"Reaper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where man kills his fellow man and answers only to his own conscience; where we will tear up the railroads and walk, blow up our steamships and use rowboats, in our harvest fields the whetstone on the old hand-scythe will still the music of the McCormick reaper. With his delicate tastes he fears the hoof-beat of your herd. But you all agree that to go backward means to go forward, and that the way to save civilisation is to lapse into barbarism. Whether you call yourselves ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... of cold, the cry of fear, the cry of weariness, of all that night disables or disarms; the rose shivering alone in the dark, the hay wanting to be dried and go to the mow, the sickle forgotten out of doors by the reaper and fearing it will rust in the grass, the white things dismayed at not looking white; is so greatly the cry of the innocent among beasts, who have nothing to conceal, of the brook fain to show its crystal clearness; and even—for thy very works, O Night, ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... inventors asked for patents on a machine for raising water to run a waterwheel, on one for making nails, for producing power by using a weight, for curing the bite of a mad dog, for counting the revolutions of a wheel, for a reaper and thresher, and for a lightning-rod on an umbrella. In the second session Congress passed an act making the members of the Cabinet, except the busy Secretary of the Treasury, a board to hear petitions and to grant sole rights ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... huts of the poor. That lady is more mighty than dainty, she is no way squeamish, she devours all and is ready for all, and fills her alforjas with people of all sorts, ages, and ranks. She is no reaper that sleeps out the noontide; at all times she is reaping and cutting down, as well the dry grass as the green; she never seems to chew, but bolts and swallows all that is put before her, for she has a canine appetite that ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... a year Distinction low'rs its crest, The master, servant, and the merry guest, Are equal all; and round the happy ring The reaper's eyes exulting glances fling, And, warm'd with gratitude, he quits his place, With sun-burnt hands and ale-enliven'd face, Refills the jug his honour'd host to tend, To serve at once the master and the friend; Proud thus ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... three hundred carbineers in front. At the tap of the drum the foremost assailants wheeled from the cover of the street wall under a terrible hail of grape and canister, and attempted to pass the gateway to the bridge. The front ranks went down like stalks of grain before a reaper; the column staggered and reeled backward, and the valiant grenadiers were appalled by the task before them. Without a word or a look of reproach, Napoleon placed himself at their head, and his aids and generals rushed ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... universal because it is God-ordained. In St. Peter's, at Rome, there are many tombs, in which death is symbolized in its traditional form as a skeleton, with the fateful hourglass and the fearful scythe. Death is the rude reaper, who cruelly cuts off life and all the joy of life. But there is one in which death is sculptured as a sweet gentle motherly woman, who takes her wearied child home to safer and surer keeping. It is a truer thought than the other. ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... its varied charms, forever free From task and tribute, Labor yields to thee No more, when April sheds her fitful rain, The sower's hand shall cast its flying grain; No more, when Autumn strews the flaming leaves, The reaper's band shall gird its yellow sheaves; For thee alike the circling seasons flow Till the first blossoms heave the latest snow. In the stiff clod below the whirling drifts, In the loose soil the springing herbage lifts, In the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... eyes and thy kind lips but say— Ere from his cerements Timon seems to flit: "What of the reaper grim with sickle keen?" And then the sunlight ushers in new day And for our tasks our bodies seem more fit— "Might of the night, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... nothing to the development of the railroad, the steamboat, the automobile, the aeroplane, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, the moving picture, the electric light, the sewing machine, and the reaper and binder. Even those dread instruments of war, the revolver and the machine gun, the turreted ship, the torpedo, and the submarine, are not due to the military ardor of the Germans. It would seem as though the Germans had been lacking in the inventiveness ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... smiles around, And this rich virgin soil Gives stores of wealth in quick return For hours of careless toil; But oh! the reaper's joyous song Ne'er mounts to Heaven's dome, For unknown is the mirth and joy Of the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... like a butterfly, and with the same apparent felicity in basking in joy, all gaiety, glee, and light-heartedness in making others happy. On they went, through honeysuckled lanes, catching glimpses of sunny fields of corn falling before the reaper, and happy knots of harvest folks dining beneath the shelter of their sheaves, with the sturdy old green umbrella sheltering them from ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... gathered with a sickle; the grain was thrashed with a flail; the grass in the meadows was cut with a scythe. But, now, all this is changed; on the great prairies of the West, the wheat, rye and oats are cut by the reaper, and with a steady hum the thrashing-machine does its work of cleaning ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... all took and went along to The Reaper, an' that were shut, an' The Dovedale Arms (which is an oncomfortably superior sort of a 'ouse, dealin' in sperrits) was down to ginger-wine, an' The Crown and The Corner Cupboard an' The Ploughman's Rest was all crowded out an' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... an unwonted activity. He lived over again his whole life, in a few minutes of time. This dread Power, who had never crossed his path before, shocked him inexpressibly. Who of the young, unstricken by sorrow, ever associates death with himself or with those he loves, till the Arch Reaper comes some day and cuts down and garners ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... sewing machine is to the home and the factory, that is the reaper to the farm. After many years of experiment Cyrus McCormick invented a practical reaper and (1840) sought to put it on the market, but several more years passed before success was assured. To-day, greatly improved and perfected, it is in use the world over, and has made possible the ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... almost without a companion—for the good priest Herman, whose time was divided between his pastoral duties, his prayers, and his studies, saw him but at intervals—found time to hang very heavily upon his hands. He thought the old reaper weary and sluggish, for the scythe flies fast only when we employ or enjoy the moments. The autumn blast was beginning to lend a thousand bright colors to the trees, and the giddy leaves, like giddy mortals, threw off their simple green for the gaudy livery that ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... on earth and in the day of Christ. One element in that character is faithful work for Jesus. Faithful work indeed is not necessarily successful work, and many who are welcomed by Jesus, the judge, will have the memory of many disappointments and few harvested grains. It was not a reaper, 'bringing his sheaves with him,' who stayed himself against the experience of failure, by the assurance, 'Though Israel be not gathered yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord.' If our want of success, and others' lapse, and apostasy or coldness has not been ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hill-side, and sere corn blades rustled in the wind, from the orchard came the scent of ripening fruit, and all the garden-plots lay ready to yield up their humble offerings to their master's hand. But in the silence of the night a greater Reaper had passed by, gathering in the harvest of a righteous life, and leaving only tender memories for the gleaners who had ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. Then he will bite you, and you die. He comes out usually in the evening before dark, and lies about on footpaths to catch the home-coming ploughman or reaper, and, contrary to the custom of other snakes, he will not flee on hearing a footstep. When anyone approaches he lies more still than ever, not even a movement of his head betraying him. He is so like the colour ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... days in harvest time, at their own charges, and another three days when the lord fed them. After harvest six pennyworth of beer was divided among them, each received a loaf of bread, and every evening when work was over each reaper might carry away the largest sheaf of corn he ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... persuaded, and they sing in chorus a 'Reapers' Song,' composed long ago by some unknown Prigourdin poet, who was perhaps a jongleur or a troubadour. The notes are so arranged as to imitate the rhythmic movements of the reaper: first the drawing back of the right arm, then the stroke of the sickle, and lastly, the laying down of the cut corn. There is something of sadness as well as of joy in the repeated cadences of the simple song, and it moves the heart, for ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the long slope toward them, under the midsummer sun, he paused a second after each stroke to look with wistful gaze at one now rarely absent from his mental vision. She was too sad and preoccupied to give him a thought, or even to note who the reaper was. From her shady retreat she could see him and other men at work here and there, and she only envied their definite and fairly rewarded toil, and their simple yet assured home-life, while she was working so blindly, and facing, in the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... and dying men rolled in the dust, and, as wheat falls under the reaper's blade, the mob melted away in lines and by battalions. Within thirty seconds the whole terrain was piled with dead ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... road led to open country, and many circling aeroplanes over an aviation field nearby gave the air of a fte. Only the uniforms of the English and American women who are attached to each of these many cantonments suggested any necessitous combating of the grim reaper. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... that 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'; in the story of Ruth recognized the wisdom of choosing Christ rather than the world, and also the beauty of unselfish service. Many were brought to consider the work of the reaper, Death, ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... reaper, United States. Wood, binding reaper, United States. Osborne, binding reaper, United States. Johnston, reaper, United States. Whiteley, mower, United States. Dederick, hay-press, United States. Mabille, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... contented, with plenty of all kinds of work to do. But I had accomplished my mission at this place, and it pleased God to remove me to another field of labor, where the harvest was ripe and ready for the reaper. I never complained; on the contrary, I rejoiced that God was not done with me, and had plenty for me to do. When I had thoroughly worked one field of labor, I deemed my immediate services no longer required, and was glad when removed where more work was to be done in God's moral ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... could work iron, if he had iron to work, and this iron Achilles gave as a prize. "With rustic methods of working it iron is always impure; it has 'straws' in it, and is brittle. It may be the metal for peace and for implements. In our fields we see the reaper sit down and repair his sickle. In war is needed a metal less hard, perhaps, but more tough and not so easily broken. You cannot sit down in the field of battle, as in a field of barley, to beat your sword straight...." [Footnote: Berard, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... teeth" mentioned by Isaiah. The ears are then rubbed between the hands. In this region the wheat was winnowed altogether by hand, and after the wind had driven the chaff away, the grain was laid out on mats to dry. Sickles are not used, but the reaper takes a handful of stalks and cuts them off close to the ground with a short, straight knife, fixed at a right angle with the handle. The wheat is sown in rows with wide spaces between them, which are utilised for beans and other crops, and no sooner is ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... there were forty eggs in a nest. It would have been vandalism of the worst to eat them, only it was no use leaving them bare to the sun, as the birds abandoned them unless they had begun brooding. In that case the mother sat so tight, occasionally the reaper, passing over, took off her head. More commonly she flew away just in time, whirring up between the mules, with a great pretense of lameness. If the nest by good luck was discovered in time, grain was ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... these choruses, however, is "The Legend of the Bended Bow," a fine war-chant by Mrs. Hemans. Tradition tells that in ancient Britain the people were summoned to war by messengers who carried a bended bow; the poem tells of the various patriots approached. The reaper is bidden to leave his standing corn, the huntsman to turn from the chase; the chieftain, the prince, mothers, sisters, sweethearts, and the bards are all approached and counselled to bravery. After each episode follow the words "And the bow passed on," but the music has been so well managed that ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... life's great harvest field, I may some reaping do; Early and late the sickle wield, And prove a reaper true. ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... long line of mown corn behind a reaper; cf. "swathes of the sword," i.e. heaps of ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... of iron massy and long From the swift-speeding hand did many essay To hurl; but not an Argive could prevail To cast that ponderous mass. Aias alone Sped it from his strong hand, as in the time Of harvest might a reaper fling from him A dry oak-bough, when all the fields are parched. And all men marvelled to behold how far Flew from his hand the bronze which scarce two men Hard-straining had uplifted from the ground. Even this Antaeus' might was wont to hurl Erstwhile, ere the strong hands of ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Stanton was associated at Cincinnati in 1857 with Abraham Lincoln in the great McCormick Reaper patent suit, it was commonly assumed that this was the first time the two men had met. Such was Lincoln's view, for his memory was apt to have blind patches in it. But in fact there had been a meeting fifteen ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... would not forget Earth is too rich, too dark, too sour, too sweet:— Nor be divorced quite From the late tingling of the nerves' delight. Less I would never be Than the deep-graving years have made of me— A memory, pulse, mind, Seed and harvest, a reaper and ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... that many poets have spoken of the bearded oats. You may remember in this connection Tennyson's phrase "the bearded barley" in the "Lady of Shalott," and Longfellow's term "bearded grain" in his famous poem about the Reaper Death. When a person's beard is very thick, we say in England to-day "a full beard," but in the time of Shakespeare they used to say "a well filled beard"—hence the phrase in the second line of the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... Russians had made a stand, and were piled up in heaps as the British again and again charged them. In other parts the round-shot had torn through whole ranks of men, cutting them down like corn before the reaper's sickle. ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... the gentle gleamings of the morn, Soon clad, the reaper, provident of want, Hies cheerful-hearted to the ripen'd field: Nor hastes alone: attendant by his side His faithful wife, sole partner of his cares, Bears on her breast the sleeping babe; behind, With steps unequal, trips her infant train; Thrice ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor; cuts his wheat with a cradle—or, given a neighbor or two, a reaper—instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of culture and intelligence which must adhere ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... straighter furrow. For the first few years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself. It was dull, hard work leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those tough oak and hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns of the big roots. Some, though fortunately ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... about three years. Neither Ben nor I heard a word from him. I told Ben it was many chances to one that he had gone under at the hands of someone that wanted to keep his cattle or his mine or something. Ben looked solemn and relieved at this suggestion. He said if the Grim Reaper had done its work, well and good! Life was full of danger for the best of us, with people dropping off every day or so; and why should Ed have hoped to be above ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... God, whatever that is, did not hear and would not answer, she not knowing that in her own pain and anguish were the seeds of progression and in her cries the whetting of the sickle wherewith all wrongs are cut down when they are ripe for the reaper. So she wept and lamented, bewailing her ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... in the streets of the villages of the North, but in Broadway and Wall Street." Davis believed that the withdrawal of every fourth man would make our problem of food and clothing impossible of solution. But at that moment the invention of the reaper enabled one harvester to do the work of ten men, and the new tools actually more than took the place of the Northern soldiers ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Death is the reaper of the ripened harvest,— The fruits are garnered in Eternity, To be, or good or bad, the spirit's food! If then our thoughts, and words, and deeds have been Of corrupt tendency, or evil nature,— What marvel if we feed on ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... grain growing into the world's greatest industry goes back for a small beginning to 1831. It was in that year that a young American-born farm boy of Irish-Scotch extraction was jeered and laughed at as he attempted to cut wheat with the first crude reaper; but out of Cyrus Hall McCormick's invention soon grew the wonderful harvesting machinery which made possible the production of wheat for export. Close on heel the railways and water-carriers began competing for the transportation of the ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... harvest and a perfect yield. You promised true, for on the harvest morn, Behold a reaper strode across the field, And man of woman born ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... the earth had been cut to pieces. Its surface had been smashed to a pulpy mass. The ground had been plowed, over and over, by a rain of shells—German and British. What a planting there had been that spring, and what a plowing! A harvest of death it had been that had been sown—and the reaper had not waited for summer to come, and the Harvest moon. He had passed that way with his scythe, and where we passed now he had taken his ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... appointed to carry out this order was a man such as those whom Louis XI. had employed fifty years earlier to destroy the feudal system, and Robespierre one hundred and fifty years later to destroy the aristocracy. Every woodman needs an axe, every reaper a sickle, and Richelieu found the instrument he required in ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... my heedless head, And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread: The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper, Time shall reap; but after the reaper The world shall glean to ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... soldiers cut down like ripe corn before the reaper, Uraga stands in stupefied amaze; his adjutant the same. Both are alike under the spell of a superstitious terror. For the blow, so sudden and sweeping, seems given by God's own hand. They might fancy it a coup d'eclair. But the jets of fire shooting ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... whole section of country, had been the residence of a northern farmer. Although the house was completely stripped, and nothing of the barns and outhouses remained but the frames, yet there were many evidences of the thrift and comfort of the former occupant. A northern reaper, several horse rakes, ploughs of improved patterns, and other modern implements of agriculture, betokened a genuine farmer. We were told that he was driven from his home early in the war, and had now found refuge among his friends in New Hampshire. ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... is as inconceivable as the idea of reparation. When a reaper goes forth to his ripe harvest, his lawful labor, and wantonly turns aside into a by-path, to try the edge of his sickle on an humble, unoffending stalk that fights for life among the grass and weeds, and struggles to get its head sufficiently in the sunshine to bloom—when ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... still took up so much more than he could keep together, that those who followed him gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home;—nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only with a strutting armful of newly-cut sheaves. But I should misinform you grossly if I left you to infer that his collections were a heap of incoherent 'miscellanea'. No! the very contrary. Their variety, conjoined with the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... half a mile down the stream. At one such place eighteen trees fell in three minutes, and it would be safe to say that a hundred trees were included in the extended fall. The trees, sixty feet high, resembled a field of gigantic grass or unripened grain; the river was a reaper, cutting it away at the roots. Over they tumbled to be buried in the stream; the water would swirl and boil, earth and trees would disappear; then the mass of leaf-covered timber, freed of the earth, would wash away to lodge on the first sand-bar, and the ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... Therefore do not concern yourself with what is not yours; but as each day or hour comes, trust God! He is not a hard master, reaping where He does not sow; but is a Father sowing in you, and by you, in order that you, as well as Himself, might reap so that "both sower and reaper might rejoice together." Trust Him for always pointing out to you the path of duty, so that, as a wayfarer, you will never err. Be assured, that when the moment comes in which you must take any step, He will, by some voice in His Word or providence, say to you, "This is ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... he not live yet many years, heaping up gold and crime? And may not sweet Grace Acton—her now repentant father—the kindly Jonathan—his generous master, and if there be any other of the Hurstley folk we love, may they not all meet destruction at his hands, as a handful of corn before the reaper's sickle? I say not that they shall, but that they might. Acton's criminal state of mind, and his hunger after gold—gold any how—have earned some righteous retribution, unless Providence in mercy interpose; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... high grasses ceased; a low, rocky barrier stayed them. Rounding this point, lo, your boat swayed instantly to the left: a gentle surf-wave took possession of you, and irresistibly bore you towards a yellow sand beach, which curved inward like a reaper's sickle, not more than a quarter of a mile long, from the handle to the shining point; smooth and glistening, strewn with polished pebbles and tiny shells, it seemed some half-hidden magic beach on which shallops of fairies might any moment ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... true record of his life and struggles to introduce his greatest invention, the reaper, and its success, as gathered from pamphlets published heretofore by some of his friends and associates, and reprinted in this volume, together with some additional facts and testimonials ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... regions the sheaf-carrier has recently been introduced, holding the sheaves until enough are collected to make a shock. Counting the labor of the men who did the binding after the original McCormick reaper at $2 per day, the total saving by all these improvements since 1870 is estimated at 6 cents per bushel for wheat, rye, and oats. Much of this saving in labor is neutralized by cost of machines, interest, and repairs. There have been nearly 3,000 patents in fences, over 5,000 in the ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... autumn of the following year, when a waiting stillness lay on the land and shimmering sunlight opened up the lonely spaces of woods and fields, the Reaper who comes to all men and reaps what they have sown, approached the home of the Merediths and announced his arrival to the young master of the house: ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... preferred to be called, was in a wheat field with his reaper just about to start to work, when a Camp Fire girl, whether Mollie or Polly he could not tell at first, came running toward him in apparent distress. So as not to make another mistake he let the girl speak first, only smiling at her in ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... grey buildings on the platform and the sleepy village beyond. From the blue overhead came the thin, sweet notes of a lark, and as we listened in the stillness we heard a faint whispering "swish" like the sound of a very distant reaper. It was the wind flowing across miles of reeds and grass and heather from the distant Atlantic. But it was not until half an hour later, when we breasted the crest of the great hog-back that stretched before us like a rampart, that we ourselves met the wind. It came out of the west, athwart the ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the plant matures the leaves grow heavy, and, thick with gum, droop gracefully over from the plant. Then as they ripen, one by one the plants are cut, some inches below the first leaves, with short stout knives,—scythe or reaper is useless here,—and hung, heads down, on scaffolds, in the open air, till ready to be taken to the barn. A Virginia tobacco-barn is totally unlike any other building under the sun. Square as to the ground plan, its height is usually twice its width and length. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... idyl of the same genre as Idyl IV. The sturdy reaper, Milon, as he levels the swathes of corn, derides his languid and love-worn companion, Buttus. The latter defends his gipsy love in verses which have been the keynote of much later poetry, and which echo in ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... themselves, give a fair idea of how the farmer used them. Most people, after all, know about edged blades and digging tools. Nearly anyone can grasp what a man might do with a scythe or a plow. Even the working of a modern reaper needs only a little explanation. But museums cannot well show cross-breeding of plants and animals. Museums seldom can show the results of that cross-breeding. Bags of fertilizer can be put on display, as can vials of penicillin, and jars of herbicide. ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... her—not slily, critically, or understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train—as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements—comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... cut our grain with cradles. In 1857 Magnus and I bought a Seymour & Morgan hand-rake reaper. I drove two yoke of cows to this machine, and Magnus raked off. I don't think we gained much over cradling, except that we could work nights with the cows, and bind day-times, or the other way around when the ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... disburdened of its owner—and they drove to another farm—a red brick farmhouse, this time, with yellow roses climbing its front. Here Sharon tarried longer in consultation. Wilbur staunchly held the roan, listened to the high-keyed drone of a reaper in a neighbouring field, and watched the old man make more figures in his black notebook. He liked this one of the Whipples pretty well. He was less talkative than Bill Bardin, and his speech was less picturesque than Starling Tucker's or even Trimble Cushman's, who would often ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... whole pocketful of silver, flush of money like a gold-digger at a fortunate rush, he does not indulge in Allsopp or Guinness. He hoarsely orders a 'pot' of some local brewer's manufacture—a man who knows exactly what he likes, and arranges to meet the hardy digestion of the mower and the reaper. He prefers a rather dark beer with a certain twang faintly suggestive of liquorice and tobacco, with a sense of 'body,' a thickness in it, and which is no sooner swallowed than a clammy palate demands a second ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... of the Night," was one of the few books of American poetry that some of us who are now growing old ourselves can remember reading, just as we were emerging from childhood. "The Reaper and the Flowers" and the "Psalm of Life,"—I recall the delight with which I used to repeat those poems. The latter, so full of suggestions which a very young person could feel, but only half understand, was for that very reason the more fascinating. It seemed to give glimpses, through ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... than groans, murmurs, and scoldings; and the brother and sister sometimes grew quite cheerful and merry together, as Alfred lay raised up to look over the hedge into the harvest-field across the meadow, where the reaper and his wife might be seen gathering the brown ears round, and cutting them with the sickle, and others going after to bind them into the glorious wheat sheaves that leant against each other in heaps of blessed promise ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said other village maids, "on Sylvanus Cobb and slate-pencils." She devoured with avidity every bit of sensational trash procurable in the public or post-office libraries, and made eyes at the tall, strong school-master,—the best rider, reaper, thresher in the field, and best reader and declaimer in the winter lyceums. He was intellectually far ahead of his fellows, and his father had labored to teach him. He was "serious," which was our Western way of saying he had strong religious views, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... which he affirmed to be the souls of the departed; he made trees and branches of trees suddenly to spring up where he pleased; he set up and deposed kings at will; he caused a sickle to go into a field of corn, which unassisted would mow twice as fast as the most industrious reaper. [120] ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... soil and hurt the harvest. The green stalks that grow among thorns are neither withered in spring, nor stunted in their summer's growth; they may be found in harvest taller than their fruitful neighbours; but the ear is never filled, never ripened, and the reaper gets nothing in his arms but long slender straw adorned at the top with graceful clusters of empty chaff. The roots of the thorns drank up the sap of the ground, while their branches veiled off the sunlight, and thus the good seed, starved beneath and overshadowed above, although it started fair ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... literally by weight of numbers. And, as they retreat, a British detachment is sent around to attack them on the flank. They press forward, expecting to crumple up Morgan's men like tall grain in the hand of the reaper! They will teach those rude fellows a lesson, that Americans can't stand before the ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... Autumn days, When, harvest o'er, the reaper slumbers, How gratefully I hymn your praise, In modest but melodious numbers. But if I'm ask'd why 'tis I make Autumn the theme of inspiration, I'll tell the truth, and no mistake— With Autumn comes the long vacation. Of falsehoods I'll not shield me with a tissue— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... haze of the August afternoon. It stewed like an apple in the sunshine, and a faint smell of apples came from it, as its great orchard dragged its boughs in the grass. They were reaping the Gate Field close to the house—the hum of the reaper came to her, and seemed in some mysterious way to be the voice of Ansdore itself, droning in the sunshine and stillness. She felt her throat tighten, and winked ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... ended, he swung lightly over his head the terrible battle-axe which had smitten down, as the grass before the reaper, the chivalry of many a field; and ere the last blast of the trumpets died, the troops of Warwick and of Gloucester met, and mingled hand ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... schooners. He probably saw stave mills arise in which hundreds of youths got employment while their fathers at home fought stumps, wire worms, drought and the devil to get puny crops at small prices. He saw the wagon-works and the fanning mill factory and the reaper industry come up out of these timber products. While he was a youth the farmers were the first promoters of bigger towns, because the big town meant more jobs for the young men whose father's acres were too few for the families, and bigger markets close at hand for perishable ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... sways in the wheat its head, Heavy with dreams, as that with bread: The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper The reaper reaps, and Time ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... shepherd bring His flock at sundown to the welcome fold, The fisherman at daybreak fling His net across the waters gray and cold, And all day long the patient reaper swing His curving sickle through the harvest gold. So through the world the foot-path way he trod, Breathing the air of heaven in every breath; And in the evening sacrifice of death Beneath the open sky he gave his soul to God. Him ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... old when the Reaper beckoned, Ripe for the paying of Nature's debt; Forty score—if he'd lived a second— Years had flown, but he lingered yet; But you had gladdened this vale of tears For a bare two hundred and fifty years; You, Georgina, we always reckoned One ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... scanty clothing, the little Jenny became a servant-of-all-work. She fed the pigs, herded the cattle, assisted in planting potatoes and digging peat from the bog, and was undisputed mistress of the poultry-yard. As she grew up to womanhood, the importance of her labours increased. A better reaper in the harvest-field, or footer of turf in the bog, could not be found in the district, or a woman more thoroughly acquainted with the management of cows and the rearing of young cattle; but ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... descent, it is struck by lightning, and she tumbles into the abyss. She is saved by Hoel in some inexplicable way, and, still more inexplicably, regains her reason. The music is bright and tuneful, and the reaper's and hunter's songs (which are introduced for no apparent reason) are delightful; but the libretto is so impossibly foolish that the opera has fallen into disrepute, although the brilliant music of the heroine should make it a favourite ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... here, the corn Bows its proud tops beneath the reaper's hand. Ripe orchards' plenteous yields enrich the land; Bring the first fruits and offer them this morn, With the stored sweetness of all summer hours, The amber honey sucked from myriad flowers, And sacrifice your best first fruits ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... the world unfurled before my eyes. And what am I? Grass on a clod of earth Scorned even by the passing reaper's scythe. ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... clew for his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell, the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"— ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... rode, a spectacle to remember, a most noble display of rich vestments and nodding plumes, and as we moved between the banked multitudes they sank down all along abreast of us as we advanced, like grain before the reaper, and kneeling hailed with a rousing welcome the consecrated King and his companion the Deliverer of France. But by and by when we had paraded about the chief parts of the city and were come near to the end of our course, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... legendary tale was composed in 1848. The next effort of the poet is one of his masterpieces, wherein his inspiration is truest and most poetical. La Fin dou Meissounie (The Reaper's Death) is a noble, genuinely pathetic tale, told in beautifully varied verse, full of the love of field work, and aglow with sympathy for the toilers. The figure of the old man, stricken down suddenly by an accidental blow from the scythe of a young man mowing behind ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... hearts are fickle, That love is sorrow, that life is care, And the reaper Death, with his shining sickle, Gathers whatever ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... laid by. Thompson, Johnson, Anderson, and the two men from the woods, who were diverted from their post-splitting for the time being, went gayly to the corn fields and attacked the standing grain in the old-fashioned way. This was not economical; but I had no corn reaper, and there was none to hire, for the frost had struck us all at the same time. The five men were kept busy until the two patches—about forty-three acres—were in shock. This brought us to the 24th. In the meantime the men and women moved ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... farmer! In the shade He works his crops by letters-patent now: Steam drives the reaper (which is union-made), As in the spring it pushed the auto-plough; A patent milker manages each cow; Electric currents guide the garden spade, And cattle, poultry, pigs through "process" wade To quick perfection—Science ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... utilized the inventions of Stephenson and others, and have grown rich by doing so, should be eulogized any more than those who are ministering to the wants of the public by the use of the Hoe printing press, McCormick's reaper, Whitney's cotton gin, or any of the ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... solve some of the South's problems, as any family can plant and cultivate after a fashion much more cotton than it can pick. Many attempts to produce such a machine have been made, but simplicity, efficiency, and cheapness have not yet been attained. Like the reaper and binder, a machine of this sort is needed for only a small portion of the year, but in that short period the need is extreme. Such a machine would revolutionize the tenant system, would permit a larger production of food, and at the same time would set labor free for other ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... with clasped hands—a queer, detached moment, as it seemed to Francis, in a life which during the last few months had been full of vivid sensations. From outside came the lazy sounds of the drowsy summer morning—the distant humming of a mowing machine, the drone of a reaper in the field beyond, the twittering of birds in the trees, even the soft lapping of the stream against the stone steps. The man whose hand he was holding seemed to Francis to have become somehow transformed. It was as though he had dropped a mask and were showing a more human, a more ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the rear where were his private quarters sat zu Pfeiffer with a towel tucked around his neck upon which was scattered inch-lengths of hair. Sergeant Schultz sheared deftly with clippers like a reaper in a field of corn. When he had completed the final trimming behind the ears, he stood aside with the air of an ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... not in the day of toil, When harvest waits the reaper's hand: Go, gather in the glorious spoil, And joyous ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... bustle I enter into confidence with dying I grudge nothing but care and trouble I hate poverty equally with pain I scorn to mend myself by halves I write my book for few men and for few years Justice als takes cognisance of those who glean after the reaper Known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new Laws (of Plato on travel), which forbids it after threescore Liberty and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me Liberty of poverty Liberty to lean, but not to lay our whole weight upon others Little affairs ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... ago he was a citizen, cultivating his farm upon the prairies, ploughing, sowing, reaping. But now the great reaper, Death, has gathered him in. He had no thought of being a soldier; but he was a patriot, and when his country called him he sprang to her aid. He yielded to disease, but not to the enemy. He was far from home and friends, with none but strangers to minister to his wants, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... school! I have two ponies to break this fall, and Pa has promised to let me drive the reaper around ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... I know how to do. I refer only to its abundance. I have found that in "working together with God," I am less involved in conflicts of wills than I was before, and that the words of Amos are literally fulfilled to me, "that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed." I say it without knocking on wood, and with no fear lest my "good luck" will be withdrawn, that from that time to this I have had plenty of work which I have accomplished happily, and ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... satisfy. sazon f. season, time. secano dry arable land. secar to dry. seco dry, lean. secretaria secretaryship, secretary's office. secretario secretary. secreto secret. secular centenary. segador m. reaper. segar to reap, mow. seguida succession, following; en —— next, immediately. seguir to follow, continue. segun according, as. segundo second; m. second, lieutenant. seguridad f. security, certainty. seguro secure, sure; m. refuge. seis six. semana week. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... head dropped like a blossom cut down by the reaper, made an almost superhuman effort to smile, as he replied with the greatest gentleness: "I have had the honor of telling your royal highness that I am absolutely ignorant of everything, that I am a poor unremembered outcast, who has this moment ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is ready for being cut when the heads have all turned brown, except a few of the smaller and later ones. It may be cut by the mower as ordinarily used, by the mower, with a board or zinc platform attachment to the cutter bar, by the self-rake reaper, or by the grain binder. The objection to the first method is that the seed has to be raked and that the raking results in the loss of much seed; to the second, that it calls for an additional man to rake off the clover; and to the third, that the binder is heavier ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... arrangements for the garnering of my crops. My house was in the open country, half a league or so from the nearest village. It was the evening hour, and I was seated in the vestibule of the outer courtyard, having just dismissed the head reaper with whom I had come to terms for the services of himself and his fellows ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... a little—retired, as it were, into the hills and back country, to allow the undimmed heaven to shine down upon the happy festival of families and nations. The cattle stood still in the fields without a low; the trees were quiet as in friendly recognition of the spirit of the hour; no reaper's hook or mower's scythe glanced in the meadow, no rumbling wain was on the road. The birds alone, as being more nearly akin to the feeling of the scene, warbled in ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... it like the hares, for as the wheat fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of corn. Your skin or mine could not have stood the scratching of the straw, which is stiff and sharp, and the burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he had been born and cradled in a cottage, and passed his childhood bareheaded in July heats and January snows. I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to wonder how these men and women could stand it, for the summer ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... effervescent infantry of Regiment du Roi, hot troopers of Mestre-de-Camp! Walled Nanci, which stands so bright and trim, with its straight streets, spacious squares, and Stanislaus' Architecture, on the fruitful alluvium of the Meurthe; so bright, amid the yellow cornfields in these Reaper-Months,—is inwardly but a den of discord, anxiety, inflammability, not far from exploding. Let Bouille look to it. If that universal military heat, which we liken to a vast continent of smoking flax, do any where take fire, his beard, here in Lorraine ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... spoken on "Heere, maak mij bekend mijne einde" (Lord, make me to know mine end), but on discovery at graveyard that all were children, spoke on "The Reaper ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... that we see falling like grain before the reaper? It is the days, and the weeks, and ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... with the slaves of Mahound and Termagaunt!' Nothing could resist the vehemence of his attack. In vain were all attempts to drag him from his steed. Before his mighty battle-axe the Saracens seemed to shake and fall as corn before the reaper. ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... all these shall be yours, and whatso ye will of all that the earth beareth; then shall no man mow the deep grass for another, while his own kine lack cow-meat; and he that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won; and he that buildeth a house shall dwell in it with those that he biddeth of his free will; and the tithe barn shall garner the wheat for all men to eat of when the seasons are untoward, and the rain-drift hideth the sheaves ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... of thousands of workers, and its ramifications are endless. It is not limited to a particular region like agriculture, or to towns and cities like manufacturing; it is not stopped by tariff walls or ocean boundaries. An acre of wheat is cut by the reaper, threshed, and carted to the elevator by wagon or motor truck. The railroad-car is hauled alongside, and with other bushels of its kind the grain is transported to a giant flour-mill, where it is turned into a whitened, pulverized product, packed ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... delight? Elsewhere there is neither true joy nor full joy,—nec verum nec plenum gaudium. There is no verity in it; it is but an external garb and shadow, and there is no plenty or fulness in it. It fills not the hand of the reaper, it satisfieth not his very hunger. But here, when a soul is possessed with Christ by faith, and dwelleth in God by love, there is both reality and plenty. All the dimensions of the heart may be filled up. Some allegorize upon the triangular composition of man's heart, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... or late in the day, put up in small cocks and threshed from these in four or five days after being cut. But this method of harvesting, however carefully done, is attended with much loss of seed. It is better to harvest with the self-rake reaper, the rakes being so adjusted that the hay will be dropped off in small gavels or sheaves, so small that in two or three days they may be lifted without being turned over; Much care should be exercised in lifting the sheaves to avoid shedding in ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... chores. I looked at the clock and it was just three o'clock in the morning, just the time Pa comes home and goes to bed in town, when he is running a political campaign. Well, sir, I had to jump from one thing to another from three o'clock in the morning till nine at night, pitching hay, driving reaper, raking and binding, shocking wheat, hoeing corn, and everything, and I never got a kind word. I spoiled my clothes, and I think another week would make a pirate of me. But during it all I had the advantage of a pious example. I tell you, you ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... steer staggered back and made several efforts to gore the dying horse and helpless rider, but with a dozen shots through his vitals, he sank down and expired. A destiny, over which he had no seeming control, willed that he should yield to the grim reaper nearly three thousand miles from his birthplace on ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... side. And all the time as it slowly advanced, it breathed and belched forth tongues of flame; its nostrils seemed to breathe death and destruction, and the Huns, terrified by its appearance, were mown down like corn falling to the reaper's sickle. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... Robert Herrick To Mistress Margaret Hussey John Skelton On Her Coming To London Edmund Waller "O, Saw Ye Bonny Lesley" Robert Burns To a Young Lady William Cowper Ruth Thomas Hood The Solitary Reaper William Wordsworth The Three Cottage Girls William Wordsworth Blackmwore Maidens William Barnes A Portrait Elizabeth Barrett Browning To a Child of Fancy Lewis Morris Daisy Francis Thompson To Petronilla, Who Has Put Up Her Hair Henry Howarth Bashford The Gipsy ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to tower'd Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers "'Tis the ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... spent a lot of days in an easy chair in the shade of a county office since then while I was driving a reaper in ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... problems on the initiative of the West. Since the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 this had been a frequent occurrence, and the history of the public lands had always been directed by Western demands. In 1862 the agricultural West, whose capacity to cultivate land had been magnified by the new reaper of McCormick, had obtained its Homestead Act, by which land titles were conveyed to the farmer who cleared the land and used it. Thomas H. Benton had fought for this through a long lifetime. He died too soon to see ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... is in the skies; The reaper singeth from the corn; The shepherd on the hills replies; And all things now salute the morn, Even the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... battle scenes of Allison, can surpass the story how, spurning the chapparal and the barbed wire, pressing their rifles to their throbbing hearts, toiling up the heights, and all the while the machine guns and the Mausers mowing the jungle as if with a mighty reaper, on and yet right on, they won the fiery crests, and Santiago fell. Well may we exclaim with