soil quotes

Hemight aswell plant anoak ina flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!

- EmilyJane Bronte« 
  Wuthering Heights, ch.14.

   Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain, Till, burst at length, each wat'ry head o'er flows,

-Rochdale
  Of Scotland and the Scots.'The Curse of Minerva', l.139^42.

What makeswarinteresting forAmericansisthat wedon't fight waronoursoil,we don't have directexperience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give it.

- Robert Dallek
  In the NewYork Times, 24 Feb.

Humannature will not flourish, any morethana potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne
  The Scarlet Letter,'The Custom-House'.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne
  The Scarlet Letter, ch.1.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil† Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wearsman'ssmudgeand sharesman'ssmell: thesoil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'God's Grandeur'.

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

-John Milton
  Lycidas, l.78.

Let none admire That riches grow in hell; that soil may best Deserve the precious bane.

-John Milton
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.690^2.

Here they have no time for the fine graces of poetry, unless it freely grows in deep compulsion, like water in the well, woven into the texture of the soil in a strong pattern.

-A'Ghobhainn
  'Poem of Lewis'.

Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse†a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.

- Louis Untermeyer
  Bygones.