"Bovine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman's ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... would have been full of glory and excitement. As it was, the dulness and monotony of the jingling of the cow-bell made even his stupid childish mind dismal. All the pleasant exhilaration of youth seemed to have deserted the boy, and life to him became as inane and bovine as to the original ringer of that bell grazing all the season in her own shadow over the ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,—who had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bovine William, who was reputed the stupidest man in the dale, noticed the change in her, noticed the touch of colour that was so quick to mount to the ivory cheek, the novel brightness and tenderness in the deep grey eyes, the new note, the low, sweet tone of happiness in ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... for a repetition of his performance. I think that Johnnyboy for the time enjoyed this companionship, yet without the least affectation or self-consciousness—so long as it was unobtrusive. It so chanced, however, that the Rev. Mr. Belcher, a gentleman with bovine lightness of touch, and a singular misunderstanding of childhood, chose to presume upon his paternal functions. Approaching the high chair in which Johnnyboy was dyspeptically reflecting, with a ponderous wink at the other guests, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he poured forth a torrent of sarcastic contempt on the young clod-hoppers, who, having just come from herding their fathers' cows, could express their feelings in no more suitable language than that of the bovine animals which had been their principal and fit associates. As he sat down, his eyes rested with withering scorn upon Alec Forbes, who instantly started to his feet amidst a confusion of plaudits ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... to train her in the duties of her station. I set forth, and would have specified what these were, but for a second interruption that was evidently not intentionally disrespectful, and was uttered with the bovine ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... shell pitched among them to-day. How they regarded it as a busy man regards the intrusion of the housemaid—just a harmless necessary nuisance, and no more. The cattle took the little automatic shells in much the same spirit, but with an addition of wonder—staring at them and snuffing with bovine astonishment. The Kaffir herdsmen first ran yelling in every direction, and then rushed back to dig the shell up, amid inextinguishable laughter. The Hindoo grass-cutter neither ran nor laughed, but awaited destiny with resignation. By the way, there is a Hindoo servant in the ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... had originated in a rising family of East Orange. She was short rather than small, and hovered audaciously between plumpness and width. Her hair was black and elaborately arranged. This, in conjunction with her handsome, rather bovine eyes, and her over-red lips, combined to make her resemble Theda Bara, the prominent motion picture actress. People told her constantly that she was a "vampire," and she believed them. She suspected hopefully that they were afraid of her, and she did her utmost under all circumstances to give the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... knot of servants were gossiping in frightened whispers with a couple of large, rather bovine country constables who, bareheaded, without their helmets, which they held under ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... frail door was once more at large. In a frenzy of freedom she dashed about the yard. Her progress was somewhat impeded by contact with the surplice which, pinned to the clothes-line, was flapping in the breezes. Maddened by this obstruction which hung, veil-like, over her bovine lineaments, she gave a twist of her Texas horns, a tug, and the surplice was released, but from the line only; it twined itself like a white ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... dream, however, was that of marriage to an heiress, one of those very material and bovine daughters of the new rich in the West end, and to this end he was bending all his artistic thought, writing, dressing, dreaming the thing he wished. I myself had a marked tendency in this direction, although from another point of view, and speaking from mine ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Scraggs he was not to claim the title of captain and was known to the world as the Maggie's first mate, second mate, third mate, quartermaster, purser, and freight clerk. One Neils Halvorsen, a solemn Swede with a placid, bovine disposition, constituted the fo'castle hands, while Bart McGuffey, a wastrel of the Gibney type but slower-witted, reigned supreme in the engine room. Also his case resembled that of Mr. Gibney in that McGuffey's job on the Maggie was the first he had had in six months and he treasured ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... of age. Of his personal appearance at this time we have no description. The portrait of him prefixed to the original edition of his works belongs to a much later moment. Whether or not the bovine features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger on that singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interesting to note that ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Rose," from this circumstance, as I afterwards learned. When it was first dropped by the dam, Mr. Webb was confined to the house by indisposition. But he had such a desire to see this new accession to his bovine family, that he directed it to be brought into the drawing-room for that purpose. Hence it received a more elegant and domestic appellation than the variegated nomenclature of ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... stand longer between you and Mr. Ferrier." Thus, with one dexterous push Ferrier found himself projected into the unknown depths of his speech. He was easy enough before students, but the quick whispers, the lightning flash of raised eye-glasses, the calm, bovine stare of certain ladies, rather disconcerted him at first. But he warmed to his work, and in deliberate, mathematical fashion wrought through his subject. He told of the long Night; the dark age of the North Sea. The little ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... the green silk curtains that were looped on the corner posts of the pavilion. When she saw the Magister her great, fair face became slowly of a fiery red; slowly and silently she fell, with motions as if bovine, to her knees at the Queen's side. Her gown was all grey, but it had roses of red and white silk round the upper edges of the square neck-place, and white lawn showed beneath her ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... simplest use made of the animals from which man derives strength appears to have been brought about by the subjugation of wild cattle—the bulls and buffaloes. Several wild varieties of the bovine tribe were originally widely disseminated in Europe and Asia, and these forms must have been frequent objects of chase by the ancient hunters. Although in their adult state these animals were doubtless originally intractable, the young were mild-mannered, and, as we can readily conceive, must ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... or a handful of hay, is dead only in a limited sense. The beef is dead ox, and the hay is dead grass; but the "organic molecules" of the beef or the hay are not dead, but are ready to manifest their vitality as soon as the bovine or herbaceous shrouds in which they are imprisoned are rent by the macerating action of water. The hypothesis therefore must be classified under Xenogenesis, rather than under Abiogenesis. Such as it was, I think it will appear, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... say that Mr. Gashwiler succumbed. The Roman constituency at Remus, it is to be hoped, were happily ignorant of this last defection of their great legislator. Mr. Gashwiler instantly forgot his theme,—began to ply the lady with a certain bovine-like gallantry, which it is to be said to her credit she parried with a playful, terrier-like dexterity, when the servant suddenly ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... exist is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have been floating, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... made him peculiarly liable to a strong sense of repulsion. The ox—we may venture to assert it on the authority of a great classic—is not given to use his teeth as an instrument of attack, and Tom was an excellent bovine lad, who ran at questionable objects in a truly ingenious bovine manner; but he had blundered on Philip's tenderest point, and had caused him as much acute pain as if he had studied the means with the nicest ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... little room, a dingy, smelling box, which had in it six berths placed across and above each other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our silk-worms at home. I wouldn't sleep in one of them, billah! even though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine horses, the rioting of the wind above us, should make us forget the brutality of the stewards. Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable here, as are their Excellencies in what is ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... is the purport of all his Polish Majesty's Eleven Letters to Friedrich, which precede or follow,— reiterating with a certain bovine obstinacy, insensible to time or change, That such is Polish Majesty's fixed notion: "Strict neutrality, friendship even; and leave me unmolested here." [In OEuvres de Frederic, iv. 235-260 ("29th August-10th September-18th September," 1756), are collected now, the Eleven Letters, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... study I have mentioned nearly all of the Biblical characters who have been turned into operatic heroes. Nebuchadnezzar appeared on the stage at Hamburg in an opera of Keiser's in 1704; Ariosti put him through his bovine strides in Vienna in 1706. He was put into a ballet by a Portuguese composer and made the butt of a French opera bouffe writer, J. J. Debillement, in 1871. He recurs to my mind now in connection with a witty fling at "Nabucco" made by a French rhymester when Verdi's ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... been, but the party found little to interest them. The next day the tourists made an excursion up the Yang-tsze-Chiang, and enjoyed it very much. They saw a little of the farming operations, as a man ploughing with a buffalo, which looked more like a deer than a bovine; others carrying bundles of grain, one at each end of a pole