the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... is a reaper whose name is Death,[613-1] And with his sickle keen He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... rattled the crows, As you dragged the whole reaper, next day, down the rows. The three mules held back, yet you danced on your toes. You pulled like a racer, and kept the mules chasing. You tangled the harness with bright eyes side-glancing, While the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... The Grim Reaper spared him, and Sam came, and was introduced to the family, and ate. He put himself in a class with Dr. Johnson, and Ben Brust, and Gargantua, only that his table manners were better. He almost forgot ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... The Downfall of Wolsey William Shakespeare The Noble Nature Ben Johnson Song on a May Morning John Milton O God, our Help in Ages Past. Isaac Watts The Diverting History of John Gilpin William Cowper Bannockburn Robert Burns My Heart's in the Highlands Robert Burns The Solitary Reaper William Wordsworth Sonnet William Wordsworth "Soldier, Rest!" Walter Scott Lochinvar Walter Scott The Star-Spangled Banner Francis Scott Key Hohenlinden Thomas Campbell The Harp that Once through Tara's Halls Thomas Moore Childe Harold's Farewell to England George Noel Gordon, Lord ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... we know their bees, That wade in honey, red to the knees; Their patent-reaper, its sheaves sleep sound In doorless garners underground: We know false Glory's spendthrift race, Pawning nations for feathers and lace; It may be short, it may be long,— "'Tis reckoning-day!" sneers unpaid Wrong. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... communicated itself to her vigorous young body. For repose and inaction are as foreign to healthy life as death itself, of which they are the symptoms; and if ever there was an intense and vivid life, Susan had it. She got up and dressed, and leaned from the window, watching the two-horse reaper in the wheat fields across the hollow of the pasture, and listening to its faint musical whirr. The cows which had just been milked were moving sedately through the gate into the pasture, where the bull, under a tree, was placidly awaiting them. A boy, in huge straw hat and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... unconscious of the power that he wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he failed, as in the dull, lifeless lines of The Excursion. Sometimes even his labored simplicity is no better than prose; but such simple and natural poems as Michael, The Solitary Reaper, To My Sister, Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, and the majority of the poems showing the new attitude toward childhood, are priceless treasures of English literature. Of most of these, we may say with Matthew Arnold, "It might seem that Nature not only gave him ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Harrison, the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the loft of an old barn. Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch. McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a grist-mill. The first model dry-dock was made in an attic. Clark, the founder of Clark University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy wagons in a horse shed. Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room, with his daughter's help, until ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... since Saxon Edelfled; Only one trace of earthly strain, That for her lover's loss She cherishes a sorrow vain, 630 And murmurs at the cross.- And then her heritage;—it goes Along the banks of Tame; Deep fields of grain the reaper mows, In meadows rich the heifer lows, 635 The falconer and huntsman knows Its woodlands for the game. Shame were it to Saint Hilda dear, And I, her humble vot'ress here, Should do a deadly sin, 640 Her temple spoil'd before mine eyes, If this false ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... a poem should be, to employ a homely illustration, what garlic should be in a salad, "scarce suspected, animate the whole," that the poet teaches not as the moralist and the preacher teach, but as nature and life teach us. He taught us when he wrote 'The Fountain' and 'The Highland Reaper, The Leach-gatherer' and 'Michael', he merely wearied us when he sermonised in 'The Excursion' and in 'The Prelude'. Tennyson never makes this mistake. He is seldom directly didactic. Would he inculcate subjugation to the law of duty—he gives us the funeral ode on Wellington, ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... Werper fancied that he could replace in the girl's heart the position which had been vacated by the act of the grim reaper. He could offer Jane Clayton marriage—a thing which Mohammed Beyd would not offer, and which the girl would spurn from him with as deep disgust as ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of steel beside which the fire of the defenders of the higher slopes of the hill the Germans were attacking was but as a shower compared with a tornado. German infantry melted away under that terrible storm, masses of grey were levelled like corn at the feet of the reaper, while even the forest, through which Henri and Jules had penetrated on the previous day, was flattened or torn to shreds, was converted into a species of smoking volcano. It was terrific! It was a master-stroke on the part of the French Command, and a shattering misfortune to the enemy. Indeed, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... were only a few weeks of this planning, hoping, saving. The little Temple builder fell ill. It was a brief illness and then the grim Reaper knocked at the door of the Wiatt home and the loving, self-sacrificing spirit was born to the Father's House where there are many mansions, where there was no lack of room, for the little heart so eager to learn ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... time, and Isaac, who was a good reaper, was wanted in the field, but he could find no one, not even a boy, to take charge of his flock in the meantime, and so to be able to reap and keep an eye on the flock at the same time he brought his sheep down to the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... here's a health to you and wife: Long may you mock the reaper's warning, And may the evening of your life In rising Sons renew the morning; May happiness and peace and love Come with each morrow to caress ye; And when you've done with earth, above— God bless ye, dear old friend—God ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... is near. The Almighty shall reveal His power. The reaper's song is silent in the field, And the shepherd's voice on the mountain. The valleys then shall shake with fear, With dread the hills shall tremble. It comes, the day of terror comes! The awful morning dawns! Thy mighty arm, O God, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... farmers were already in their fields. It was harvest-time—the second harvest of the year—and the little rice-fields were no longer like mirrors, but were filled with high rustling grain ready for the sickle. The water had been drained off and the reaper and thrasher were going through the fields before dawn. There was no machinery like that used at home. The reaper was a short sickle, the thrashing-machine a kind of portable tub, and Mackay looked at them with some amusement, and described to A Hoa how they took off the great wheat crops ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith |
