prayer and fast the spirits accurst With ignominy forth. Foundations next He ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the interior Indians will never bear the strain of development. Lazy and ambitionless, they are incapable of uniting their tribal forces. Alas for them! They merely cumber ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... wearied and over-heated, looked him over with a sneer. "A fine soldier with your complaints!" was his jeering comment. "I wonder to see a Jew in our ranks, but you'll not cumber us long, I'm thinking. You Jews are fit only for trading and money lending—not fighting. You'll melt away quickly enough in the heat ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... pas la pretention de m'affubler d'un titre que la mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me permet pas de porter comma il sied. Je m'appelle, pour vous servir, Blair de Balmile tout court.' [My lord, I have not the effrontery to cumber myself with a title which the ill fortunes of my king will not suffer me to bear the way it should be. I call myself, at your service, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... principles, that say, shepherds use few ceremonies, for that they acquaint themselves with few subtleties: to frame myself, therefore, to your country fashion with much faith and little flattery, know, beautiful shepherdess, that whilst I lived in the court I knew not love's cumber, but I held affection as a toy, not as a malady; using fancy as the Hyperborei do their flowers, which they wear in their bosom all day, and cast them in the fire for fuel at night. I liked all, because I loved none, and ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... well-to-do and were able to discard a garment when a passing fancy had been gratified, and after a thing was passe they would rather toss it aside than wear it out. In consequence shopkeepers, who studied the market as if it were a thermometer, refused to cumber their counters with expensive goods which must only be shelved after their color or design was out of date. Such conditions had created an American market for cheap silks such as was unknown in Europe where quality was a far greater factor in the sale of silk materials. ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... to the hand that shed this costly blood! Over thy wounds now do I prophesy— Which like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue; A curse shall light upon the limbs of men; Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war; All pity choked with custom ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... captain's error; abashed, also, by the surprise and fear with which the Indian regarded me at first, and the obsequious civilities with which he soon began to cumber me. I know now that he must have overheard and comprehended the peculiar nature of my prayers. It is certain, of course, that he at once disclosed the matter to his patron; and looking back with greater knowledge, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a second Robinson Crusoe than sober history. For that reason I have put the corroborative evidence in footnotes, rather than cumber the movement of the main theme. I am sorry to have loaded the opening parts with so many notes; but Radisson's voyages change the relative positions of the other explorers so radically that proofs must be given. ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... clod! Digged from the earth like a base common sod; I wonder at thee, and thy power to hold The world in bond to thee, thou yellow gold! Yet do I sadly own thy fascination, And would I gladly show my estimation By giving house-room to thee, if thou'lt come And cumber up my home;— I'd even promise not to call attention To these things that ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... "Exeter Hall is like a little world. We have some fine girls there, but we have, too, some that are petty and selfish. Exeter Hall has sent forth some of the noblest women I have ever known, and it has also sent forth some that simply cumber ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... everlasting Night, And blest the endless Slumber! We are heated with the day too bright, And withered up with cumber! We're weary of that life abroad: Come, we will now go ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... of a serious suitor such as John. It was rumored the latter was taking to liquor, and she was blamed for it. Women often like to have others say yes to the first man who comes, and not leave old love affairs to cumber the ground. And girls, however loving to their friends, have but a cold sympathy for their ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... collected from it in the early settlement of the country. Earth for leaching was removed to such an extent that bedrock is now exposed near the entrance and at several places within. In addition many large rocks cumber the floor, consequently excavations would not yield satisfactory results, although refuse still to be seen in the cave and in front of it shows that it was a place of ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... from time to time the hungry hordes, whose iron sinews swept the nerveless children of the gardens of the earth from the face of their idle paradises: and, but for this stream of keener life and nobler energy, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete race of lotus-eaters than would now cumber the fairest regions ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... idiot to think of cutting down the pine grove. I'm a milksop compared with a red-headed Indian you never saw before. Now I'm a blunderbuss for answering a simple question asked me by my sister. What do you think I am, anyhow? Fit to cumber the earth?" ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... afforded us in the present. We would rather that the wound should be ever fresh than that the image of the dear past should fade. It would be a loss to our best life if it would fade. There is no sting in such a faith. Such remembrance as this, which keeps the heart green, will not cumber the life. True sentiment does not weaken, but becomes an inspiration to make our life worthy of our love. It can save even a squalid lot from sordidness; for however poor we may be in the world's goods, we are rich in happy associations in the past, and in sweet communion in ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... why not? What use are these manikins in creation? Only to cumber the earth. Well, mozo, you have brought ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... more ineffectual attempts to regain his freedom. Indeed, the Gazette, discovering that the wretch had been originally transported for highway robbery, argued very ably it would be far better to hang such wild beasts in the first instance than suffer them to cumber the ground, and grow confirmed in villainy. "Of what use to society," asked the Gazette, quite pathetically, "has this scoundrel been during the last eleven years?" And everybody agreed that he had been ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... But the captain, Smith, to whom perhaps Margaret had been speaking, set down his flat foot on the deck and said that he, who commanded there, would suffer no such thing. A wounded man, he declared, would but cumber them who had little room to spare in that small boat, and could be of no service, either on land or water. Moreover, Master Peter's face was known to thousands who had watched it yesterday, and would certainly be recognised, whereas none would take note ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... was written. What was the particular excuse, invented fiercely at the moment, there is no use writing down here to cumber the page. John Arniston cheerfully gave himself over to the recording angel. Yet the ninth commandment is of equal interpretation, though it may be somewhat less clearly and ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... riches known, and yet despis'd, And we should serve him as a grudging master, As a penurious niggard of his wealth, And live like Natures bastards, not her sons, Who would be quite surcharged with her own weight, And strangl'd with her waste fertility; Th'earth cumber'd, and the wing'd air dark't with plumes. 730 The herds would over-multitude their Lords, The Sea o'refraught would swell, and th'unsought diamonds Would so emblaze the forhead of the Deep, And so bested with Stars, that they below Would grow ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Blood. Ouer thy wounds, now do I Prophesie, (Which like dumbe mouthes do ope their Ruby lips, To begge the voyce and vtterance of my Tongue) A Curse shall light vpon the limbes of men; Domesticke Fury, and fierce Ciuill strife, Shall cumber all the parts of Italy: Blood and destruction shall be so in vse, And dreadfull Obiects so familiar, That Mothers shall but smile, when they behold Their Infants quartered with the hands of Warre: All pitty choak'd with ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... allowed us as many as four wives, and as many women slaves or concubines as a man can properly and with decency provide for, the children of the latter, if recognised by the father, sharing equally with the offspring of the former. Though why a man who has found his love should wish to cumber his house with other women, seething with jealousy and peevish from want of occupation, is beyond my power ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... wished to lead an easy, quiet life, just as if the business of this mighty world could be carried on by innocent people fond of ease and quiet, or that Providence would permit innocent, quiet drones to occupy any portion of the earth and to cumber it. God had at any rate decreed that this man should not cumber it as a drone. He brings a certain affliction upon him, the agony of which produces that terrible whirling of the brain which, unless it is stopped ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... circumstances, to prove highly beneficial to us. The offensiveness and noxiousness look very much like a direct command from the Author of Nature, to do that which shall turn the refuse to a good account—namely, to bury it in the earth. Yet, from sloth and negligence, it is often allowed to cumber the surface, and there do its evil work instead. An important principle is thus instanced—the essential identity of Nuisance and Waste. Nearly all the physical annoyances we are subjected to, and nearly all the influences that are operating actively for our hurt, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... ergoin' ter 'cumber yore projeck's none ternight," he declared, good-humouredly, then added fairly enough, "but termorrer night I aims ter go sparkin' thar myself—an' I looks ter ye to do as much fer me an' give me ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... I asked his aid, He plunged it in the sheath; And, on his courser mounting light, He seemed to vanish from my sight; The moonbeam drooped, and deepest night Sunk down upon the heath. 'Twere long to tell what cause I have To know his face, that met me there, Called by his hatred from the grave, To cumber upper air; Dead or alive, good cause had he To be my ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... line should not exceed, (especially for three or four links towards the hook) I say, not exceed three or four haires; but if you can attain to Angle with one haire; you will have more rises, and catch more fish. Now you must bee sure not to cumber yourselfe with too long a Line, as most do: and before you begin to angle, cast to have the wind on your back, and the Sun (if it shines) to be before you, and to fish down the streame, and carry the point or tip of the Rod downeward; by which meanes the shadow ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... scarcely less remote that midnight dread, Or venturous less that daring, when La Seine Dismay'd, dismasted, cumber'd with her dead, Struck to the ship ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... that sacred duty of hospitality which Allah enjoins upon the faithful. It is reported that he was host here to fifty of the enemy during their remaining lifetime—although they had the delicacy not to cumber him with overlong living. It is not, as I said, a pleasant place, but the walls are strong and so ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... own, But whose your bondsmen when alone, That further rules you will not break, And marriage liberties partake? Some really do, as I suppose, Upon design keep on some clothes, And yet in truth I'm not afraid For to describe a bundling maid; She'll sometimes say when she lies down, She can't be cumber'd with a gown, And that the weather is so warm, To take it off can be no harm: The girl it seems had been at strift; For widest bosom to her shift, She gownless, when the bed they're in, The spark, nought feels ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... lonely flower I bent, I thought of lives thus lowly clogged and pent, Which yet find room, Through care and cumber, coldness and decay, To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day And make the sad earth happier for ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... my threshold had boasted and jeered and cried— 'The pledge of your offsprings' birthright your children have swept aside— They cumber the land of strangers, they dwell in the alien's tent Till "home" is a word forgotten, and "love" ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... destructive analytical touch. They pull the wrong levers. So far as one can gather from the specialists on the question, there is very considerable congestion in many of the London thoroughfares, delays that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of goods, multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds of acres of idle trucks—there are more acres of railway sidings than of public parks in Greater London—and our Overseas cousins find it ticklish work crossing Regent Street and Piccadilly. Regarding life simply ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... These assurances had, beyond a doubt, a soothing influence on the apprehensions of Ruth and her handmaidens; but they somewhat failed of their effect, with those unwelcome visiters who still continued to cumber Wish-Ton-Wish with their presence. Though they had evidently abandoned all ideas connected with the original object of their visit, they spoke not of departure. On the contrary as night approached, their chief entered ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Sweet- world and Mr. Present-good, namely, for they are two men full of civility and cunning. Let these engage in this business for us, and let Mansoul be taken up with much business, and if possible with much pleasure, and this is the way to get ground of them. Let us but cumber and occupy and amuse Mansoul sufficiently, and they will make their castle a warehouse for goods instead of a garrison for men of war.' This diabolical advice was highly applauded all through hell till all the lesser devils, while setting themselves to carry it out, gnashed their teeth ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Bougwan, that—I love him, and that I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... will outlive me, child, I trust, should such a state of things ever come to pass; but I am old, and shall not cumber the earth long," and a groan burst ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... violence, hath yet in it something of reason. Let him hear from Miss Lucy's own lips that she hath dutifully acceded to the will of her parents, and repenteth her of her covenant with him; and when he is assured of this he will depart in peace unto his own dwelling, and cumber us no more. Alas! the workings of the ancient Adam are strong even in the regenerate; surely we should have long-suffering with those who, being yet in the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity, are swept forward by the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... de bery Ole Nick," was the way Martha described him, when she had a moment alone with Teddy. "It sho duz beat all, how de good Lo'd lets people like him cumber de earf." ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... their stereotyped calculations—any new combination, any strange factor, any fresh variant. And you will be all that to them, Mr. Harnish. And I repeat, they are gamblers, and they will deserve all that befalls them. They clog and cumber all legitimate enterprise. You have no idea of the trouble they cause men like us—sometimes, by their gambling tactics, upsetting the soundest plans, even overturning the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... have known it for a long time, almost from the first; now everybody knows it, and the society reporters are beginning their innuendoes. The next thing will be her picture in the sensational press, and a scandal. Don't you know this? It must not happen! We must make way for them—you and I. We cumber the path." ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... most incontrovertible proof before it could be accepted without suspicion or reserve. The various collections of her plays and novels which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century give us nothing; nay, they rather cumber our path with the trash of discredited Memoirs. Pearson's reprint (1871) is entirely valueless: there is no attempt, however meagre, at editing, no effort to elucidate a single allusion; moreover, several of the Novels— and the Poems in their entirety— ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky. They talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to dig, Would, if on thee were found but one good fig, Preserve thee from the axe: but, barren tree, Bear fruit, or else thy end will cursed be! The utmost end of patience is at hand, 'Tis much if thou much longer here doth stand. O cumber-ground, thou art a barren tree. Bear fruit, or else thine end will cursed be! Thy standing nor they name will help at all; When fruitful trees are spared, thou must fall. The axe is laid unto thy roots, O tree! Bear fruit, or else ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fought on the question of 'freedom for bears;' And how, inter alia, the beast got away And took himself off in the midst of the fray; And how Tommy Johnson at last came to grief: All which I omit, as I wish to be brief. The story's too lengthy—it must not be sent all To cumber your pages, my dear CONTINENTAL. At present my purpose, my object, my mission is To show how the woodman became 'Abolitionist.' Introductions, you know, like 'original sin,' Hang on, while you long for some sign of repentance In shape of the last and the welcomest ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Cameron, eagerly; "and if they prove to be what I want, you shall have the price Mac Cumber is going to charge me for these—it is no mean ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... deceased Matthew Colvill, writer in Edinburgh, John Binning's greatest enemy, being very active to obtain the gift of his forefaulture, with a designe of his ruine, and the prejudice of his numerous and just creditors, the deceased Mr. James Gordon, minister at Cumber in Ireland, John Binning's father in law and former Curator, to whom he was oweing a considerable soume of money, came over to Scotland, at John Binning's desire, who was then in Ireland, to obtaine the said gift, to disappoint Matthew Colvill thereof, who ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... must remain a moot point with the discriminating observer whether they are more delightful in the genial home-circles of which they are the centres and ornaments, or in the more exciting stir and whirl of the ballroom. After every gathering hecatombs of slain male victims mournfully cumber the ground; and one all-conquering fair one, now herself conquered by matrimony and motherhood, wrung from those her charms had blighted the title of ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... certain cats in Kilkenny till both were "eaten up:" the Gudabirsi fix the event at the period when their forefathers still inhabited Bulhar on the coast,—about 300 years ago. If the date be correct, the substantial ruins have fought a stern fight with time. Remnants of houses cumber the soil, and the carefully built wells are filled with rubbish: the palace was pointed out to me with its walls of stone and clay intersected by layers of woodwork. The mosque is a large roofless building containing twelve ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... confronted with hostile Indians who protested against the unlawful seizure of their lands. And now that wheat and corn were becoming great staple crops, the Northwestern pioneers were loudly demanding that the natives should not be permitted to cumber the ground. They must move on to the arid desert beyond or be carried into the Southern country, which Davis, as we have seen, was trying to open to Southern pioneers. It was a real conflict of interest between the lower South and the Northwest, and in order to win, the Northwestern politicians ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... and the fame Are bounded by the world alone; The calm, the smouldering, and the flame Of awful patience were his own; With him they are forever flown Past all our fond self-shadowings, Wherewith we cumber the Unknown As ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... in the dust. Domestic cats may mioul in the garden at night to a certain extent, but a line must be drawn; after that they must be chased up trees and barked at, if necessary, all night. Opossums and native cats are unfit to cumber the earth, and must be hunted into holes, wherever possible. Cows and other horned animals must not come into the yard, or even look over the garden fence, under penalties. Black fellows must be barked at, and their dogs chased to the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the southern coast of Cuba, where they remain as memorials, like and unlike the distorted iron that was the Maine, in the harbor of Havana, and as the shattered and charred remnants of the fleet of Montejo, at Manila, still cumber the waters of the bay off Cavite, telling the story of the glory of ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... for you the brand Against Abaddon, who hath overcast The truth and right, Adami, made full fast Unto God's glory by our steadfast band. Go, smite each sophist, tyrant, hypocrite! Girt with the arms of the first Wisdom, free Your country from the frauds that cumber it! Swerve not: 'twere sin. How good, how great the praise Of him who turns youth, strength, soul, energy, Unto the dayspring ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... connected by a high-road. Having disclosed my intentions to La Trape, I left this road and struck into a woodland path which promised to conduct us in the right direction. But the luxuriance of the undergrowth, and the huge chaos of grey rocks which cumber that part of the forest, made it difficult to keep for any time in a straight line. After being an hour in the saddle we concluded that we had lost our way, and were confirmed in this, on reaching a clearing. In place of the chateau we ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... glory as corrupting man's primitive simplicity. He pled for a return to nature, to country-side, thatched cottages, ploughed fields, flocks, harvests, vintages and rustic holidays. He made this plea, not with an armoury of Greek learning, such as cumber Virgil and Horace, but with an original passion. He cannot speak of the jewelled Roman coquettes without a sigh for those happy times when Phoebus himself tended cattle and lived on curds and whey, all for the love of ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... trowsers about his legs, and lodge him in a house with close-shutting doors and windows, and you expose his constitution to a very serious strain, especially in a country where there is a good deal of rain. Being, after all, but half civilized, he will probably sleep in a wet shirt, or cumber his feet with wet shoes; he will most likely neglect to open his windows at night, and poison himself and his family with bad air, to the influence of which, besides, his unaccustomed lungs will be peculiarly liable; he will live a less active life under his changed conditions; ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich 'guacas' [that is, graveyards] will be found." To emigrants he says:—"Do not come before December; take the Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required": advice which might have been taken from the "Burker's Guide." And he concludes with this line in Italics and small capitals: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... storm-winds of Autumn . . . . . Ye are bound for the mountains— Ah, with you let me go . . . . . Hark! fast by the window The rushing winds go, To the ice-cumber'd gorges, The vast seas of snow. There the torrents drive upward Their rock-strangled hum, There the avalanche thunders The hoarse torrent dumb. —I come, O ye ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... do what it does in private: that man to whom God intendeth to reveal great things, he taketh him aside from the lumber and cumber of this world, and carrieth him away in the solace and contemplation of ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... however, cannot be considered at all common in the Islands; there is no specimen in the Guernsey Museum, and Mr. Couch has never mentioned to me having had one through his hands, or recorded it in the 'Zoologist,' as he would have done had he had one; neither does Mrs. Jago (late Miss Cumber), who used to do a good deal of stuffing in Guernsey about thirty years ago, remember having had one through her hands. There can be no reason, however, why it should not occasionally occur in the Islands, as it does so both on the French and ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... but they are conspicuous objects in the open plain, hill, and pasture. Great numbers of them have become standards; we see them following the lines of old stone walls that skirt the bounds and avenues of the farm, in company with the Ash and the Maple. In these situations, where they would not "cumber the ground," they have been allowed to grow, without exciting the jealousy of the proprietor of the land. Accident, under these circumstances, has reared many a beautiful tree, which would in any other place have been cut down as a trespasser. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... were occupied with the strife of Kirk and King, whence arose "all the cumber of Scotland" till 1689. The preachers, led by the learned and turbulent Andrew Melville, had an ever-present terror of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and of an unknown proportion of the people. The Reformation of 1559-1560 had been ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... and cumber of the world, that will call a man off from looking after the salvation of his soul. This is intimated by the parable of the thorny ground. (Luke 8:14) Worldly cumber is a devilish thing; it will hurry a man from his bed without prayer; to a sermon, and from it again, without prayer; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the souls that come unwelcomed into birth, I'm sorry for the unloved old who cumber up the earth, I'm sorry for the suffering poor in life's great maelstrom hurled - In truth, I'm sorry for them all ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... opened might excuse his excitement, even in a less interested person. The Castle of Hers, though built for strength, presented a very different appearance from that of Stramen: its outline was light and graceful, and it seemed rather to lift up than cumber the tall hill that it so elegantly crowned. It was situated upon the border of the lake, which, by trouvere and troubadour, in song and in verse, in every age and in every clime, has been so justly celebrated. A few miles to the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... the correi, Sage counsel in cumber, Red hand in the foray, How sound is thy slumber! Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou art gone, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... up the roads, she could neither stay where she was, nor pursue her journey. Her infant, too,—she was sure, if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such weather, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to take her aboard. And she was now with her child, all alone, below in the cabin I was stationed a-head on the out-look beside the foresail horse: ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... soul by the worship of animals, birds, and insects, holding the cat sacred to Re, the bull to Isis, the beetle to Pthah. A long struggle against their rude faith ended in its adoption as the religion of the new empire. Then rose the mighty monuments that cumber the river-bank and the desert—obelisk, labyrinth, pyramid, and tomb of king, blent with tomb of crocodile. Into such deep debasement, O brethren, the sons ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... them—they are harmless. Slay me if you will. I offer my life if it will appease your ignorant wrath. I cannot return to Bantoom and so I might as well die, for there is no pleasure in intercourse with the feeble intellects that cumber the face of the world outside the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... atmosphere of the law, beyond the reach of chronic ribaldry, and into the region of argument, where it must be estimated by its legal merits. I have applied to it the rules of law. I have pushed away the dead exfoliations that cumber the path; and have gone to the foundations, to the ever fresh and preserving spirit of the rules of the common law, and have sought to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... little to do, and has even that little done for him by his chief clerk, Zolotucha. The Inspector of the Medical Department is also a man of leisure, and likely to be at home—if he has not gone out to a card party. Others also there are—all men who cumber ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and in some places an iron rod laid on the surface would sink by its own weight. Like many other difficulties in this world, the solidification of the Chat Moss was said to be impossible, but the great engineer scarce admitted the propriety of allowing the word "impossible" to cumber our dictionaries. He began the work at once by forming an embankment twenty feet high, which he carried some distance across the treacherous soil, when the whole affair sank down one day and disappeared! Undismayed, Stephenson began again, and went on ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... sometimes troubled with the same longings, for among the many proclamations against the residence in London of country gentlemen in unofficial positions is one of James I., noticing "those swarms of gentry, who, through the instigation of their wives, do neglect their country hospitality and cumber the city, a general nuisance to the kingdom;" and the royal Solomon elsewhere observes that "gentlemen resident on their estates are like ships in port—their value and magnitude are felt and acknowledged; but when at a distance, as their size seemeth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Adela Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: "You raving maniac!" Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a-spray; Blithesome the bee and the hive full alway; Better work than the bow hath the sickle to-day; Fuller the stack than the House of the Play; The Churl who cares neither to work nor to pray Now why should he cumber the earth with his clay? Justly St. Breda, the sapient, would say "As many to evil as good ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... by morning she rises without a hope, night by night she lies down vacant or apathetic; and the utmost use she can make of the day is to totter three or four times across the floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and weary, "the tomb of her dead self," we look at this dry leaf, and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it in its ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... has no use and no place for a relation of personal subserviency. So far as concerns the economic efficiency of the community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the general habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate adjustment of human institutions to the existing situation. The habit of mind which best lends itself to the purposes of a peaceable, industrial community, is that matter-of-fact temper ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of ripening, and are beginning to go into a worthless condition,—green. The cucumbers cumber the ground,—great yellow, over-ripe objects, no more to be compared to the crisp beauty of their youth than is the fat swine of the sty to the clean little pig. The nutmeg-melons, having covered themselves with delicate lace-work, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rapture of popular air, And caught to the place that was best? You think he could barter and cheat As vulgar diplomates use, With the people's heart in his breast? Prate a lie into shape Lest truth should cumber the road; Play at the fast and loose Till the world is strangled with tape; Maim the soul's complete To fit the hole of a toad; And filch the dogman's meat To feed the offspring ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... women, I mean!" Mrs. Burgoyne laughed too as Mrs. Brown settled back in her chair with a relieved sigh. "We women," she went on vigorously, "have mismanaged every separate work that was ever put into our hands! We ought to be ashamed to live. We cumber—" ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... No Persian cumber, boy, for me; I hate your garlands linden-plaited; Leave winter's rose where on the tree It hangs belated. Wreath me plain myrtle; never think Plain myrtle either's wear unfitting, Yours as you wait, mine as I ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... nice that these men should die, it is ordained that they must die, and we should not quarrel with them if they cumber our highways and kitchen stoops with their perambulating carcasses. This is a form of elimination we not only countenance but compel. Therefore let us be cheerful and honest about it. Let us be as stringent as we please with our police regulations, but for goodness' ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit thereon, and found none. And he said unto the vinedresser, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why doth it also cumber the ground? And he answering saith unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: and if it bear fruit thenceforth, well; but if not, thou shalt ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... without rising, and looked awhile toward the house. She had as much trouble to get matters adjusted to her mind as if she had a houseful of furniture to place, with carpets to lay, curtains to hang, and the thousand and one "things" with which we bigger housekeepers cumber ourselves and make life a burden. This spasmodic visitation went on for days, and finally it was plain that sitting had begun. Still the birds of the vicinity were interested callers, and I began to think that one ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... you should die. You cumber the earth! Shall I do it?" Helwyse muttered to his heart,—"merely ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... My sons, you say. You're right: For menfolk have no children: only women Carry them: only women are brought to bed: And only women labour: and, when they go, Only the mothers lose them: and all for nothing, The coil and cumber! If I could have left one son, Wedded, and settled down at Krindlesyke, To do his parents credit, and carry on ... First Peter came: it snowed the night he came— A feeding-storm of fisselling dry snow. I lay and ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... the canon, "this is your sort, is it? I'll have nought to do with it! Preaching, preaching! Every idle child's head is agog on preaching nowadays! A plague on it! Why can't Master Dean leave it to the black friars, whose vocation 'tis, and not cumber us with his sermons for ever, and set every lazy lad thinking he must needs run after them? No, no, my good boy, take my advice. Thou shalt have two good bellyfuls a day, all my cast gowns, and a pair of shoes by the year, with a groat a month if thou wilt keep mine house, bring in my meals, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... boys—White, who died in California, or Porter, who was now in the Senate—and then a shake of the hand and good-bye, Neckart usually wondering to himself, as they parted, how soon that fellow Laidley would cease to cumber the earth and the captain would have his own and wear a decent coat again and the bits of gaudy jewelry in which he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... every one wounded became a serviceable clod; rapidly as the dump and cumber of humanity filled the moat the ladders extended their upward reach; while drum-beat, battle-cry, trumpet's blare, and the roar of cannon answering cannon blent ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... bane be the subject of legislation, when society was in its normal state? Sir George thought not, and hence he virtually says to the landlords, "Now is your time to get rid of the people; they have served your purpose; they are useful to you no longer; why should they cumber the ground?" Mr. Poulett Scrope objected to carrying the clause so suddenly into execution, as it would be a complete clearance of the small farmers of Ireland, and would amount to a social revolution in the state ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... outright; others unfortunately survived, and clung with feeble and vicious helplessness to the skirts of their manlier fellows; and from them have descended the shiftless squatters, the "mean whites," the listless, uncouth men who half-till their patches of poor soil, and still cumber the earth in out-of-the-way nooks from the crannies of the Alleghanies to the canyons ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... to be written or read, But cushions of softest moss instead, Without a care to cumber; And fern-leaf fans for the weary head, Soothing the ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... Hover the colours and clouds of the twilight, void of a star. As a bird unfledged is the broad-winged night, whose winglets are callow Yet, but soon with their plumes will she cover her brood from afar, Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies with their blossom Thick as the darkness of leaf-shadowed spring is encumbered with flowers. World upon world is enwound in the bountiful girth of her bosom, Warm and lustrous with life lovely to look ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... good to nobody now. One old coat 'ull do to patch another, but it's good for nought else. Thee'dst like to ha' a wife to mend thy clothes an' get thy victual, better nor thy old mother. An' I shall be nought but cumber, a-sittin' i' th' chimney-corner. (Adam winced and moved uneasily; he dreaded, of all things, to hear his mother speak of Hetty.) But if thy feyther had lived, he'd ne'er ha' wanted me to go to make room for another, for he could no more ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have been its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one can ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumber the ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise that beneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried a sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientific investigator, or a good judge. Scientifically speaking, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... old idolatries;—from the proud fanes Each to his grave their priests go out, till none Is left to teach their worship; then the fires Of sacrifice are chilled, and the green moss O'ercreeps their altars; the fallen images Cumber the weedy courts, and for loud hymns, Chanted by kneeling multitudes, the wind Shrieks in the solitary aisles. When he Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all The laws that God or man has made, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... what Emerson says: "I pray you, O excellent wife, cumber not yourself and me to get a curiously rich dinner for this man and woman who have just alighted at our gate. These things, if they desire them, they can get for a few shillings at any village inn; but rather let that stranger see, if he will, in your looks, accents and behavior, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... picturesqueness and a kinship with Nature and the hills, utterly lacking in a mining locality. The squalid rows of the latter, arranged in wretched, heart-breaking symmetry, are an offence to the landscape. Mud and filth cumber the door-steps, runnels of malodorous water ooze along the rows, ragged and ill-kempt bairns tumble about like little savages. A pitiful sight it is to see the black squads of colliers returning to their homes after a day in the damp bowels of the earth: greasy caps ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... shod, and your farrier paid—what need you cumber yourself further, than to mount and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... outclassed the abominations of heathendom. As already pointed out in these pages, the fig tree was a favorite type in rabbinical representation of the Jewish race, and the Lord had before adopted the symbolism in the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree, that worthless growth which did but cumber the ground.[1084] ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... talking for the good of your soul. Don't take any more advice—certainly not Sheila Melrose's! You go straight ahead and marry her! You've got money, I know, but I hope you won't chuck your job on that account. Stick to it, and you shall have the Dower House to live in while I yet cumber the ground, and Burchester Castle as soon as ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... would be a strange shame for this age if it were not so: for as every age of the world has its own troubles to confuse it, and its own follies to cumber it, so has each its own work to do, pointed out to it by unfailing signs of the times; and it is unmanly and stupid for the children of any age to say: We will not set our hands to the work; we did not make the troubles, we will not weary ourselves seeking ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... of the maiden Who calls on you now— Arise! from your dreaming In violet bowers, To duty beseeming These star-litten hours— And shake from your tresses Encumber'd with dew The breath of those kisses That cumber them too— (O! how, without you, Love! Could angels be blest?) Those kisses of true love That lull'd ye to rest! Up!—shake from your wing Each hindering thing: The dew of the night— It would weigh down your flight; And ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
