"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and of folklore. The old mythologists worked at a hortus siccus, at myths dried and pressed in thoroughly literary books, Greek and Latin. But we now study myths 'in the unrestrained utterances of the people,' either of savage tribes or of the European Folk, the unprogressive peasant class. The former, and to some extent the latter, still live in the mythopoeic state of mind—regarding bees, for instance, as persons who must be told of a death in the family. Their myths are still not wholly out of concord with their ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... a long while before the door was opened. After the third or fourth ring a light gleamed in the windows, and there was a sound of steps, coughing and whispering; at last the key grated in the lock, and a stout peasant woman with a frightened red face appeared at the door. Some distance behind her stood a thin little old woman with short grey hair, carrying a candle in her hand. Zinaida Fyodorovna ran into the passage and flung her arms round ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to myself in a voice 'at could be heard anywhere in the hotel, an' he drew me to one side an' sez, "Hush, presumptuous peasant; for all you know the blood of Alfred ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... before the end of 1847. In this period of little more than two years there was an interval of six months during which the work was laid aside, while I was writing articles in the Morning Chronicle (which unexpectedly entered warmly into my purpose) urging the formation of peasant properties on the waste lands of Ireland. This was during the period of the Famine, the winter of 1846-47, when the stern necessities of the time seemed to afford a chance of gaining attention for what appeared to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate destitution with permanent improvement ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... pleasure, gentlemen?" replied the peasant, with a purity of accent peculiar to the people of that district and which might have put to shame the cultured denizens of the Sorbonne and the Rue ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... remote part of Swabia there once dwelt a rich peasant, who was noted in all the neighborhood for his shrewdness. No one could get the better of him in a bargain, and no man managed his farm with such extraordinary success. His crops always seemed to flourish ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... clothing into a boiling spring, where it was turned and churned and twisted and finally flung out, a clean and purified testimonial to Mother Nature's ability as a laundress. Or perhaps the pretty pastoral of the peasant girl knee deep in the brook, rubbing her household linen on the stones, hath even greater charms. But the trouble is that we are neither "forty-niners" nor peasants, but just plain, latter-day housekeepers with a laundry problem to face, and finding ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... year 1895 the name of the German peasant, Johanna Ambrosius, was hardly known, even within her own country. Now her melodious verse has made her one of the most popular writers in Germany. Her genius found its way from the humble farm in Eastern Prussia, where she worked in the field beside her husband, to the very heart of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... had been a cultivated desert, and the absence of enclosures, of cottages, and even of peasantry, was saddening to a traveller from sunny Italy, or busy England. Yet the towns were frequent and lively, and the cordial politeness and ready smile of the wooden-shoed peasant restored good humour to the splenetic. Now, the old woman sat no more at the door with her distaff—the lank beggar no longer asked charity in courtier-like phrase; nor on holidays did the peasantry thread with slow grace the mazes of the dance. Silence, melancholy bride of death, went ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... the Great Place under the eye of Mr. The Englishman, where a few awkward squads from the last conscription were doing the goose-step—some members of those squads still as to their bodies, in the chrysalis peasant-state of Blouse, and only military butterflies as to their regimentally-clothed legs—from the Great Place, away outside the fortifications, and away for miles along the dusty roads, soldiers swarmed. All day long, upon the grass-grown ramparts of the ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... Waterford, was a Protestant freeholder in Louth to be punished for the crime of a Catholic freeholder in Clare? If the principle of the honourable and learned Member for Newport be sound, the franchise of the Irish peasant was property. That franchise the Ministers under whom the honourable and learned Member held office did not scruple to take away. Will he accuse those Ministers of robbery? If not, how can he bring such an accusation against ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient Border fame, and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure you that this caravan, attended by a dozen ragged, rosy, peasant children carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... of money matters generally have been already noted. He had the Scotch peasant's horror of debt—anything but that. This probably arises from the fact that the trifling sums owing by the poor to their poor neighbors who have kindly helped them in distress are actually needed by these generous friends for comfortable existence. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... of the peasant, always on the alert, and his quality for spying made him stop at nothing to get the information he desired. M. Vulfran usually made the same reply when Talouel had ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... horses were fed, and I had, as is customary, treated the driver, we departed amidst the pleasing sounds of Bien oblige, bon voyage. If they had cheated me, I should have been content, so much is politeness worth; and the Canadian French peasant is a primitive being, and as polite as a baron of the ancien regime. It was quite refreshing in such hot weather to meet with a little civilization, after being occasionally witness to the reverse from the newest people in the world. ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... is one advantage not so easy to express. Long ago I read a story of Tolstoi's called "The Candle"—how a peasant Russian forced to plough on Easter Day lighted a candle to his Lord and kept it burning on his plough as he worked through the sacred day. When I see a man ploughing in his fields I often think of Tolstoi's peasant, and wonder if this is not as true a way as any of worshipping God. I wonder ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... warm, and he was buried with indecent haste in one of the public cemeteries. His funeral took place on Thursday. On the Sunday following, the grounds of the cemetery were, as usual, much thronged with visiters, and about noon an intense excitement was created by the declaration of a peasant that, while sitting upon the grave of the officer, he had distinctly felt a commotion of the earth, as if occasioned by some one struggling beneath. At first little attention was paid to the man's asseveration; but ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... school to learn mathematics, and that he was very glad that he had escaped the infliction of learning grammar. Indeed, on every subject besides mathematics, he was profoundly ignorant. He had no manners whatever; in fact, he was a mere peasant. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... through the eastern window, stood, statue-like, the hooded figure, but with the great capote thrown back, showing a sad, eager, girlish face, with dark eyes, and a good deal of black hair,—one of those faces of peasant beauty such as America never shows,—faces where ignorance is almost raised into refinement by its childlike look. Contrasted with Severance's wild gaze, the countenance wore an expression of pitying forgiveness, almost of calm; yet it told of wasting sorrow ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... each other's cheeks, and foes long vowed More warmly did it; two-months' babies leapt Right upward in their mother's arms, whose black Wide glittering eyes looked elsewhere; lovers pressed Each before either, neither glancing back; And peasant maidens smoothly 'tired and tressed Forgot to finger on their throats the slack Great pearl-strings; while old blind men would not rest, But pattered with their staves and slid their shoes Along the stones, and smiled ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... best company in this nation at a board of elegance and hospitality. Here the manufacturer and husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppressions and his oppressor. They marry into your families; they enter into your senate; they ease your estates by loans; they raise their value by demand; they cherish and protect your ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the peasant into a veteran, and supplied by discipline the absence of experience; as a statesman, he enlarged the policy of the cabinet into the most comprehensive system of general advantage; and such was the wisdom of his views, and the philosophy of his ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... William set to build Corfe Castle was Stephen Mowlem; and the Dorsetshire firm of Mowlem still pave London causeways. A poor woman in a remote hamlet, untouched by tourist or guide-book, has shown me the ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised in Carlyle's "Past and Present," ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... almost extinct at Hong Kong, and is vanishing fast on the mainland. It is still found occasionally in the garden of a peasant, who, we are told, resolutely declines to sell his treasure. This may seem incredible to those who know the Chinaman, but Mr. Roebelin vouches for the fact; it is one more eccentricity to the credit of that people, who had quite ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... power of talking on the subject, which unfortunately bore more than due proportion to his talents of execution. His companion, a magnificent-looking man in form, and so far resembling the young barbarian, but more clownish and peasant-like in the expression of his features, was Stephanos the wrestler, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... vingtieme. The vingtieme, or "twentieth," was a tax on incomes—5 per cent [Footnote: Five per cent in theory; in practice in the reign of Louis XVI it was 11 per cent] on the salary of the judge, on the rents of the noble, on the earning of the artisan, on the produce of the peasant. The clergy were entirely exempted from this tax; the more influential nobles and bourgeois contrived to have their incomes underestimated, and the burden fell heaviest on the poorer classes. Capitation was a general poll or head tax, varying in amount according to whichever of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... deprived of the small emoluments of his office; but he was not silenced, for he still continued to perform the ceremonies of his religion, sometimes in some gentleman's drawing-room, sometimes in a farmer's house, or a peasant's cottage, but oftener out in the open air, under the shadow of a spreading beech, on a rude altar hastily built for ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little Laure, who had bloomed into ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... certainly as it will give us new life. The germs of tuberculosis will live for weeks and even months in dark, damp, unventilated quarters, just precisely such surroundings as are provided for them in the inside bedrooms of our tenements, and the dark, cellar-like rooms of many a peasant's cottage or farmhouse. In bright sunlight they will perish in from three to six hours; in bright daylight in less than half a day. This is one of the factors that helps to explain the apparent paradox, that the dust collected from the floors and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Science demands pure intellect; but religion, both intellect and feeling, perhaps most of the latter. The mind is susceptible of high cultivation, the heart feels instinctively, and that of a peasant may throb with purer feeling than a philosopher's and for that reason be more ready to receive religious truth. And who may ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural. If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as composed the mind of the tenth century biographers of Declan and ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... poet. His muse, it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one. She is "clad in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks along the level Bedfordshire roads." But if the lines are unpolished, "they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant," with the "strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a single blow the nail home to ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the dark blue smock and the peculiar peaked hat of the country folk of Normandy for the less distinctive clothes of the English peasant, in a very large number of cases the Frenchmen would pass as English. The Norman farmer so often has features strongly typical of the southern counties of England, that it is surprising that with his wife and his daughters there should be so little resemblance. Perhaps this is because the French ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... was out of the palace, he looked round him on all sides, and perceiving a peasant going into the country, hastened after him. When he had overtaken him, he made a proposal to him to change clothes, which the man agreed to. When they had made the exchange, the countryman went about his business, and Aladdin entered the neighboring city. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... got his mind off. The costooms of the peasant wimmen are very pretty, a black bodice over a white chemise with short full sleeves and bright colored shirts, and hat trimmed with long ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman's Crede (1394), and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was {32} appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... life, and more divine; The congregated glories of this cave, With all its jewelled lamps and sparkling roof Could never purchase one of its small joys. Love, in exchange, takes nothing but itself, Power cannot claim it—fear cannot command— It is a tribute Queens cannot exact. The humblest peasant, singing in her hut, Is often richer than the proudest princess: It is the gift God left the human race To keep them from despair, when sin and shame, Pain, poverty, and death, and madness came Among the people. When a youthful ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... he writes on a loose sheet, apropos of nothing, "the frank dunghill outside a German peasant's kitchen window. It is a matter of family pride. The higher it can be piled the greater his consideration. But what I loathe and abominate is the dungheap hidden beneath Hedwige's ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... cleared at about eleven, and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical; picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two equally forlorn hedgehogs. Each moment the concourse increased, for it is a fateful day and every one wants to know the issue: because, you see, if the dove runs true, lights ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... districts, like the Swiss Cantons, but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom were in a very different position from the peasant communities of Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the Norman Conquest, offered a serious obstacle; and though ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with almost white hair, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... oft be made pleasant, If fowk wor to foller this plan; Throo a prince ov the throne to a peasant, To do a gooid turn when ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... anything; but he catches every current whisper and swells it to the journalistic audibility. Here, if we take Addison at his word, are the key ideas for Wordsworth's Preface on the language of rustic life, for Tolstoy's ruthless reduction of taste to the peasant norm. Addison went on to urge what was perfectly just, that the old popular ballads ought to be read and liked; at the same time he pushed his praise to a rather wild extreme, and he made some comic comparisons between Chevy Chase and ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... goes, so far indeed he comes to embrace a certain persuasion of this kind, but merely to this limited extent, that what is going on around him at present, in his own narrow sphere of observation, will go on in like manner in future. The peasant believes that the sun which rose to-day will rise again to-morrow; that the seed put into the ground will be followed in due time by the harvest this year as it was last year, and the like; but has no notion of such inferences ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... boy had become hysterical, and the Capuchin Father Aurelian tried to exorcise him, and charged a peasant's wife, Frau Herz, with bewitching him, on evidence that would have cost the woman her life at any time during the seventeenth century. Thereupon the woman's husband brought suit against Father Aurelian for slander. The latter urged in his defence that the boy was possessed ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Electra was that she lived "unmated and alone" (1. 562, p. 31). But that was said when Pylades was regarded as practically a dead man. Electra was apparently betrothed to Pylades, but was not actually his wife.—There is no mention of the Peasant husband of the Electra. ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... reviews we find the same odd mixture of articles apposite to present problems, and articles utterly out of date. The organisation of agriculture is a perennial, and Lady Verney's "Peasant Proprietorship in France" ("Contemporary," January, 1882), Mr. John Rae's "Co-operative Agriculture in Germany" ("Contemporary," March, 1882), and Professor Sedley Taylor's "Profit-Sharing in Agriculture" ("Nineteenth Century," October, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... shelves above it, with more jugs, and a table beneath a window. At the left there is a large open fire-place, with turf fire, and a small door into inner room. Pegeen, a wild looking but fine girl, of about twenty, is writing at table. She is dressed in the usual peasant dress.] ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... sure of a band of disciples; Ecstatica, Dolorosa, of enraptured believers who will visit them in their lowly huts, and wait for days to revere them in their trances. The foreign noble traverses land and sea to hear a few words from the lips of the lowly peasant girl, whom he believes especially visited by the Most High. Very beautiful, in this way, was the influence of the invalid of St. Petersburg, as ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... fears, and shared, to a surprising extent, the pains and pleasures of a simple and rather cruel society. The Renaissance changed all that. The lord entered the new world of ideas and refined sensuality; the peasant stayed where he was, or, as the last vestiges of spiritual religion began to disappear with the commons, sank lower. Popular art changed so gradually that in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century we still find, in remote corners, things that are rude ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... renunciation of all worldly goods. He lived on what was given to him to eat from day to day; he nursed the lepers and the sick. Ever described as a most lovable person, he won by his preaching the hearts of people of all classes, from the King of France to the humblest peasant. He wrote beautiful hymns in praise of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and had a great love for every living thing. The birds were said to have flocked around him because they loved him, and we read that he talked to them and called them ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... in his work, and he caught but faint echoes of the storm that rumbled in the financial world. It was a thing which he thought of with wonder in future times—that he should have had so little idea of what was coming. He seemed to himself like some peasant who digs with bent head in a field, while armies are marshalling for battle all around him; and who is startled suddenly by the crash of conflict, and the bursting of ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... the demand for further supply became so urgent that a poll-tax was imposed on a graduated scale according to a man's dignity, ranging from ten marks or L6 1s. 4d. imposed on a duke, to a groat or four pence which the poorest peasant was called upon to pay. The mayor of London, assessed as an earl, was to pay L4; and the aldermen, assessed as barons, L2. The sum thus furnished by the city amounted to less than L700,(634) and the whole amount levied on the country did not exceed ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers. She said that the patient's faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. My mother was the patient. In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this sort of industry, and has both the high and the low for patients. He gets into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma, but his business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... swept by towards the east, leaving a blear of scarlet in his eyes, and his ears ringing with the soldiers' cheers: "Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur! A Berlin! A Berlin! A Berlin!" A furtive-eyed young peasant ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... express understanding as a dim feeling of irreparable loss and misfortune. There rose in him an alarm, which was turned soon into a storm of anger against the Christians in general, and against the old man in particular. That fisherman, whom at the first cast of the eye he considered a peasant, now filled him with fear almost, and seemed some mysterious power deciding his fate ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... sinews, energies divine, Were never yet too much for men who ran In such hard ways as must be this of thine, Deliverer whom we seek, whoe'er thou art, Pope, prince, or peasant! If, indeed, the first, The noblest therefore! since the heroic heart Within thee must be great enough to burst Those trammels buckling to the baser part Thy saintly peers in Rome, who crossed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... in this can be shown, By peasant, by lawyer, or king on the throne; We freely will forfeit whatever we've said, And call it a virtue to ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... indifference, as though they were waiting for something. The same atmosphere of lethargy seemed to pervade their surroundings. The innkeeper sat and dozed; the youths in the college opposite lounged at the door; pedestrians on the high road went by without greeting anyone; the peasant in the field sat on his plough, and wiped the sweat from ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... almost virtuous. But, sir, when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Great War in Vol. I we have already shown how important a part the little Balkan States played in the long chain of events leading up to the final catastrophe. When two mighty lords come to blows over the right of way through the fields of their peasant neighbors, it is only natural that the peasants themselves should be deeply concerned. While it is not likely that any of them would feel especially friendly toward either of the belligerents, it might, however, be to their advantage to take a hand in ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... may yet be taught, With death alone are laurels cheaply bought; Not in the conflict Havoc seeks delight, His day of mercy is the day of fight. But when the field is fought, the battle won, Though drenched with gore, his woes are but begun: His deeper deeds as yet ye know by name; The slaughtered peasant and the ravished dame, 300 The rifled mansion and the foe-reaped field, Ill suit with souls at home, untaught to yield. Say with what eye along the distant down Would flying burghers mark the blazing town? ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turned that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun The west, that burns like one dilated sun, Where in a mighty crucible expire The mountains, glowing hot, like coals ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hotels on a New York model, hears the same slang and much the same general conversation from New Haven to Los Angeles. But this monotony is superficial. Beneath the surface there are infinite strainings and divergences—the peasant immigrant working toward, the well-established provincial holding to, the wide-ranging mind of the intellectual working away from, this dead level of conventional standards. Where we are going, it is not yet possible to say. Quite certainly not toward an un-British ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... that in the first place they will be made the cat's-paw of some of the wilier of the Whigs. There are several of these measures which look to some Socialistic, as, for instance, the allotments scheme, and other schemes tending toward peasant proprietorship, co-operation, and the like, but which after all, in spite of their benevolent appearance, are really weapons in the hands of reactionaries, having for their real object the creation of a new middle-class made out of the working-class ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... and it and its inhabitants were made the target for the jests and witticisms of the people of Judea. The word "Nazarene" was synonymous with "lout"; "boor"; "peasant"; etc., to the residents of the more fashionable regions. The very remoteness of the town served to separate it in spirit from the rest of the country. But this very remoteness played an important part in the early life of Jesus. Nazareth, by reason of its ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... surprising elevation of fortune, no achievements of valour, of strength, or of policy, to appeal to; no discoveries in any art or science, no great efforts of genius or learning to produce. A Galilean peasant was announced to the world as a divine lawgiver. A young man of mean condition, of a private and simple life, and who had wrought no deliverance for the Jewish nation, was declared to be their Messiah. This, without ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... him there is a bold, cunning face, belonging to a boy named Franti, who has already been expelled from another district. There are, in addition, two brothers who are dressed exactly alike, who resemble each other to a hair, and both of whom wear caps of Calabrian cut, with a peasant's plume. But handsomer than all the rest, the one who has the most talent, who will surely be the head this year also, is Derossi; and the master, who has already perceived this, always questions him. But I like Precossi, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... concert, I questioned my aunt and found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp cowpuncher, who had sung the chorus at Bayreuth, when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the "Prize Song," while my aunt went ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... regarded them not, and I trustingly clung to your heart, for I knew that if danger threatened me, you would surely save me! Oh, do you yet remember that fabulous ride? How we rested in out-of-the-way houses, or with poor peasant people, and then proceeded on farther and farther! And how the sun constantly grew warmer, melting the snow, and you constantly became more cheerful and happy, until, one day, you impetuously pressed me to your bosom, and said: 'Natalie, we are saved! Life and the future are now yours! ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... different kinds. Serfs (Leibeigener), who were little better than slaves, and who were bought and sold with the land they cultivated; villeins (Hoeriger), whose services were assumed to be fixed and limited; and the free peasant (die Freier), whose counterpart in England was the mediaeval copyholder, who either held his land from some feudal lord, to whom he paid a quit-rent in kind or in money, or who paid such a rent for ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... frames, and duly whitewashed every summer, a thatched roof, small panes of glass, and an old doorway raised from the ground by two steps. There was about this little dwelling all the homely rustic elegance which peasant life admits of: a honeysuckle was trained over the door; a few flower-pots were placed on the window-sills; the small plot of ground in front of the house was kept with great neatness, and even taste; some large rough stones on either side the little path having been formed into a sort of rock-work, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... phosphorus, and these impurities make it brittle so that a cast iron teakettle will break at a blow, like a china cup. Armor of this kind would have been no good for our iron-clad ancestors. When a knight in iron clothes tried to whip a leather-clad peasant, the peasant could have cracked him with a stone and his clothes would have fallen off like plaster from the ceiling. So those early iron workers learned to puddle forge iron and make it into wrought iron ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... been in the library a tremendous run upon any books which gave illustrations of European costumes. The girls considered that either allegorical or native peasant dresses would be suitable. They took drawings and ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... oblivion. The historical narratives of the Bible are, indeed, to a great extent an exception to this rule. They tell us much about the everyday life of peasants and slaves. The Bible's chief heroes were not kings nor nobles. Its supreme Hero was a peasant workingman. But we have not always studied the Bible from this point of view. In this course we shall try to reconstruct for ourselves the story of the Hebrew people as an account of Hebrew shepherds, farmers, and ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... clad in russet-brown? His distant step sounds hollow on the frozen ground; no beam of beauty is on his face, but his look is healthy, and his step is firm. As he approaches the peasant bars his door and renews his fire. The sparkling home-brewed goes round and mantles in the foaming jug, the oft-repeated tale is told, the rain patters against the casement, but the night passes away, and the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... 