on their shoulders; another threshing by beating a bunch of the stalks on a frame like a ladder or clothes-horse; but what pleased them most were the fishermen. One had a ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... or went hunting—as they did more frequently when the buffalo came northwards later on, led from the southern plains, which form their more common habitat throughout the year, by the rich blue grass, and other prairie delicacies which these bovine beasts loved, that flourished among the valleys of the Black Hills; or whether they were digging in the kitchen garden that Josh and Jasper had improvised at the back of the little hut where they ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... world which he was studying so earnestly,—what a transformation he could have brought upon this light-hearted and joyous scene! The scales had so nearly balanced; at the bottom of his heart he was conscious of a certain faint contempt for the almost bovine self-satisfaction of a nation without eyes. Literature and painting, art in all its far-flung branches, even science, were suffering in these days from a general and paralysing inertia. Life which demanded no sacrifice of anybody was destructive of everything in the nature of aspiration. Sport ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... heat-giving bodies, as the Brahmana is the best of all bipeds, as the cobra is the foremost of all serpents, as Fire is the first of all things possessed of energy, as the thunderbolt is the foremost of all weapons, as the humped bull is the foremost of all animals of the bovine breed, as the ocean is the foremost of all watery expanses, as clouds charged with rain are the foremost of all clouds, as Ananta is the first of all Nagas, as Airavata is the foremost of all elephants, as the son is the foremost of all beloved objects, and lastly, as the wife is the best ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... acceptance of an obscure destiny had in it nothing of the sacredness of renunciation. It was almost as though he were hoarding his soul's wealth, and adroitly avoiding any of the pangs and labours of the spiritual life. Because it seemed to me that, for a man of his receptivity, the normal bovine existence of the humble folk among whom he lived was out of the question. He knew too much, was too alive to the shifting lights and shadows of life, to sit, like grey-haired Saturn, "quiet as a stone." Perhaps he had some unknown ulterior ambition on which ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... OF THE OX; being a Manual of Bovine Pathology specially adapted for the use of Veterinary Practitioners and Students. With 2 Plates and ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... was beginning to lose her painful embarrassment, she showed to somewhat better advantage and no longer impressed him, as bovine, stolid, almost stupid; he could not but note again her full young figure, her well-shaped, well-poised head, and her regular features, and the pity of it seemed all the greater by reason thereof. He tried to visualize her perfectly groomed, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... Lennox, as he could dimly make out, spreading to right and left, a line of wagons, but not closed up, for there were wide intervals between; and now a low, dull, crunching sound and the odour of bovine animals plainly announced that there were spans of oxen lying close by the wagons as if ready for some movement in the early morning for which their ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... this: Keep the mind active. There's nothing that will make a stolid, bovine face like a brain that isn't made to get up and hustle. Don't sit around and read lovey-dovey novels or spend your time chatting with that stupid woman next door. Don't forget that life is short and there's not a moment to waste. ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... introduced, thanks to the convincing explanations of their effectiveness by the representatives of the Bureau of Animal Industry of the national Department of Agriculture; 8640 milch cows were inspected by veterinary practitioners (1905-1907), to learn the prevalence of bovine tuberculosis (of these thirty-six per cent reacted to the tuberculin test); state societies and state departments have been aroused to demand an efficient live-stock sanitary board; magistrates have fined and imprisoned offenders ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... bones brought out the fact that eight of them were fragments of human bones representing at least three individuals, four were fragments of llama bones, one of the bone of a dog, and three were "bovine remains." The human remains agreed "in all essential respects" with the bones of modern Quichuas. Llama and dog might all have belonged to Inca, or even more recent times, but the bovine remains presented considerable difficulty. The three fragments were from bones which "are among ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... certain extent, is as beneficial to some plants as to animals; and every intelligent farmer knows that if salt be withheld from the bovine genus for any considerable length of time, the general health droops and parasites are sure to abound. The object of nature in bringing into existence the large family of mildews, each member of which is a perfect plant in its way, and as capable of performing its functions as ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... home, and improve the occasion by cracking a few more bovine skulls if we meet them, the northern burring brutes. Their lingo sickens me, but ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... surprising. But being deceived, why should she think it odd to find hay inside? Ignorant of anatomy and physiology, she knows nothing about insides. Had she considered the matter—and it doesn't fall in the line of bovine rumination [Footnote: Bovine rumination: chewing a cud.]—she would doubtless have expected to find in her calf not hay but condensed milk. But if not milk, why not hay? She was well acquainted with the process of putting hay inside, why therefore should she ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... the resources of his bosom! And out of this high sensibility of man must come what innumerable stabs of quick agony, what slow, gasping hours of grief and pain, that to the cattle upon the hills are utterly unknown! But do you envy the ox his bovine peace? It is precisely that which makes him an ox, It is due to nothing but his insensibility,—by no means, as I take occasion to assure those poets who laud outward Nature and inferior creatures to the disparagement of man,—by no means due to composure and philosophy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... instant. The Swede held a huge fist in front of Johnnie's face, while the latter looked steadily over it into the blazing orbs of his accuser. The Easterner had grown pallid; the cowboy's jaw had dropped in that expression of bovine amazement which was one of his important mannerisms. After the three words, the first sound in the room was made by Scully's paper as it floated forgotten to his feet. His spectacles had also fallen ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... Prophet's brain began to swim. Sparks seemed to float before his eyes, and amid these sparks, nebulous and fragmentary visions appeared, visions of his beloved grandmother companioned by scorpions and serpents, in close touch with camelopards and bovine monsters, and, in the last stress of terror and dismay, left entirely dependent upon crustaceans for that help and comfort which hitherto her devoted grandson had ever been thankful ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the face of Chiquita constantly before her and the pangs of jealousy gnawing at her heart? How stupid to have imagined her to be one of those bovine women with large liquid eyes who, figuratively speaking, pass the major portion of their lives standing knee-deep in a pond, gazing stolidly out upon the world; a fat brown wench upon whose hip a man might confidently expect to hang his hat by the time she has attained ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... saw that the girl's spirit was not with him. He would have stopped the farmer at once, but he had not the heart to do it, even had he felt in himself strength to attract an intelligent response from that strange, grave, bovine fixity of look, over which the human misery sat as a thing not yet taken ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... barely two minutes after he had expressed this wish that Miss Morrison reappeared upon the scene accompanied by a pale, nervous, bovine-eyed man of about thirty-five years of age, and said in a tone of agitation: "Pardon me for interrupting, Mr. Headland, but this is Mr. Maurice Van Nant. He is most anxious to meet you, and father would have me bring him ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... beginning to wish they might shine in it—these last the very young people. The latter were just beginning to dream of dances at Kinsley's, a stated Kirmess, and summer diversions of the European kind, but they had not arrived as yet. The first class, although by far the dullest and most bovine, was still the most powerful because they were the richest, money as yet providing the highest standard. The functions which these people provided were stupid to the verge of distraction; really they were only the week-day ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... no indigenous breeds of either cattle or sheep in this country. The only animals of the bovine race found here when this continent was discovered were the buffalo and the musk ox. The 'natives' are a heterogenous mixture of various breeds, introduced from time to time for different purposes, and allowed to cross ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tenuous at best, and powerless to subdue the fiercer nature of man when his acquisitive and aggressive commercial instincts are aroused. One of the most devout admirers of Peninnah Penelope Anne tossed his head with a very bellicose and bovine obduracy when he intimated an incredulity of the statement that the herd had been stampeded without an ulterior motive of malice or nefarious profit. The gentle soul who had assumed the tendance and protection of the fawn held down as he listened a shaggy intent ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Mrs. Hilmer always dimpled with wholesome pleasure. Well, she did look sweet, in a motherly, bovine way, Fred admitted, when the note of insincerity in ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... of Sherman's army would have been incomplete which omitted the notorious "Bummers." At the end of each corps appeared the strangest huddle of animation, equine, canine, bovine, and human, that ever civilian beheld—mules, asses, horses, colts, cows, sheep, pigs, goats, raccoons, chickens, and dogs led by negroes blacker then Erebus. Every beast of burden was loaded to its capacity with tents, baggage, knapsacks, hampers, panniers, boxes, valises, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the statement with the bovine stolidity of an English audience in the presence of ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... and found a crowd gathered there, and a good-looking young man seemed to be haranguing them. He stopped as we came along and after being introduced went on with: "As I was saying, Miss Sanborn, I regard women as greatly our inferiors; in fact, essentially unemotional,—really bovine. Do you really not agree to that?" I almost choked with surprise and wrath, but managed to retort: "I am sorry to suppose your mother was a cow, but she must have been to raise a calf like you." And I walked away to the tune of great applause. It seems someone had said ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and not the community, is all-important. The average Oriental cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His life, too, is naore complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low-thoughted than you might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but it is never empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse, and to forget that it is the man that is ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... father was a cattle-dealer, and taught her to handle fearlessly the animals he delighted in. She learned to tell at a glance the finest points of live-stock, and to doctor bovine and equine ailments with the utmost skill. With all this, she became a proficient in Italian and French, and a terse and rapid writer. A few years ago, after her father's death, she traveled in Italy with an invalid sister, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Central Office man, and had been long enough at Headquarters to lose the heavy bovine set of the man who pounds the pavement. A strapping big fellow, with graying hair and a pair of round bullet eyes that searched you with needle points, his very appearance was sufficient corroboration of ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal—ah—rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well- apportioned leisure of ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... a bugle-call, and the sliding doors leading from the corral are opened, and a bull, bounding forward therefrom, stops short a moment and eyes the assembled multitude and the men on horseback with wrathful yet inquiring eye. A moment only. Sniffing the air and lashing his tail, the noble bovine rushes forward and engages the picadores; the little pennants of the national colours, which, attached to a barbed point, have been jabbed into his back by an unseen hand as he passed the barrier, fluttering in the wind created by his rush. Furiously he charges ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... the Bundist's shop, and David hurried off to enlist him. The shopkeeper proved, however, so corpulent and bovine that David's heart sank. But he began bluntly: ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... loose and twisting detached from the pony's back. Everyone witnessed a blur upon the air and knew it was the man. He was flung with catapultic force against a frightened cow. He struck with arms and legs extended. He clung like a bur to the bovine's side, for a moment before he dropped—and everyone roared unfeelingly, in relief of the tension ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... been known to stuff his mouth with grass. For more than thirty-six hours, since the night when they had supped on horseflesh and he had contracted a terrible dysentery in consequence, he had been without food, for he was so little able to look out for himself that, notwithstanding his bovine strength, whenever he joined the others in a marauding raid he never got his share of the booty. He would have been willing to give his blood for a ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... always welcome. In reply to one of them Carlyle wrote: 'Thanks for your friendly human letter; which gave us much entertainment in the reading (at breakfast time the other day), and is still pleasant to think of. One gets so many inhuman letters, ovine, bovine, porcine, etc., etc.: I wish you would write a little oftener; when the beneficent Daimon suggests, fail not to lend ear to him.' Another, who has since followed him 'from sunshine to the sunless land,' and to whom he wrote of domestic affairs, said, 'The striking feature in his correspondence ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... of the Frog family had no surname, but about two thousand years ago, in consequence of his disastrous failure in an attempt to rival a male animal of the bovine species, the prefix "bull" was incorporated with his patronymic by a crooked little Greek. The name, however, more appropriately belongs to the Horned ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... heart disease. I had often feared as much, but now I had it from a scientific source that my heart was going wrong. I could tell by the way I felt. My room-mate noticed me. He was another Western bovine-chaser, a good fellow in his way, but according to my standard, devoid of all the finer qualities that go to make ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... that he is dead. The pang's not there, Nor in the City's many-coloured bloom Of swift black-lettered posters, which the throng Passes with bovine stare, To say He is dead and Is it going to rain? Or hum stray snatches of a rag-time song. Nor is it in that falsest shibboleth (Which orators toss to the dumb scorn of death) That all the world stands weeping at his tomb. London is dining, ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... appropriate to the occasion of starting up, he flung out his bullwhip in a flourish of aerial penmanship and drove home the aforesaid remarks with a startling report. Again the bovine ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... hate—these cannot be avoided. We must experience them. So do the animals, who gain from their experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, is ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Streptococcus of bovine mastitis. Streptococcus lanceolatus (Diplococcus pneumoniae or pneumococcus). to contrast ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... and as loudly as ever they could, just to show us that they were not afraid—that they did not care, not they, pooh! After these came a small detachment of guarda, with arms, who watched the Yankee soldiers with bovine intentness while they came to a halt and ordered arms in front of ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... a half-worn and almost imperceptible path leading through the long rough grass, and, turning round a half- demolished shrine, which exhibited the remains of Apis, the bovine deity, he came immediately in front of the philosopher, Agelastes, who, sitting among the ruins, reposed his ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and rode out in the direction from whence had arisen the bovine complaint. The sound was not repeated, and Hazel had begun to chaff Bill about a too-vivid imagination when within a half mile of the clearing he pulled his horse up short in the middle ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... from the front. Soldiers stole a cow from a farmyard. It had but the stump of a tail, and foreseeing that there might be a requisition by the owner, who passed for a Union sympathizer, they disguised the creature by attaching a long switch from a dead bovine. Sure enough the man came to headquarters, and from his patriotic plea of having lost much by adhering to the old cause, his demand was accorded. If he could find his lost animal, he was entitled to it and the offenders would be punished. It had not been obtained by the regular ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... made picturesque, as if they were in the stable by right, and as if it were only a stable, not a temple hallowed to a diviner significance. The ass, instead of looking devoutly into the cradle, stretches out his lazy length in the foreground; the ox winks his eyes with a more than bovine stupidity. In some of the old German pictures, while the Hebrew ox is quietly chewing the cud, the Gentile ass "lifts up his voice" and brays with open mouth, as if ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... was jealous. The other Half, he saw plainly, was getting the better share of things. That Half was admired and envied. By accident, as he paced the room, he looked in the glass; and he started, for his face had grown heavy: there was a bovine look about the cheeks: the eyes were dull: the mouth full. Then the other Half rose and stood beside him. Together they looked at their own faces. "Ha!" cried Ambition, well satisfied at the contrast. "It works already. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... savored the air in Mr. Potts's direction. Mrs. Potts stirred slightly, and uttered a sharp, "Tht—tht." Mr. Potts, his hand still stayed in his beard, gazed from under the fringed penthouse of his brows with an arrested, bovine look. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... remarkable bovine characteristic. Suppose a herd of cattle, say 2000 steers, to be quietly and peacefully lying down under night-guard. The air is calm and clear. It may be bright moonlight, or it may be quite dark; nothing else is moving. Apparently there is nothing whatever to frighten them or even disturb them; ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... in the early days, of desiccated bovine placenta; although it may be given at any time ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... allowed to assist at these banquets, and there was nothing in her new life which she enjoyed more than the sight of all those glad young faces round the board, or the sound of that frank, rustic laughter. Some there were naturally of a bovine dullness, in whom even Miss Wendover could not awaken a ray of intelligence; but these were few. The generality of the children were far above the average rustic in brightness of intellect, and this superiority might fairly be ascribed ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... kind from day to day. And this quiet dreariness had lasted for months past, and seemed likely to last as far into the future that young Ellington faced his prospect with a sort of pained confusion of mind, and began by slow degrees to understand the bovine apathy of the ploughmen. Old Mr. Ellington was a magnate who would have been commended by Mr. John Ruskin. The fashions of other country people did not influence him to imitation, and he steadfastly performed that feat of "living on the land" which is supposed to bring such blessedness ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... group of peasants with hands outstretched where a thin column of smoke rises straight. Autumn skies and foliage tell of chill in the air. The colors burn in dying leaves, in the sky, in fruit and grapes. A man is bringing a burden of fagots. Men of bovine anatomy crouch before the fire, their backs arched, their cheeks bulging, as they blow it into flame. These folk are all primitive, candid in their animalism, Samsons in limb and muscle. Brangwyn's ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Grande Armee and on the Champ de Mars. Field-guns and caissons filled the Tuileries garden, whilst in the grounds of the Luxembourg Palace one again found cattle and sheep; yet other members of the bovine and ovine species being installed, singularly enough, almost cheek by jowl with the hungry wild beasts of the Jardin des Plantes, whose mouths fairly watered at the sight of their natural prey. If you followed the quays of the Seine you there found sightseers gazing at the ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... was saying; and answered with a truly human voice,—inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one's soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the "Silences," which is of a very abstruse nature!—Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world! ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... them, appear to catch something of their expression—to look like cows; just as persons of sympathetic or responsive nature, and great mobility of face, grow to be like those they live and are in sympathy with. The cowman who looks like a cow may be more bovine than his fellows in his heavier motions and slower apprehensions, but he also exhibits some of the better qualities—the repose and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... companion, a ruddy and athletic looking man, somewhat bovine in type, who at the moment was busily tracing out sections on a human skull and checking his calculations from Ross's Diseases of the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the quiet seminary hill; of the little chapel with its churchyard to the west, commanding the lakes, the woods, the rising bosom of hills. The story was disconnected, lapsing into mere exclamations, rising to animated description as one memory wakened another in the chain of human associations. Bovine, heavy, and animal, yet peaceful, was that picture of Wisconsin farm lands, saturated with a few strong impressions,—the scents of field and of cattle, the fertile soil, and the broad-shouldered men, like ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... on, my mind was exercised on the question as to whether this part of the world was peopled only by ill-tempered bullies, surly wretches, or bovine fools. So came I to a place where the ways divided and I was deliberating which to follow when I heard a shrill whistling and glancing about, beheld a large woman who talked very fast and angrily to a small man, who whistled extremely ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... crowded corrals from where she stood. She could hear the bellowing of the restless cattle as they pushed and horned each other in their forceful, bovine desire to get out to the succulent grass of their beloved pastures. All the men were astir, preparing for their lawless expedition. The saddle-horses, ready for the trail, were hitched to the corral fences. Through the open window she could hear her lover ordering and ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her. Then came the second in rank who feared the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... RINDERPEST, a disease which affects ruminants, but especially bovine cattle; indigenous to the East, Russia, Persia, India, and China, and imported into Britain only by contagion of some kind; the most serious outbreaks were in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look. They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from smoking ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... the Midlands. She was not a great help to the minister, because she was not sufficiently flexible and insinuating for her position; but nevertheless they always worked together, and she followed as well as she could the directions of her astuter husband, who, considering his bovine cast, was endowed with quite a preternatural sagacity in the secular business of ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the Bovine Species in General. An entirely new translation of the last edition of this popular and instructive book. By Thos. J. Hand, Secretary of the American Jersey Cattle Club. With over 100 Illustrations, especially engraved for this ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... her. Hate and cruelty for the most part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher animals are monogamous, but by far the greater number of species are polygamous or promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bear family, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to the birds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the ostrich and perhaps ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs |
