"Serf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from your knees, ye cringing serf men! What have ye gained by whines and tears? Rise! They can never break our spirits Though they should ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... impressed by the striking difference between the race of people in the province of Orel and the population of the province of Kaluga. The peasant of Orel is not tall, is bent in figure, sullen and suspicious in his looks; he lives in wretched little hovels of aspen-wood, labours as a serf in the fields, and engages in no kind of trading, is miserably fed, and wears slippers of bast: the rent-paying peasant of Kaluga lives in roomy cottages of pine-wood; he is tall, bold, and cheerful in his looks, neat and clean of countenance; ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... vulgar slave-driver, as yonder Mr. Bungay, whom we have just left, who fattens on the profits of the other's brains, and enriches himself out of his journeyman's labour. It makes me indignant to see a gentleman the serf of such a creature as that, of a man who can't speak the language that he lives by, who is not fit ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... exaggerating!" exclaimed Napoleon, sneeringly. "In truth, it is mere imagination to compare the Russian serf—the blood in whose veins is frozen by Siberian cold, and whose back is cut up and bowed by the knout—with the Spaniard, passionate and free beneath a torrid sun, and who in his rags still feels himself noble and a grandee. But these exaggerations ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... not even sing a psalm when the former lord of Borreby was laid in the earth to rest! Oh, everything has an end, even misery. Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant. That was the hardest trial that befell our father, that the husband of a daughter of his should be a miserable serf, whom the proprietor could mount on the wooden horse for punishment! I suppose he is under the ground now. And thou, Ida? Alas, alas! it is not ended yet, wretch that I am! Grant me that I may die, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... shrewd, intelligent, active, and handsome people—intelligence and strong sense, to a far greater amount than could be found in persons of the same class in England. A trace, albeit a faint one of the Saxon serf, still lingers with the English peasant; but the free breeze of America soon sweeps the shadows from his brow, and his sons all, proudly take their place as men, knowing that by their own conduct and talents they may work their way to fortune, or, at least, "rough hew" it, without ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... from the stall; No serf is seen in Hassan's hall; The lonely Spider's thin gray pall[dd] 290 Waves slowly widening o'er the wall; The Bat builds in his Haram bower,[74] And in the fortress of his power The Owl usurps the beacon-tower; The wild-dog howls o'er the fountain's brim, With ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... at last is o'er; When the first poor outcast went in at the door, She entered with him in disguise, 340 And mastered the fortress by surprise; There is no spot she loves so well on ground, She lingers and smiles there the whole year round; The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land Has hall and bower at his command; 345 And there's no poor man in the North Countree But is lord of the earldom as ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets, {850} Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle, And genially floats me about the giblets. I'll tell you what I intend to do: I must see this fellow his sad life through— He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall. My father was born here, and I inherit His fame, a chain he bound his son with; Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it, But there's no mine to blow up and get done with: {860} So, I must stay till the end of the chapter. For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... slave—a huge Riff from the mountains of Morocco, acquired in some mysterious manner. All Bohemia flocked to the studio to witness the anachronism. For the benefit of those of New York who did not belong to Bohemia the artist delighted to promenade the streets followed at a respectful distance by his serf. Absolam—so the chattel was called—bearing his chains lightly, considered his main duty to be to make love to the ladies of Bohemia. The artist's real troubles began when he undertook to rid himself of his slave. Absolam, waxing greasily fatter and fatter, basking ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... traffic for many centuries, seems to have worked out, according to the gradients and so forth, at from eight to fifteen miles, and at such distances do we find the country towns, while the horseless man, the serf, and the labourer and labouring wench have marked their narrow limits in the distribution of the intervening villages. If by chance these gathering places have arisen at points much closer than this maximum, they have come ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Tette on the 17th August, 1858; the navigation was rather difficult, the Zambesi from Shupanga to Senna being wide and full of islands; our black pilot, John Scisssors, a serf, sometimes took the wrong channel and ran us aground. Nothing abashed, he would exclaim in an aggrieved tone, "This is not the path, it is back yonder." "Then why didn't you go yonder at first?" growled out our Kroomen, who had the work of getting ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... where a small ruling class is benefited by the labor of a slave or serf class, there is, at least for the ruling classes, a marked utility in the increase in population. It means just so much opportunity for increase of wealth on the part of landowning and slaveholding or serf-controlling classes. In any country, increase in the labor supply means just so much ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the arrogant Caesaro-papistry ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the pen of Homer (though they say he never used one), or even that of the worthy who wasted precious years in writing a Homer Burlesqued, what heroic exploits might not I immortalise! In every stupid serf and cunning ruffian there, there was a heart as brave as Ajax's own; but then they fought with sticks instead of lances, and hammered away on fustian jackets instead of brazen shields; and, therefore, poor fellows, they were beneath ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... day.' Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 418) says that 'he was more detested than any man alive, as a shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants and dependants.' Lord Albemarle (Memoirs of Rockingham, ii. 70) describes the 'bad Lord Lonsdale. He exacted a serf-like submission from his poor and abject dependants. He professed a thorough contempt for modern refinements. Grass grew in the neglected approaches to his mansion.... Awe and silence pervaded the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Maitre Chesnel had known the delights of such high friendship; the Marquis had raised him to his own level. The old noble looked on the good notary as something more than a servant, something less than a child; he was the voluntary liege man of the house, a serf bound to his lord by all the ties of affection. There was no balancing of obligations; the sincere affection on either side put them out ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... the villein, who in the Middle Ages had formed the bulk of the population, had disappeared.[239] It is probable that even at the beginning of the Tudor period the great majority of the bondmen had become free, and that the serf then only formed one per cent. of the population, and many of those had left the country and become artizans in the towns, for personal serfdom had outlasted demesne farming; though even there the heavy hand of the lord ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... Godless theory of the State, I remember that those who had it in its purity did not regard the slave as a man. When I read the story of slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, "The doctrine that woman is a slave or serf of man—whether it comes from hell or heaven, from God or demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, or the very Sodom of perdition—is savagery pure and simple," I say, "That is so, but just that was the ruling idea when infidelity was on the throne of Rome." And only where ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... haggard wretch, infirm and bent beneath a pile of years, yet shrewd and cunning, greedy of gold, malicious, and looked upon by the common people as an imp of darkness. It was this old villain who told Thancmar that the provost of Bruges was the son of a serf on Thancmar's estates.