'us,' though often of feminine words, as the central Arbor, will indicate either real masculine strength (quereus, laurus), or conditions of dominant majesty (cedrus), of stubbornness and enduring force (crataegus), or of peasant-like commonalty and hardship (juncus); softened, as it may sometimes happen, into gentleness and beneficence (thymus). The occasional forms in 'er' and 'il' will have ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the most renowned now living. Though only an illiterate peasant woman, she has been able for more than twenty years to baffle every scientist who has studied her. Her organism remains the most ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinary enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village till death, he would have been ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... novelist, dead or living, who so skilfully harmonises the poetry of moral life with its penury. Just as Millet could in the figure of a solitary peasant toiling on a plain convey a world of pathetic meaning, so Mr. Hardy with his yeomen and villagers. Their occupations in his hands wear a pathetic dignity, which not even the encomiums of a ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... of the last Ukases the Israelites are also to be removed from all the towns and villages situate within fifty wersts of the Austrian and Prussian frontiers, and must quit every house where the sale of spirituous liquors is offered to the peasant, the number of exiles would surely equal the number of those who are already settled in the interior, and their fate cannot be any other than epidemic, disease, destitution, and starvation. This, as I had the honour of hearing personally ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... anything of her mother; he had brought her to her present home when only five years old, after a long stay on the Continent. A strange woman, wearing the dress of a Sclavonic peasant, came with the child as nurse; but she had never learnt to speak English, and had now ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... maintenance in Ireland of a tenure combining the evils both of large estates and of minute subdivision of farms is founded upon justice. De Beaumont at any rate teaches that to transform Irish tenants into peasant proprietors would be ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... inspiration; on Shelley Wordsworth, William; confidence in immortality; on female poets; his friendship with Coleridge; on James Hogg; on inspiration; Keats' annoyance with Wordsworth; on love poetry; on the peasant poet; on the poet's democracy, habitat, morals, religion, solitude; the Prelude; on prenatal life; quarrel with philosophy; repudiation of inspiration through ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... groups and leaders: labor organizations - Salvadoran Communal Union or UCS (peasant association); General Confederation of Workers or CGT (moderate); United Workers Front or FUT; business organizations - Productive Alliance or AP (conservative); National Federation of Salvadoran Small Businessmen ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... The peasant leaves his plough afield, The reaper leaves his hook, And from his hand the shepherd-boy. Lets ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Herrera, "to be guided by you in the matter; but this arrangement strikes me as extremely hazardous. Where can three hundred men conceal themselves during a whole day, even in this wild and thinly peopled district, without imminent risk of discovery? Remember that a glimpse obtained by a passing peasant of but one of our number, ensures our destruction. The forests and mountain passes are traversed by woodcutters and shepherds; the chances against us would be innumerable. Is it not better, without loss of time, to proceed to the convent, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... which she took the conversation in her own hands and regaled us (in a soft, weak voice) with details as to her husband's prosperity, her sister's lamented decline from the paths of virtue, and the consequent wrath of her father, a peasant of stern principles, in the vicinity of Chalons on the Marne;—it was not, I say, until after this was over, and I had once more cleared my throat for the attack, and once more dropped aside into some commonplace about the picture, that ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... wife of Peter the Great and empress of Russia, daughter of a Livonian peasant; "a little stumpy body, very brown,... strangely chased about from the bottom to the top of the world,... had once been a kitchen wench"; married first to a Swedish dragoon, became afterwards the mistress of Prince Menschikoff, and then of Peter the Great, who eventually ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the King's death. His army fled in dismay; his corpse was left on the ground, till a peasant carried it to Tynemouth; his men were dispersed, slain, or drowned in their flight; his young son Edmund, a stripling of eighteen or nineteen, just contrived to escape to Edinburgh Castle. The first tidings that met him there were, that his mother was dying; that she lay on her ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Sewell says, (p. 164,) "The condition of the free peasant rises infinitely above that of the slave. In all, the people are more happy and contented; in all, they are more civilized; in all, there are more provisions grown for home-consumption than ever were raised in the most flourishing days of slavery; in all, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... scale as compared with other employments. We can not afford to lose that preeminently typical American, the farmer who owns his own medium-sized farm. To have his place taken by either a class of small peasant proprietors, or by a class of great landlords with tenant-farmed estates would be a veritable calamity. The growth of our cities is a good thing but only in so far as it does not mean a growth at the expense of the country farmer. We must welcome the rise of physical sciences ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... aspirations, and a proud consciousness of the dignity of his nature. "The princely disposition of the Spaniards," says a foreigner of the time, "delighteth me much, as well as the gentle nurture and noble conversation, not merely of those of high degree, but of the citizen, peasant, and common laborer." [152] What wonder that such sentiments should be found incompatible with sober, methodical habits of business, or that the nation indulging them should be seduced from the humble paths of domestic industry to a brilliant and bolder career of adventure. Such consequences ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... Caucasus, and shortly afterwards he participated in the defence of Sebastopol during the great Crimean War. Since that period his life has been a wonderful career of literary success. On his fine estate, with his large family and his servants about him, he lives the life of a simple peasant, advocating a form of socialism which he considers to constitute a practical interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. In "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy manifestly aims at furnishing an elaborate delineation of the sociological ethics of high life in Russia. It is a lurid and sombre recital, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... pass the marmalade, or with what expletives I may comment upon some little defect in domestic life. My literary friend, John, has shamelessly compiled a short phrase-book for our use abroad, reproducing our present regrettable idioms. One inquiry, to be addressed to the local peasant by the leading officer, runs thus:—"Can you tell me, Sir, where the enemy is at present to be found?"—"Ou sont les ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... muskets. Thence, introduced into a half-subterranean gallery, he became, on the part of those who had brought him, the object of the grossest insults and the harshest treatment. The officers perceived that they had not to deal with a gentleman, and they treated him like a very peasant. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the author find most admirable in the women of Brittany? Show how these traits are brought out by contrast with the behavior of the men. Do women in this country do the same kinds of work as the European peasant women? What other things might the descriptions have included if the author had not been so much interested in the people? What parts of the sketch are humorous? Point out passages that are effective through contrast. Show how ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... ill-used—probably in being made to believe that truth which was falsehood. She is not complaining, but she is sitting alone in the snowstorm, and you hear her thoughts. They are not the thoughts of a model heroine under her circumstances, but they are those of a deeply-feeling, strongly-resentful peasant-girl. Anguish has driven her from the ingle-nook of home to the white-shrouded and icy hills. Crouched under the "cauld drift," she recalls every image of horror—"the yellow-wymed ask," "the hairy adder," "the auld moon-bowing tyke," "the ghaist ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... pale, high-bred faces— Hawthorns in white wedding favours, Scented with celestial savours— Daisies, like sweet country maidens, Wear white scolloped frills to-day; 'Neath her hat of straw the Peasant Primrose sitteth, Nor permitteth Any of her kindred present, Specially the milk-sweet cowslip, E'er to leave the tranquil shade; By the hedges, Or the edges Of some stream or grassy glade, They look upon the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... belie her religious sentiments, was in a strange quandary. The other servants quaked for they knew not well what. Cuddie alone, with the look of supreme indifference and stupidity which a Scottish peasant can at times assume as a mask for considerable shrewdness and craft, continued to swallow large spoonfuls of his broth, to command which he had drawn within his sphere the large vessel that contained it, and helped himself, amid the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... arrived in Russia with what Nikitin called "his romantic notions." He had read his Dostoevski and Turgenev; he had looked at those books of Russian impressions that deal in nothing but snow, ikons, and the sublime simplicity of the Russian peasant. He was a man whose circumstances had led him to believe profoundly in his own incapacity, unpopularity, ignorance. For a moment his love had given him a new confidence but now how was that same love deserting him? He had foreseen a glorious campaign, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... Quiet little isolated lives have a funny way of getting out into the light. There was that little peasant girl at Domremy, for instance; there was that gentle saint who preached poverty to the birds; there was Eugenie Guerin, and the Cure of Ars, and the few obscure little English weavers—and there was ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... occasion, Queen Victoria sent for Thomas Carlyle, who was a Scotch peasant, offering him the title of nobleman, which he declined, feeling that he had always been a nobleman in his own right. He understood so little of the manners at court that, when presented to the queen, after speaking to her a few minutes, being tired, he said, ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... something new. It chanced in this disastrous case, One morn betimes he join'd the chase: Swift o'er the plain the hunters fly, Each echoing out a joyous cry; A forest next before them lay; He, left behind, mistook his way, And long alone bewildered rode, He found a peasant's poor abode; But fasting kept, from six to four, Felt hunger, long unfelt before; The friendly swain this want supplied, And Joan some eggs and bacon fried. Not dainty now, the squire in haste Fell to, and praised their savory taste; Nay, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... pitying bosoms, cease to bleed! Such scenes no more demand the tear humane; I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed With every patriot virtue in her train! And mark yon peasant's raptur'd eyes; 25 Secure he views his harvests rise; No fetter vile the mind shall know, And Eloquence shall fearless glow. Yes! Liberty the soul of Life shall reign, Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... trade of linen and damask weaving, and established a modest business of his own at Slangerup, a town in the northern part of Sjaelland and close to the famous royal castle of Frederiksborg. At the age of thirty-eight he married a young peasant girl, Karen Soerendatter, and built a modest but eminently respectable home. In this home, Thomas Kingo, the future hymnwriter, was born December ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... with somewhat the same attachment that a French peasant bears for the soil upon which he has been reared. She rejoiced in every yard of it. To go away and resign it to others would be tragedy unspeakable. The fear that Aunt Harriet might recommend the family to leave Highfield ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... amazing clamor arose from a gateway a little higher up the road, and glancing in that direction, I saw old father Poupard leading his horse and cart into the open. He was followed by his wife and daughter-in-law, two brawny peasant women, who were loudly lamenting the departure ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it, our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... found it so intolerably sour, that I was forced to swear by all the gods of the Indians, I would not have any connexion with it.—He then pointed to the stream where the girl was angling, and said, with a peasant countenance that had brightened up for a moment, 'Go; you are a sober man; the clear waters are good for you; for my own part, this juice of the apple shall be sufficient.'—Two hours now elapsed, without any one uttering a word.—The Indian had by this time drunk ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... propose to Holmes, the miniature painter, to come out to me this spring. I will pay his expenses, and any sum in reason. I wish him to take my daughter's picture (who is in a convent) and the Countess G.'s, and the head of a peasant girl, which latter would make a study for Raphael. It is a complete peasant face, but an Italian peasant's, and quite in the Raphael Fornarina style. Her figure is tall, but rather large, and not at all comparable to her face, which is really ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... ballads of old France on their lips. For the story is full of those artless, lisping numbers of the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that Gerard collected and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl. ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... whenever she espy me coming, at once to open. And now I will devise a device whereby to slay this damned loon." Herewith he arose and, issuing from the pavilion door, walked till he met on the way a Fellah to whom he said, "O man, take my attire and give me thy garments." But the peasant refused, so Alaeddin stripped him of his dress perforce[FN203] and donned it, leaving to the man his own rich gear by way of gift. Then he followed the highway leading to the neighbouring city and entering it went to the Perfumers' Bazar where he bought of one some rarely potent Bhang, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... for as nothing would be settled by fighting, and the law would punish any one, however much in the right he might be, who fought, there is no occasion at all for weapons. It is a good plan, for you see no one, however rich, can tyrannise over others; and were the greatest noble to kill the poorest peasant, the law would hang him, just the same as it would hang a peasant who killed ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... and breeding, have yielded to this clamor for return. And giving the apparent lie to their own sanity and moral stability, many such men have married peasant girls or barmaids, And those to whom evil apportioned itself have been prone to distrust the impulse they obeyed, forgetting that nature makes or mars the individual for the sake, always, of the type. For in every such case of return, the impulse was sound,—only that ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... allowed these only to see a peasant in his shirt sleeves, and bareheaded, who belabored a large gray mare, on which he rode bareback, with his heels and ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible; that he is naked, without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... the different provinces in forms as diverse as the past history and local conditions of each province, long before it was brought under British administration, had combined to make them. Whereas in the Bombay Presidency, for instance, land is chiefly held by small landlords and peasant proprietors, it was held in Agra and Oudh before they became British by a great landed aristocracy whose rights, like all established rights, it was a principle of British policy to respect, and the talukdars of Oudh and the zemindars ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... spare, dignified and active, grey-bearded and hard-featured, but as lithe and bright-eyed as a boy, scorning any conveyance but his own feet, and quite dry while we 'ran down.' He was like Boaz, the wealthy gentleman peasant—nothing except the Biblical characters gave any idea of the rich fellah. We sat and drank new milk in a 'lodge in a garden of cucumbers' (the 'lodge' is a neat hut of palm branches), and saw the moon rise over ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... named Denis Lamotte. He laid great stress on the fact that he had a son in the service of an officer of the Consul's guard; his other son, Vincent Lamotte, lived with him. The worthy man appeared very much surprised at the invasion of his house, but his peasant cunning could not long withstand the professional cleverness of the detective, and after a few minutes ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... of you, what we are going through! Only a few weeks ago all of us were peacefully following our several vocations. The peasant was gathering in this Summer's plentiful crop, the factory hand was working with accustomed vigor. Not one human being among us dreamed of war. We are a nation that wishes to lead a quiet and industrious ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... neighbourhood of Eltham, and spent much of his time in feasting with his favourites at the royal palace there. In 1386 (notwithstanding the still prevalent distress, which had continued from the time of the peasant revolt) Richard kept the Christmas festivities at Eltham with great extravagance, at the same time entertaining Leon, King of Armenia, in a manner utterly unjustified by the state of the royal exchequer, which had been replenished by illegal methods. And, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... So I write on every subject, and the public hounds me on all sides, sometimes in anger, and I race and dodge like a fox with a pack of hounds on his trail. I see life and knowledge flitting away before me. I am left behind them like a peasant who has missed his train at a station, and finally I come back to the conclusion that all I am fit for is to describe landscapes, and that whatever else I attempt rings ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... answered, 'and my father was a shepherd!' It was not pride rebuking pride; it was the ever present fact which would not have been worth mentioning but for the suggestion of the antithesis. He, too, was a shepherd,—a peasant. It may be that he knew what would be right and good for his people, and it may be not; but it is sure that he realized that to educate would be to emancipate, to broaden their views would be to break down the defences of their prejudices, to let in ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... lady," he said, "all that I objected to was this over-glorification of the feats of arms accomplished by us. People over here did not understand. On the one side were the great armies of Russia,—men drawn, all of them, from the ranks of the peasant, men of low nerve force, men who were not many degrees better than animals. They came to fight against us because it was their business to fight, because for fighting they drew their scanty pay, their ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The young peasant-woman smiled indulgently on them both, on the child now sobbing, his face buried in her skirt, and on the boyish, perplexed, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... been dominant in the country; a Protestant Viceroy to distribute places and emoluments amongst that Protestant clique; Protestant judges who have polluted the seats of justice; Protestant magistrates, before whom the Catholic peasant could not hope for justice. They have not only Protestant, but exterminating landlords, and more than that, a Protestant soldiery, who, at the beck and command of a Protestant priest, have butchered and killed a Catholic peasant, even in the presence of his widowed mother. All these ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... accommodates itself more readily to the conditions of the soil where he dwells. In Sardinia agriculture is prosecuted under physical conditions precisely similar even at the present day; the pestilential atmosphere exists, but the peasant avoids its injurious effects by caution in reference to clothing, food, and the choice of his hours of labour. In fact, nothing is so certain a protection against the "aria cattiva" as wearing the fleece of animals and keeping a blazing fire; which ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... word Pee-wee hooked his duffel bag to the end of his scout staff, after the fashion of a Swiss peasant, and carrying the staff over his shoulder, marched on ahead like a conquering hero, as if he preferred not to be ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... evening wore away. The talk was to the very mind of Donal, who never loved wisdom so much as when she appeared in peasant-garb. In that garb he had first known her, and in the form ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... ineffaceable spot in her memory. They were dark, strong-faced men of medium height, with fierce, black eyes and long black hair. As no two were dressed alike, it was impossible to recognize characteristic styles of attire. Some were in the rude, baggy costumes of the peasant as she had imagined him; others were dressed in the tight-fitting but dilapidated uniforms of the soldiery, while several were in clothes partly European and partly Oriental. There were hats and ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... there are shepherds here with their flocks; they will show me the way to some village where I can live disguised as a peasant girl. Alas! it is not always kings and princes who are the happiest people in the world. Who could have believed that I should ever be obliged to run away and hide because the King, for no reason at all, ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... had been a good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage of the little peasant girl, if it ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... magnificent example of his method in the longest story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout, and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is reinforced by the incident. Tiny events—the peasant who eats minnows alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand roubles—take on a character of portent, except that the word is too harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a sense ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... among the inner vitalities of the character, at the imminent risk of corrupting them all. Be that as it may, these Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler people than ourselves, from peer to peasant; but if we can take it as compensatory on our part, (which I leave to be considered,) that they owe those noble and manly qualities to a coarser grain in their nature, and that, with a finer one in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Florence divided into the new road and the old. At this point it steeply overtops the fields on one side, which is shored up by a wall some ten or twelve feet deep; and here round a sharp turn of the hill on the other side came a peasant driving a herd of the black pigs of ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... vistas of the future—addresses that touched to its fullest and most delicious vibration every chord of the Irish heart—here they were being sped over the land in an unfailing and ever welcome supply. The peasant read them to his family by the fireside when his hard day's work was done, and the fisherman, as he steered his boat homeward, reckoned as not the least of his anticipated pleasures, the reading of ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... and trenches and all the detail of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds, which was Nature's own little say in the affair and a warning that in a few years after the war she and the peasant will ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... preach, you ignorant peasant! What do you come here for, spoiling our enjoyment, and keeping us awake at nights? Don't you know this is no common conventicle? It is the place where the king says his prayers! Away with you, or we will take off your head!" So said Amaziah, the priest, ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... they drive the cattle also through the fire in order to protect the animals against wizards and witches, who are then ravenous after milk. In Little Russia a stake is driven into the ground on St. John's Night, wrapt in straw, and set on fire. As the flames rise the peasant women throw birchen boughs into them, saying, "May my flax be as tall as this bough!" In Ruthenia the bonfires are lighted by a flame procured by the friction of wood. While the elders of the party are engaged in thus "churning" the fire, the rest maintain a respectful silence; ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Boys—they little know how the old folks worrit about 'em. But my father he never had no occasion to worrit about me. You know, Betsy, that when I fust commenced my career as a moral exhibitor with a six-legged cat and a Bass drum, I was only a simple peasant child—skurce 15 Summers had flow'd over my yoothful hed. But I had sum mind of my own. My father understood this. "Go," he sed—"go, my son, and hog the public!" (he ment, "knock em," but the old man ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... penetration, brilliancy in association of ideas—such mental qualities, like the qualities of the apparition of the externally armed head in Macbeth, will not be commanded; but attention, after due term of submissive service, always will. Like certain plants which the poorest peasant may grow in the poorest soil, it can be cultivated by any one, and it is certain in its own good season to bring forth flowers and fruit. I can most truthfully assure you by-the-by, that this eulogium on attention is so far quite disinterested ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... from Jane Melville. Her out-of-the-way knowledge made her a most useful auxiliary, and she rejoiced that there was one person in the world that she could assist with it. She did not forget Peggy's wish about the quick writing, and taught those peasant children to express themselves fluently on paper. Their manners were improved under her influence, and what was still uncouth or clumsy she learned to ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... religious persecution and economic want. Every German state contributed to their number, but the bulk of this migration came from the Palatinate, Wuerttemberg, Baden, and Alsace, and the German cantons of Switzerland. The majority were of the peasant and artisan class who usually came over as redemptioners. Yet there were not wanting among them many persons of means and ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... the yokels fled at once, but the other, seeing it was a woman, held his ground. A moment after they were in converse, and I saw a broad grin on the man's face. Then mademoiselle beckoned to us, and we came forth. On our appearance the peasant seemed inclined to follow his friend's example; but we somehow managed to reassure him, and gathered that, except for a small party of harmless travellers who were at the ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... industry is not required in tillage must do something in return for the food that is provided for them. They exchange, consequently, the accommodations for the necessaries of life. Thus the carpenter and the weaver lodge and clothe the peasant, who supplies them with their daily bread. The greater stock of provisions, therefore, which the husbandman produces, the greater is the quantity of accommodation which the artificer prepares. Such are the happy effects which naturally result from civilised society. It ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... is of our company, and throws the light of his strong intellect upon whatever subject it is we discuss. He cannot, however, on such occasions, thoroughly tame to the tone of gentle society, his imperious and almost rude nature. The peasant of Pannonia will sometimes break through, and usurp the place of emperor; but it is only for a moment; for it is pleasing to note how the presence of Livia quickly restores him to himself; when, with more grace than one would look for, he acknowledges his fault, ascribing it sportively to the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... would say, 'here's the chance of your life to win life's chief prize. Now you are peasant soldiers. You have the opportunity to become citizen kings. We are all kings here. Here the least of you can take a rank much higher than that of any General in your army. He can become ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Vehmic tribunal, we do not find ourselves in a midnight forest, nor in a dimly-lighted cavern or mysterious vault, as peasant traditions would tell us, but in the hall of some ancient castle, or on a hill-top, under the shade of lime-trees, and with an open view of the country for miles around. Here, on the seat of justice, presides the graf or count of the district, before him the sword, the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... manoeuvring on the slopes of the Vosges. If you'll lend us a hand, I'll run down to Saint-Elophe first, buy a suit of second-hand French peasant's clothes and go and find my man. Then I'll bring him to the old barn in your little farm to-night ... as ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... morning's walk brought us to Linz. The peasant girls in their broad straw hats were weeding the young wheat, looking as cheerful and contented as the larks that sung above them. A mile or two from Linz we passed one or two of the round towers belonging to the new fortifications of the city. As walls have grown out of fashion, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... The grave Turk, the stately Spanish cavalier, the Italian bandit and the Grecian corsair, mingled together without reserve;—and the fairer portion of creation was represented by fairies, nuns, queens, peasant girls and goddesses. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... of flowers upon the sides, the rose and lid being cut out of one piece of wood, and so beautifully made to imitate nature, that the slightest touch with the point of a knife or a needle, makes the leaves move and quiver without spoiling the flower. This was made by a Swiss peasant. The people of Switzerland are very remarkable for ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... and paid for the official entertainment, and the Cubans were too busy getting that money to have much time for village improvement. The Spaniards, following their home custom, might decorate a military highway to some extent, but the rough trail over which the peasant carried his little crop did not concern them. That was quite the business of the peasant who had neither the time nor money to ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... witness another patrician departure—when their ears were assailed by the unexpected sound produced by the call to arms, which was followed immediately by the closing of the city gates. They had scarcely asked each other the meaning of these unusual occurrences, when a peasant, half frantic with terror, rushed into the square, shouting out the terrible intelligence that the Goths were ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... recounted "that Thor fared forth with his chariot and his goats and with him the Ase, called Loki. They came at evening to a peasant and found shelter with him. At night Thor took his goats and slew them; thereupon they were skinned and put into a kettle. And when they were boiled Thor sat down with his fellow travelers to supper. Thor invited the peasant and his ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer |
