Democracy, like a tree, is a thing of slow growth, and it requires a congenial soil.

And, if no other occupation be provided for the mind of man, it carves out employment for itself in vain regrets and gloomy forebodingsin jealousy, envy, and the indulgence of every hateful and tormenting passion: hence the proverb,'If you want corn, cultivate your soil; if you want weeds, let it alone.'

The curse of Cain was that he should be 'a fugitive and a vagabond,' as well as unsuccessful in tilling the soil.

It likes good, rich, dampish soil, and delights to grow in a quiet, shady nook, or even beneath the spread of our larger forest trees.

Men are calling for intellectual fruitfulness and mechanical fruitfulness, and are bending their energies to find the soil which will develop at once the best quality and greatest amount of fruit.

The great majority of the prisoners remained on deck, chained together and helpless, yet surrounded by armed guards, while the few who had already been purchased by passengers, humbly followed their new masters ashore the moment the gang-plank touched the soil of Virginia.

Stone arrow-heads were found in a near-by field as often as the farmer turned up the soil in plowing.

The Osmanlis may have been more savage in their methods than the marchmen of Germanythough hardly, perhaps, than the Teutonic Knights who prepared the soil of Prussia for the Hohenzollerns.

For there was one who could make or mar all fortunesthe absolute owner of street and houses and passers-byone who owned the patent and dispensed the right to tread that soil, to breathe that air, to be glorified in that sunlight and amid those snow crystals.

THE DOWNS.The well-known substance chalk, which the chemist regards as a nearly pure carbonate of lime, and the microscopist as an aggregation of inconceivably minute shells and corals, forms the sub-soil of the hilly districts of the south-east of England.

Were the fork used instead of the hoe; were the weeds kept down; were the manure returned to the soil, instead of festering about everywhere in sun and rain: in a word, were even as much done for the land as an English labourer does for his garden; still more, if as much were done for it as for a suburban market-garden, the produce might be doubled or trebled, and that without exhausting the soil.

The South does not possess the rich and exhaustless soil of the prairies, which for half a century will yield without return successive and luxuriant crops of corn.

Lister had seen others in the West, who had made good, breaking soil they owned and walking with the confident step of self-respecting men.

Each garden was, so to speak, turfed with minute plants, smaller than daisy roots, and even more closely covering the soil than English lawn grass.

Earthworms however do not prefer waterlogged soils.

No Russian law ever directly enslaved the peasantry, but, through this decree of Boris, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants, just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges.

Clerambault was too hot-blooded to let himself be buried under this snowy shroud; but the soul is not all, the body is a plant which needs human soil, Deprived of sympathy, reduced to feed on itself, it perishes.

Oh, had we had in 1848 such an army of disciplined soldiers as Austria itself keeps now for us, never had one Cossack trod the soil of Hungary, and Europe would now be free.

Then followed a period of rest, in which the superincumbent shallow waters became completely filled up, and finally replaced, by fine mud, which settled down into a new under-clay, and furnished the soil for a fresh forest growth.

Persons accused, or threatened with the pursuit of the Inquisition, took every means to escape the action of that tribunal: they left the soil of Spain and went to Rome.

If he did so, the 'hair unbound' is probably to be regarded as streaks of rain-cloud; these cloudlets ought to fertilize the soil with their moisture; but, instead of that, they merely dim the eyes of Morning, and dull the beginnings of day.

and has not the frank and truthful Mr. Spratt, of South Carolina, announced in the councils of that State, that the South must import more savages from Africa, to reclaim and improve its soil?

They are leaving for the Front, to defend alongside of the heroic soldiers of Italy and France the disputed and sacred soil of our country, and to combat the German barbarians, who strive in vain to advance against the rampart which is formed by the breasts of the soldiers of three nations.

Proceeding farther, they came to a low coast having a sandy soil, which was overgrown with wood, for which reason it was called Mark-land, or the Woody-land.

Before the last of those who survived the hunger and the pestilence of that pilgrimage had reached Russian soil, it is probable that in all Armenia there was not a man of their race left alive, nor a woman either unless she had accepted Islamism and the life of the harem.