—S. Knowles, The Provost ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... a serf, man," Says Klimka in answer; "The burden was heavy, But not on your shoulders. Your pockets are full, So the robber alarms you; The robber with this case 290 ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... pity me, for from that fatal moment, I have been the slave, the serf, of a stronger will—a will that has withered and crushed out, by slow degrees, the last trace of moral courage that might have beautified and strengthened my character; crushed it out, and left me a cowardly, miserable, helpless girl! ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... hearing; a sentence or two In the journals; then dignified freedom for you. When love, truth and loyalty vanish, the tie Which binds man to woman is only a lie. Undo it! remember at all times I stand As a friend to rely on—a serf to command. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... deposit, converted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. It is surely not very great Radicalism to affirm that a state of things so anomalous ought not to exist—that the English tenant should be a freeman, not a serf—and that he ought not to be bound down by a weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience of his own. The simple principle of 'No lease, no vote,' would set all right; and it is a principle which so recommends itself to the moral sense as just, that an honest ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... of superior men, maintained by the working population, deals with circumstances external to the community—circumstances with which, by position, it is more immediately concerned. Ceasing by-and-by to have any knowledge of, or power over, the concerns of the society as a whole, the serf-class becomes devoted to the processes of alimentation; while the noble class, ceasing to take any part in the processes of alimentation, becomes devoted to the co-ordinated movements of ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... singled out to receive the favour of the famous Archbishop, and meet not only great nobles, but even the Emperor himself, still, it was gossiped that the Barons grumbled at this distinction being placed upon a serf like the blacksmith Arras, and none were so loud in their complaints as Count Bertrich, who had remained drinking in the castle while the blacksmith fought for the land. Nevertheless, all the nobility ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... grounds. Free now to the poorest serf. Well, there's something century-gained. Some people say the world's growing worse all the ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... of the Czarina and the Monk Rasputin. The latter was a serf in Siberia, and now has a malignant, hypnotic influence in the Russian Court. If he is refused anything, he falls on the floor in a fit and froths at the mouth until he gets what he wants. The Court ladies have to lick his dirty fingers clean, for he refuses to use a finger-bowl at table. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... widespread proletarian misery upon the other, which conspired to the overthrow of Greek and Roman civilization. The study of those relentless economic forces which led to the break-up of Roman civilization is important as showing how chattel slavery became modified and the slave to be regarded as a serf, a servant bound to the soil. The lack of adequate production, the crippling of commerce by hordes of corrupt officials, the overburdening of the agricultural estates with slaves, so that agriculture became profitless, the crushing out of free labor by slave labor, and ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... whose sovereign wiles, O'er cankered care bring radiant smiles, Best gift of Love to mortals given! At once the bud and bliss of Heaven! Crownless are kings uncrowned by thee; Content the serf in thy sweet liberty, O charm of ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... this verbiage to be necessary. In the hands of an honest landlord it is as meaningless as that in the ordinary contract we sign in renting a house. In the hands of a dishonest landlord or merchant it practically enables him to make a serf of the Negro. The mortgage is supposed to be filed at once, but it is sometimes held to see if there is any other security which might be included. The rascally creditor watches the crop and if the Negro may have a surplus he easily tempts him to buy more, or more ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... prettiest of the stories about birds is divided between St Serf, the founder of a monastery in Loch Leven, and St Kentigern, the patron of Glasgow, where he is better known as St Mungo. Kentigern was one among a parcel of neophyte boys whom the worthy old Serf, or Servanus, was perfecting in the knowledge of the truth. Their teacher ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... bowed in silence beneath two galling burdens—a selfish and corrupt monarchy, and a multitudinous, privileged, lazy, and oppressive aristocracy, by whom the peasant was handled like a Russian serf. [Said peasant is now the principal ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... land led us past Lochore, where we made a pause for a few moments. Then proceeded to Ballingray or Bingray, and so by Kirkness, where late ravages are supplied by the force of vegetation down to the shores of Lochleven. We embarked and went upon Saint Serf's Island, supposed to have been anciently a cell of the Culdees. An old pinfold, or rather a modern pinfold, constructed out of the ancient chapel, is all that attests its former sanctity. We landed on Queen Mary's Island, a miserable scene, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... simplicity marked their dress and arms. Patten observes, that in battle the laird could not be distinguished from the serf: all wearing the same coat armour, called a jack, and the baron being only distinguished by his sleeves of mail, and his head-piece. The borderers, in general, acted as light cavalry; riding horses of a small size, but astonishingly nimble, and trained ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... our author deals with the conditions of man, passing in review youth and age, male and female, serf and lord. Our extracts from it fall into three groups. The first deals in great measure with the relations of family life. We have an account of the boy and the girl (as they appeared to a friar "of orders grey"), the ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... laughter at all things, was everywhere. And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the novel offices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy—the morning sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was over—dew-drenched garments—the serf lying at his ease at last: the artists, then so [62] numerous at the place, caught what they could, something, at least, of the richness, the flexibility of the visible aspects of life, from all this. With them the life of seeming idleness, to which Denys was conducting the youth of ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... penalties were to be done away. But the question is, shall human beings, who (as all of us) are imperfect, be controlled by public law, or by individual caprice? Was not my reviewer intending to advocate some form of serfdom which is compatible with legal rights, and recognizes the serf as a man; not slavery which pronounces him a chattel? Serfdom and apprenticeship we may perhaps leave to be reasoned down by economists and administrators; slavery proper is what I attacked ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... might be glad of not remembering in dreams. What had put this yearning spirit into so gross a frame, destroying its solid coherence? Why could not Tryst have been left by nature just a beer-loving serf, devoid of grief for his dead wife, devoid of longing for the nearest he could get to her again, devoid of susceptibility to this young man's influence? And the thought of all that was before the mute creature, sitting there in heavy, hopeless patience, stung Felix's heart ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... reproof would be administered to him for conduct which at any other season might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death. Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was this inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a time a mimic republic in which the high offices of state were discharged by the slaves, who gave their orders and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the same blue summer weather, Hundreds of years ago, in this field where I lie, Caedmon, the Saxon, was caught by the self-same thing: The serf lying, black with the sun, on his beautiful wain-load, The jingle and clink of the harness, The hot creak of leather, The peace of the plodding; And wondered, O terribly ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... unbroken, ancient, and unsullied line! But I like this jolly fellow in the green riding jacket; he drank and hunted with the nobles, and employed the peasants to run down the tall deer with the hounds. Indeed, the ignorance, stupidity, and wretchedness of the serf were the strength of the noble, and give convincing proof of his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... including, of course, claims in the nature of choses in action. Congress may, therefore, take and cancel claims to service owned by Rebel slave-owners without any compensation whatever. Under the feudal law, a serf, owing service to a noble guilty of treason, became, because of his master's guilt, released ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he was serf to a brewery; and the particular brewery whose beer his mortgage compelled him to push did not make a beer that could be pushed. People complained that it had a disagreeably bitter aftertaste. In the second place, Mrs. Lange was a born sitter. She had married to rest—and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... appertained when great open chimneys allowed the rain and snow to fall upon the fire or on the logs laid ready for the burning, the difficulties of lighting a fire were experienced. Then the local smith came to the aid of the "domestic" or serf, and hammered into shape what were termed andirons, their use making it easier to light the logs, giving a current of air under them, causing them to burn brighter. The andirons were afterwards called fire-dogs, and ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... say much about this tailor; but, as it is the custom to have the character of each personage in a novel clearly defined, there is no help for it, so here is Petrovitch the tailor. At first he was called only Grigoriy, and was some gentleman's serf; he commenced calling himself Petrovitch from the time when he received his free papers, and further began to drink heavily on all holidays, at first on the great ones, and then on all church festivities without discrimination, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... you enter on a realm where all— Use, custom, morals—are untried and strange, In Poland here reigns freedom absolute; The king himself, although in pomp supreme, Must ofttime be the serf of his noblesse; But there the father's sacred power prevails, And in the subject ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... none shall meet; Suppressed shall be each journal-sheet; And every serf beneath my feet ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... our much respected friend, Alexai Ivanovitch Tveritinov, and the petition he sent in, in the year 1860. He insisted on reading it in every drawing room in St. Petersburg. There was one rather good sentence in it about our liberated serf, who was to march over the face of the fatherland bearing a torch in his hand. You should have seen our dear Alexai Ivanovitch, blowing out his cheeks and blinking his little eyes, pronounce in his babyish voice, 'T-torch! t-torch! Will march ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind; Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf or Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... Turk the feudal system of the pre-Turk days continued. We get a clear idea of the pre-Turk social conditions from the laws of Tsar Stefan Dushan, which show the strongly marked class difference of noble and serf. The noble was almost tax-free, but had to supply troops. The serf was tied to the land, and could only leave it with his lord's permission. Different punishments were inflicted upon nobles and serfs, the nobles' being ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... passion for beauty and a desire to create. And no man can inspire others with the desire to create who has not taken sacred fire from the altar of the gods. The creative genius is the highest gift vouchsafed to man, and wherein man is likest God. The desire to create does not burn the heart of the serf, and only free people can respond to the greatest power ever given ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... white peasants were enabled to rise out of their degradation, and to become the strength instead of the danger of France. Nothing short of such a reform could have conquered the contempt and aversion with which the higher classes looked upon the emancipated serf. Norman-French literature reeks with the outbreak of this feeling toward the ancestors, whether Jews or villeins, of the very men who are now the aristocracy of South Carolina,—a feeling as intense, as nauseous ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame! Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame; But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know, What angel nightly tracks that waste of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... oligarchical cities, each holding in feudality extensive neighboring regions. Not until 1833 were the peasants of Bale placed on an equal footing with the townspeople, and then only after serious disturbances. And the inequalities between lord and serf, victor and vanquished, voter and disfranchised, existed in all the older states save those now known as the Landsgemeinde cantons. Says Vincent: "Almost the only thread that held the Swiss federation together was the possession of subject ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... pie back into th' ice-chest where we keep our honor an' ginerosity an' lock th' dure an' Cubia goes home, free an' hopeless. D'ye think so? Well, I don't. Be hivins, Hinnissy, I think th' time has come whin we've got to say whether we're a nation iv Beets. I am no serf, but I'd rather be bent undher th' dispotism iv a Casteel thin undher th' tyranny iv a Beet. If I've got to be a slave, I'd rather be wan to a man, even a Spanish man, thin to a viggytable. If I'm goin' to he opprissed ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... State education was such that up to the present time, even in this country, a notable portion of society would treat as a revolutionary measure the concession of such rights as every one, freeman or serf, exercised five hundred years ago in the village folkmote, the guild, the parish, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... applied to the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf, knecht, thrall, slave, villain, peasant, and laborer, to artisan and working-man—there is a vision of progress as bright as the light which fell upon Saul of Tarsus ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... which men in prison must bear. They are deprived of liberty, separated from friends, no social intercourse, and constantly maintaining an unnatural position. The convict's place is lower than the most degraded menial; he must ask for permission even to get a drink of water. No serf of earth, no slave, however wretched, has a sadder lot. These unhappy mortals have yielded to temptation, have fallen, and are paying the penalty of violated law. Who can think of these degraded beings, without, to some extent, its ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbors as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys—all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general's favorite hound. 'Why is my favorite dog lame?' He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog's paw. 'So you did it.' The general looked ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he could oppose me with a shield and a club; or were we both equally peasants, we could fight, each armed according to our rank. But, were I ten times the aggressor, and he the offended party, all combat between him and me is impossible, for he is beneath the knight, the noble, the citizen, the serf, the labourer; beneath the lowest degree in the scale of humanity—beneath the beasts themselves; he is a vile Gesitain, a dog of a leper, an infamous and degraded Cagot, and yonder ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... "Conca d'Oro," that luxuriant tract of land beyond the monastery where the waters flow—that verdant dale which supplies Alatri, perched on its stony hill, with fruit and vegetables of every kind. The man is a market-gardener with wife and children, a humble serf, Eumaeus-like, steeped in the rich philosophy of earth and cloud and sunshine. I bring him a cigar in the cool of the evening and we smoke on the threshold of his two-roomed abode, or wander about those tiny patches of culture, geometrically disposed, where ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Syene. But of what avail was it to be Royal by right when Egypt, my heritage, was a slave—a slave to do the pleasure and minister to the luxury of the Macedonian Lagidae—ay, and when she had been so long a serf that, perchance, she had forgotten how to put off the servile smile of Bondage and once more to look across the ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... found fault with her; and, ultimately, she was not only sent to the kitchen under the control of the cook, but, on the census of the population being taken, in 1816, her name was inscribed on the books as that of a serf. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... it is allowable here to employ the word which in the army signifies a man who is destined to die as a captain) is a sort of serf, a part and parcel of his regiment, an essentially simple creature, and Castanier was marked out by nature as a victim to the wiles of mothers with grown-up daughters left too long on their hands. It was at Nancy, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... fair-haired son of the north, with broad, open forehead, mild blue eyes, sanguine complexion, and large frame; there the dark visaged southron, with his flashing glance and fiery soul; there was the knight in his armor, the priest in his robes, the foot-soldier in his tough jerkin, the unkempt serf with his belt of rope. There were pawing horses, swearing grooms, carts full of provisions, sacks, groups of gossiping women, crowds of merry children. Under the bright sun of Asia, all was gaudy and brilliant. Spearpoints glittered, breast-plates and helmets gleamed, thousands of targets ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... greatest singer in the world, and you have nothing more to learn from me." Hogarth discredits this story, on the ground that "none but a plodding drudge without a spark of genius could have submitted to a process which would have been too much for the patient endurance even of a Russian serf; or if a single spark had existed at first, it must have been extinguished by so barbarous a treatment." Caffarelli did not rise to the height of his fame rapidly, and, when he went to London to supply the place of Farinelli in 1738, he entirely failed to please ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... sure to listen if they find that you are a good speaker. There was a notion that came into my mind while you were speaking; I said to myself: 'Well, and what if Euthyphro does prove to me that all the gods regarded the death of the serf as unjust, how do I know anything more of the nature of piety and impiety? for granting that this action may be hateful to the gods, still piety and impiety are not adequately defined by these distinctions, for that which ...
— Euthyphro • Plato
... view, he was fool enough to set the detective police after me—me, who could snap all their noses off! For he saw how your heart was all set on one thing, and expected to have you his serf forever, by the simple expedient of hanging me. The detectives failed, as they always do. He also failed in ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... comrades according to the old Saxon war-custom; but it needed not the daring of the attack to mark them as the very flower of English chivalry. The young noble, who hovered around his chief much as Rothgar circled about Canute, would have been lordly in a serf's tunic; and the leader's royal bearing distinguished him even ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... was—starvation. In lands the richest in the world, tilled by a people with a passion for agriculture, there was not enough bread! The reasons for this are too complex to be stated here, but a few may have brief mention. The allotment of land bestowed upon each liberated serf was too small to enable him to live and to pay his taxes, unless the harvests were always good and he was always employed. He need not live, but his taxes must be paid. It required three days' work out of each week to do that; and if he had not the money when the dreaded day arrived, the ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... part of my story, revolting enough to our republican ears. This lady and her people, in the country to which they belong, are held in a subjection to which that of the Russian serf was comparative freedom. They are held legally as the slaves not of individuals, but of the government, which has absolute power over their persons, lives and property. Its manner of exercising that power ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the serfs was a great grievance to the old seamen, who looked back to the days when they could with impunity chastise or finish a serf without a feeling of reproach. After the emancipation it became a terror to have them aboard ship. Many a mate has been heavily fined and locked up in a pestilential cell for merely shoving a fellow who was caught in the act of stealing, or ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... The fate which made you hers And gave you of her best And set you in a sunny place, Down-sloping to the West, Forgot to change your fisher's heart Serf to the ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro will not work," said the anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated," said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... question it—whatever vital bearing it has upon our political system—and is there one who will deny it?—the question of the licensed saloon must quickly be settled as the world in its advancement has settled the questions of constitutional government for the masses, of the opium traffic, of the serf, and of the slave—not as matters of economic and political expediency but as questions ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... them, in which the lion and the eagle could manage to live at all. Our little measure of justice is not God's measure. His justice does not require us to relieve the hard-working millions of all labor, to emancipate the serf or slave, unfitted to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and yours! Your son shall be my serf; your woman my chattel! Ha, that woman! She has already fought me, like one of these strange woods-beasts you have made us kill! See! My hair is burned and my flesh blistered with her fire-beating! But when I hold her in these ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... stronger than those of wealth, that labour is more honourable than sloth, intelligence than privilege, liberty more abiding than tyranny—the idea of equality, of fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of a signal act of justice, and that desire to participate in the eternal strength of the children of labour as against the ephemeral and fictitious strength of the children of idleness and wealth, found strange confirmation ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Ahashuerus, already mad with excitement. It would not answer to pass by the indignity, for a hundred and twenty-seven provinces were represented at his court, and the news of his sullied honor would reach every dwelling in his realm, and curl the lip of the serf with scorn. The nobles fanned the flame of his indignation. Unless a withering rebuke were administered, their authority as husbands would be gone, and the caprice of woman make every family a scene of ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... our pianos and our sideboards, and now what do they say to us? That Magdalene weeping amid her hair, who once spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner,—that Sebastian, arrow-pierced, whose upward ardent glance, spoke of courage and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf—that poor tortured slave to whose aid St. Mark comes sweeping down from above—can they speak to us of nothing save flowing lines, and correct drawing, and gorgeous colour? Must we be told that one is a Titian, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... regeneration, these men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at the plow and not in the Senate—a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow, but unless he have political rights ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... the eyes of men; only when the evening was come, and all things sought their rest, he prayed the peasant and other mean folk of that country, of their charity to grant him shelter for the night. From the serf he gathered tidings of the King. These gave again to him what they, in turn, had taken from some outlawed knight. Thus Tristan learned that when Pentecost was come King Mark purposed to hold high Court at Tintagel, and keep the feast with ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles—I see that still as the blazonry of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of her lungs ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the Abbess of Fontevrault came to see him. The King's mother Eleanor, her guest, had been sent for in a hurry. The king had been hurt. A serf of Achard of Chalus had ploughed up a golden relic, an emperor with his family seated round a golden table. Ademar of Limoges had seized it. Richard demanded the whole and was after it sword in hand. The holders were in Castle Chalus, short of weapons but not of valour, and held ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... have whispered that, after all, the boy Bartolommeo might as soon be a Pico as an Orsini. Suppose she know that she must strike or be struck? Why, she strikes, or gets some one to strike for her. At what price? A promise of love, of love to a groom, the son of a serf! Why, the dog must be mad or drunk to believe such a thing possible; his very belief in anything so monstrous makes him worthy of death. And then he dares to blab! This is much worse than Pico. Medea is bound to defend her honor a second time; if she could stab Pico, she can certainly stab this fellow, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Nivernais, in Burgundy, in Franche-Comte, there are none, or very few domains, no signs remaining of ancient servitude. . . . A good many personal serfs, or so constituted through their own gratitude, or that of their progenitors, are still found."[1228] There, man is a serf, sometimes by virtue of his birth, and again through a territorial condition. Whether in servitude, or as mortmains, or as cotters, one way or another, 1,500,000 individuals, it is said, wore about their necks a remnant of the feudal collar; this is not surprising ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread of industry and trailing the puissant pike, a diligent serf. I have no ethics, and yet I am on the side of the just when they do not put thorns in my bed to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... train passing through repeated mines, which, one after the other, will explode with awful devastation. Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg, the strongholds of despotism in Europe, each will totter—all but the last will fall. The press is powerless on the Russian serf. Russia will be the tyrant's last citadel. Italy will throw off the Austrian yoke and be free. Gregory XVIII. will shortly die. A wise, far-seeing and benevolent priest, named Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, born at Sinigaglia, and now a cardinal, with the title of ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... and arrogant pride, The follies of fashion he loved to deride; But acknowledged true merit wherever 'twas shown, By a serf in his hut, or a ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia of the established; that the government that is representative of them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness; that this blind thing called government is not the serf of their wills, but that they are the serfs of it; in short, speaking always of the great mass, that they do not make government, but that government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid and awful monster, misbegotten ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... serfs, if it does not go to the other extreme and make him a nihilist or some other brand of the political desperado. It was from this quarter, forget it not, that the old flint locks came, "whose report was heard around the world," and the serf will never be his model, for the old spirit has still enough of life left for another blaze, as these new oppressors will find to ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... waistcoat and a hundred half-dollar cigars and being very fussy about what he had for lunch. It may have been an optical illusion, but he appeared to Sally to put on at least six pounds in weight on the first day of the new regime. As a serf looking after paper-knives and other properties, he had been—for him—almost slim. As a manager he blossomed out into soft billowy curves, and when he stood on the sidewalk in front of the theatre, gloating over the new posters ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... doubt was the trade of the particular ancestor of the old valet who passed from a state of serfdom to one of burgher dignity, until some unknown misfortune had again reduced his present descendant to the condition of a serf, with the addition of wages. The whole history of Flanders and its linen-trade was epitomized in this old man, often called, by way of euphony, Mulquinier. He was not without originality, either of character or appearance. His face was triangular in ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... he was shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability of any kind. Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he had nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood, he was a peasant, a serf, a servant, a lover, a paramour, a shadow, a nothing. He lay still in amazement, staring at the room he knew so well, and wondering whether it was really there, the window, the chest of drawers, or whether it was ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... had been formally civil to the young Freiherr; but he had laughed at the fend letter as a mere old-fashioned habit of Schangenwald's that it was better not to notice, and he evidently regarded the stealing of a bull or the misusing of a serf as far too petty a matter for his attention. It was as if a judge had been called by a crying child to settle a nursery quarrel. He told Ebbo that, being a free Baron of the empire, he must keep his bounds respected; he was free to take and hang any spoiler he could ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the true serf among our animals; he belongs to the soil, and savors of it. He is of the earth, earthy. There is generally a decided odor about his dens and lurking places, but it is not at all disagreeable in the clover-scented ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... goneness about the stomach. Did he think that increasing the hunger pain would make him more thoughtful, more orderly? Would he have done better if he had been suddenly brought to change places with his serf? If he could not help fining the people until he fined off the most of their wages, were they to blame for refusing to work for him? Was the Government right in taking his part when it had neither eye ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Yet to die were witless, When Death, who with his fatal finger taps At princely doors, as freely as he gives His summons to the serf, may at this instant Have sealed the only life that throws a shade Between us ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... of an Equilateral from the ranks of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for all the higher classes are well aware that these rare phenomena, while they do little or nothing ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... the brown landscape. Two hours' riding around the lagoon furnishing water for irrigation brought us to a village of some size, belonging to the estate. The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged from her hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and the manner of a serf of medieval times before her feudal lord. The bees lived in hollow logs with little thatched roofs. For several miles more the rich bottom lands continued. Then we began to ascend through bushy foothills, and cultivation dropped behind us, as did the massive head overseer, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... of the river, who had asserted that all men were born equal and had equal rights. This sentiment had been loudly applauded, but he himself had sense enough to see that it was contrary to fact, and that men were not born equal. One was the son of a noble, the other of a serf. One child was a cripple and a weakling from its birth, another strong and lusty. One was well-nigh a fool, and another clear-headed. It seemed to him that there ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... he, so long completely his own master, consented to become the servant even of famous Royal princes? I think that as mothers accept irksome situations for the support of their children, so La Bruyere became the serf of the Condes for the sake of his book. For it is now time to reveal the fact that in this apparently listless, empty life there was one absorbing secret interest. This was the collection of the maxims, reflections, pictures, and what not which he had been quietly ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... parent. The hereditary character of slavery, however, does not arise out of the idea of the slave as a chattel or thing, a mere matter of property, it depends on the organization of society. In England one man is born a peer, another a commoner; in Russia one man is born a noble, another a serf; here, one is born a free citizen, another a disfranchised outcast (the free colored man), and a third a slave. These forms of society, as before remarked, are not necessarily, or in themselves, either just or unjust; but become the one or the other, according to circumstances. Under ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... contracting debts to the Bisya trader, and the other half in paying them. His rice is sold before it is harvested. His abak patch often is mortgaged before the planting is completed. He is an economic serf to an inconsiderate taskmaster.[42] ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... has been taken that woman would lose her dignity if marriages were dissoluble. Is it necessary to lose your freedom in order to retain your character, in order to be womanly or manly? Must a woman in order to retain her womanhood become a slave, a serf, with a wild beast for a master, or with society for a master, or with a phantom for a master? Has not the married woman the right of self-defence? Is it not the duty of society to protect her from her husband? If she owes no duty to her husband; if it is ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... him into a state of profound melancholy; and some months later, seeking to mitigate his grief by the distractions of travel, he left his domains near Moscow, never intending to return. Accompanied by his twin children, ten years of age, a priest who had served them as tutor, and a serf named Ivan, he repaired to Odessa, and then took passage on a merchant ship for Martinique. Disembarking at St. Pierre, he took lodgings in a remote part of the suburbs. The profound solitude which reigned there did not at first bring the consolation ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... of the usual minimum necessities of life, sometimes a little above it, sometimes a little below. Your social position, therefore, has remained the same, for this social position is reckoned not by its relation to the position of the beast in primeval forests, or negroes in Africa, or of the serf in the Middle Ages, or the workingmen of eighty years ago, but only by the relation of this position to the position of your fellowmen—to the position of other classes in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... reach? Obscurely shall he suffer, act, and fade, Dubb'd noble only by the sexton's spade? Awake the Present! Though the steel-clad age Find life alone within the storied page, Iron is worn, at heart, by many still— The tyrant Custom binds the serf-like will; If the sharp rack, and screw, and chain be gone, These later days have tortures of their own; The guiltless writhe, while Guilt is stretched in sleep, And Virtue lies, too often, dungeon deep. Awake the Present! what the Past has sown ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... for the belfry, but only as a partial type of an ulterior creature, a sort of elephantine Helot, adapted to further, in a degree scarcely to be imagined, the universal conveniences and glories of humanity; supplying nothing less than a supplement to the Six Days' Work; stocking the earth with a new serf, more useful than the ox, swifter than the dolphin, stronger than the lion, more cunning than the ape, for industry an ant, more fiery than serpents, and yet, in patience, another ass. All excellences of all God-made creatures, which served man, were here to receive advancement, and then ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... none better—a lank, scrawny, reddish-haired youngster, freckled almost as profusely as Billy. Three times had they met in noble battle, and three times had Billy been the conqueror, but somehow the spirit of young McMasters did not seem particularly broken, nor did he become a serf. Billy felt that the air was full of portent, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... romantically credulous: the stigma of that night cleaves to him still. Brazen it out as he may, the hang-dog look remains, telling us that the barriers have been at least once broken down which separate the man from the serf. There would be, perhaps, less mischief abroad if slander were always so promptly and ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be willed away at death with ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... of peasant family," sighed the tramp. "My mamma was a house serf. I don't look like a peasant, that's true, for such has been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in the master's house. She petted and spoiled me, and did her best to take me out of ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... unjustly, the bulk of real and personal estate in the Territory being vested in the Church and its directors, between whom and the mass of the population there exists a difference in social welfare as wide as between the Russian nobleman and his serf. In brief, the Mormons no longer claim to be a Christian sect, but assert, and truly, that their religion is as distinct from Christianity as that is from Mahometanism. Many of the doctrines whispered in 1847 only to those who had been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... that as you become a bondsman only by accession, and because you were not born a bondsman, your servitude will cease with the cause that makes you a serf. Now, if you love me more than all else, lose your goods to purchase our happiness, and espouse me. Then when you have had your will of me, when you have hugged me and embraced me to your heart's content, before ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... forbearance towards the weak. My next-door neighbour may keep his children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a loose liver with a frantically foolish religious creed; but all this does not justify me in taking possession of his house, and either poking him out or making him a serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a thing as universal justice, then all men have their rights under it—even verminous persons. We are obliged to put constraint upon them when their habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised nations are obliged to put constraint ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... half centuries of modern civilization in the Americas has there existed—in any year, in any decade, in any generation in all that time—a greater spirit of mutual understanding, of common helpfulness, and of devotion to the ideals of serf-government than exists today in the twenty-one American Republics and their neighbor, the Dominion of Canada. This policy of the good neighbor among the Americas is no longer a hope, no longer an objective ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... bold beady eyes, he looked what he was, the superb brute—the brute reckless of all save the instant satisfaction of his desires. He came of a family of colliers, the most debased class in a lawless district. Jack's father had been a colliery-serf, legally enslaved to his colliery, legally liable to be sold with the colliery as a chattel, and legally bound to bring up all his sons as colliers, until the Act of George III. put an end to this incredible survival from the customs of the Dark Ages. Black ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... I bled and cried under all those horrible shadows. Lo! it was there that they precipitated me, under the crush of those who come and go, under the trampling feet of men, under the undermost of the human race, lower than the serf, baser than the serving man, lower than the felon, lower than the slave, at the spot where Chaos becomes a sewer, in which I was engulfed. It is from thence that I come; it is from this that I rise; it is from this that I am risen. And here I ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... labor-worn serf, who has toiled through the long day in the fierce rays of the sun, can sleep such nights as these. I call them nights, yet what a strange mistake. The sunshine still lingers in the heavens with a golden glow; the evening vanishes dreamily in the arms of the morning; there is nothing to mark ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to Heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of serf and peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface And thwart her genial will; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must be In him who condescends ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... a proprietor could send his human property into exile. He was not required to give any reason, the record accompanying the order of banishment stating only that the serf was exiled "by the will of his master." This privilege was open to enormous abuse, but happily the ukase of liberty has removed it. The design of the system was no doubt to enable proprietors to rid themselves of serfs ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... laid in the earth to rest. O-h, everything has an end, even misery. Sister Ida became the wife of a peasant; that was the hardest trial which befell our father, that the husband of his own daughter should be a miserable serf, whom his owner could place for punishment on the wooden horse. I suppose he is under the ground now; and Ida—alas! alas! it is not ended yet; miserable that I am! Kind Heaven, grant me that ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... are ever likely to recur. For even slaves and serfs could make unto themselves some kind of art befitting their conditions; and even the most despotic aristocracies and priesthoods could adequately express their power and pride only in works which even the slave and serf was able to see. In the whole of the world's art history, it is this present of ours which forms the exception; and as the changes of the future will certainly be for greater social health and better social organisation, it is not likely that ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like the swine, may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his children, forsake the marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does not dissolve the marriage- vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf from her obligation to honour his memory,—nay, to sacrifice to it the honour due to a kind father and mother, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... they read the "Sacred Volume," that it is not the friend of woman. They will find that the writers of that book, for the most part, speak of woman as a poor beast of burden—a serf, a drudge, a kind of necessary evil—as mere property. Surely a book that upholds polygamy is not the friend of ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison—as ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Thorold Rogers repeatedly points out,[110:2] they "consummated the degradation of the labourer"; and made him, as it has left him, what the same impartial authority well terms "the most portentous phenomenon in agriculture, a serf without land." By means of their Financial Policy they rid themselves of the duties which originally accompanied the privilege of land-holding, viz. to provide the necessary public revenues for all defence purposes, and converted themselves from Land Holders into ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... emblem of marriage, as later the ring. (It was so among the Jews, as we see in the book of Ruth, Chapter III, v. 4, and Chapter IV, vv. 7 and 8). St. Vladimir the Great asked in marriage the daughter of Prince Rogvold; as Vladimir's mother had been a serf, the princess proudly replied that she 'would not uncover the feet of a slave.' At the present time in the east of Russia when a young girl tries to find out by divination whom she will have as a husband the traditional formula is 'Come and take my stockings off.' Among ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... it's do, do, do, with a purpose all your own, That makes a man a man, whether born a serf or king; And it's loaf, loaf, loaf, lolling on a bench or throne That makes a being thewed to act a limp ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... given quantity of gold or silver ore from the pits and adits beneath the ground. Thousands of peones were impressed into this forced labour; armed soldiers were stationed at the entrances of these labyrinths to see that each wretched serf deposited his sack of rock, under the load of which he had toiled up fathoms of notched pole, or ladder, from the infernal regions below, panting, sweating, expiring, and presently driven down again ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... make this woman understand what my real feelings toward her were. My soul was filled with a hatred as bestial as the love against which it was a reaction. It was the savage, murderous passion of the revolted serf. I could have taken the crutch from her side and beaten her face in with it. She threw her hands up, as if to avoid a blow, and cowered away from me into the corner ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the warrior son of Zeus. "Yea, veteran, I would see the Epean King Augeas; surely for this end I came. If he bides there amongst his citizens, Ruling the folk, determining the laws, Look, father; bid some serf to be my guide, Some honoured master-worker in the fields, Who to shrewd questions shrewdly can reply. Are not we ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... safety to the republic demand that men shall not be born as rulers, nor born as serfs. The serf is the person who is born in poverty, with no right to a standing place, and whom society has left to the education of the street or of the coal mine, growing up without knowledge, without industrial skill—knowing nothing but to sell unskilled labor in a market crowded by a million others ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him,—the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... beloved, compared to the sordid master, and all testimony concurred that Meshach Milburn deserved neither commiseration, friendship, nor recognition. Her father, however, indulgent in all things, said the money-lender had a good mind, and was no serf. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... difficult thing of all, a thing to accomplish which superhuman courage is required, is to exercise the most complete control over the ass of which Sterne speaks. This ass ought to be as submissive as a serf of the thirteenth century was to his lord; to obey and be silent, advance and stop, at the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... fired! What golden wishes and hopes inspired! To give but a mere abridgment— What a leg to leg-bail Embarrassment's serf! What a leg for a Leg to take on the turf! What a ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... made no mention of American slavery, but into an account of the events of my stay at St. Petersburg and Moscow during the Crimean War, and of the death and funeral of the Emperor Nicholas, with the accession and first public address of Alexander II, I sketched, in broad strokes, the effects of the serf system,—effects not merely upon the serfs, but upon the serf owners, and upon the whole condition of the empire. I made it black indeed, as it deserved, and though not a word was said regarding things in ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... good products of the Sekhet Hemat. And this Sekhti journeyed to the south unto Henenseten; and when he came to the lands of the house of Fefa, north of Denat, he found a man there standing on the bank, a man called Hemti—the workman—son of a man called Asri, who was a serf of the high-steward Meruitensa. Now said this Hemti, when he saw the asses of Sekhti, that were pleasing in his eyes, "Oh that some good god would grant me to steal away the goods of ...
— Egyptian Literature
... appropriate to his position, with special gifts whenever he or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye had rested. Therefore the [vc]if[vc]ija would lose the last shadow of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement, with little wooden ploughs and with a total absence of manure. And yet this pitiable serf ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... it was not too soon to begin laying those unseen foundations—to think the thought that must come before the thing. He was veritably a king, yet for a time must he masquerade as a wage-slave, a serf to Breede, and an inferior of Bulger's, considered as a ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... hall, the serf and vassal Held, that night, their Christmas wassail; Many a carol, old and saintly, Sang ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... it all over with—if only that were the end! And my father—he'll have a shock and die, and then that will be the end. Then they will place his swords across the coffin—and the Count's line is extinct. The serf's line will continue in an orphanage, win honors in the gutter and ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... of subject race, settled captives, or quondam slaves, tied to the soil they cultivated and sold with the estate but capable of possessing land and property of their own. There is little trace of serfs in Babylonia, unless the muskinu be really a serf. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a slave! Or house-born serf! Why he for a prey? Against him the young lions roar, Give forth their voice, And his land they lay waste Burning and tenantless. Is not this being done thee For ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... the cable that bound me to civilisation, and having seen the buff pony and the dazed yokel disappear in a cloud of dust, I looked about me with what Stevenson calls a "fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy," the joy of a successful rebel or a liberated serf. Plenty of money in my purse—that was unromantic, of course, but it simplified matters—and nine hours of daylight remaining in which ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... ambitious nobles. He began to love the peasantry he had seen as dim, remote shadows about his father's estate in the country. There he had learnt not to treat them brutally, after the fashion of most landowners, but it was not till he was exposed to the rough life of the bastion with Alexis, a serf presented to him when he went to the University, that Tolstoy acquired that peculiar affection for the People which was not ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... comparing the position of a landowner with that of an owner of serfs, Nekhludoff had compared the renting of land to the peasants instead of cultivating it with hired labour, to the old system by which serf proprietors used to exact a money payment from their serfs in place of labour. It was not a solution of the problem, and yet a step towards the solution; it was a movement towards a less rude form of slavery. And it was in this ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... definitions will help you to think rapidly. Standing as they do for a large group of experiences, definitions are a means of mental economy. For illustration of their service in reasoning, suppose you were asked to compare the serf, the peon and the American slave. If you have a clean-cut definition of each of these terms, you can readily differentiate between them, but if you cannot define them, you will hardly be able to ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... at the altar and join in the responses with the deacons, and when the serf-girls were brought together to dance and sing choruses, he would join in their songs too, and beat time with his feet, and pinch their cheeks.... But he soon went back to Petersburg, leaving my stepfather practically in complete control of ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... ordinary rate of interest paid {222} by the Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could not believe it, but further investigation proved the statement true. In the United Provinces I found that in some cases the ryot has been little better than a serf. The merchant has "furnished him supplies," adding interest at the rate of one anna on each rupee at the end of each month—6-1/4 per cent., not a year but a month, and that compounded every 30 days! In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boys twenty ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... his mouth, as if some secret grief were gnawing at his vitals. And, indeed, good cause existed for his sorrow; for, but a few days previously, he had lost his wife. They had buried the countess at midnight, as was the custom of the family, in the old, ancestral vault of the castle. Vassal and serf had waved their torches over the black throat of the grave, and the wail of women had gone up through the rocky arches. Still the count had been seen to shed no tear. An old warrior, schooled in the stern academy of military life, he had early learned to conquer his emotions; indeed, there were ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... following swarm, o'ershading earth and heaven, Roll back her outrage, and indignant shed The world's wide vengeance on her sevenfold head. Then dwindling back to littleness and shade Man soon forgets the gorgeous glare he made, Sinks to a savage serf or monkish drone, Roves in rude hordes or counts his beads alone, Wars with his arts, obliterates his lore, And burns the books that rear'd his ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... a thing of beauty instead of doing some deeds of beauty. On reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin," you involuntarily ask, "What effect has this book had on slavery in America?" On reading Turgenef's Memoirs of a Sportsman, though it accomplished as much for the serf, you no longer ask, "What has the book done for the serf?" You do not think of the serf any more now that he has ceased to be. But you do think of the innumerable things of beauty that roll out from his pages before you as if from a kaleidoscope. And if ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... predecessors ever kept any accounts, it is rather difficult to ascertain their exact condition. So long as he has money enough in his pocket to pay his labourers and buy a little stock, my father, like every British farmer, is content. The fact is, he is a serf as much as his men, and until we get rid of ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... and Dane, Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, Arab, Armenian, and Mantchoo, Would shout, "We ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
