"Bulrush" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good talking to him," said a dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; "no good at all, for he has ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... illumined by the new moon, a curve of light approaching its western bed. To the horizon reached a fen, blacked with pools of stagnant water, from which the frogs kept up an incessant trill through the summer night. Heath and fern covered the ground, but near the water grew dense masses of flag and bulrush, amongst which the light wind sighed wearily. Here and there stood a sandy knoll, capped with firs, looking like black splashes against the grey sky; not a sign of habitation anywhere; the only trace of men being the white, straight road extending ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... his brother when he had committed idolatry? Was he not consecrated a high priest unto God? Was not Miriam his elder sister, who acted so conspicuous a part in his early preservation, watching his bulrush-cradle when exposed to the waves and the monsters of the Nile? Was it not Miriam that accompanied him in his prosperities, that hailed his increasing glory, that aided his triumphant songs when the Egyptian army was submerged in the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... exertion."—Booth's Introd., p. 28. "Some of these situations are termed CASES, and are expressed by additions to the Noun instead of by separate words."—Ib., p. 33. "Is it such a fast that I have chosen, that a man should afflict his soul for a day, and to bow down his head like a bulrush?"—Bacon's Wisdom, p. 65. "And this first emotion comes at last to be awakened by the accidental, instead of, by the necessary antecedent."—Wayland's Moral Science, p. 17. "At about the same time, the subjugation of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hired and decorated with palm branches; or palm booths were built, decked with oranges and boughs of cinnamon berries, lighted with candles and lanterns and furnished with seats for the king, queen, and musicians, and with buckets of rum punch. Then the "bulrush man" went his round. Covered with capes and flounces of rushes and crowned with a high waving fringe of them, he rattled pebbles in calabashes, danced to their clatter, proclaimed the feast, and begged such of us white children as his dress ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... flows; The swallow, haunter of the charmed spot, Skims through the silence, and awakes it not; Perch'd as in sleep, the gray kingfisher broods, A sentinel among the solitudes; And faints the breeze beneath the heavy sky, Nor bends the bulrush, as it loiters by Thro' long green walls of forest trees, that throw Unwavering shadows in the flood below; And droops from topmost boughs (like garlands dight By elfin hands) the gaudy parasite: Crowning the wave with flow'rs; and high above, The tall acacia moves, or seems to move Its ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Louis XII. is Gargantua or Francis I. Pantagruel. Rabelais says what he wants, all he wants, and in the way he wants. There are no mysteries below the surface, and it is a waste of time to look for knots in a bulrush. All the historical explanations are purely imaginary, utterly without proof, and should the more emphatically be looked on as baseless and dismissed. They are radically false, and therefore both ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... for a time, surrounded by a wall of green bulrush. They soon perceived that that would never do, and resolved to push back into the open water. Meanwhile Marengo had been sent into the sedge, and was now heard plunging and sweltering about in search ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... and marked by some high reeds greener than the rest, even when the reeds may have been generally burnt. These reeds are distinctly different from the "balyan," growing on the marshy parts of the rivers Lachlan, Murrumbidgee, and Millewa; the former being a cane or bamboo, the latter a bulrush, affording, in its root, much nutritious gluten. We found good grass for the cattle on both sides of the water-course, which was fringed with a few tall reeds, near which the pretty little KOCHIA BREVIFOLIA observed ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... very curious plant, belonging to the fungi tribe, growing from the anus; this fungus varies from three to six inches in length, and bears at its extremity a blossom-like appendage, somewhat resembling a miniature bulrush, and evidently derives its nourishment from the body of the insect. This caterpillar when recently found, is of the substance of cork; and it is discovered by the natives seeing the tips of the fungi, which grow upwards. They account for this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... which went before; and a gesture that a great while before had been condemned by the Holy Ghost himself. "Is it such a fast that I have chosen, a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head as a bulrush?" Isa. lviii. 5. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... realms. Not half so furious blazed the warlike fire Of Mice, high theme of the Meonian lyre; When bold to battle marched the accoutered Frogs, And the deep tumult thundered through the bogs. Pierced by the javelin-bulrush on the shore, Here, agonizing, rolled the mouse in gore; And there the frog (a scene full sad to see!) Shorn of one leg, slow sprawled along on three: He vaults no more with vigorous hops on high, But mourns in hoarsest ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... youthful swain one day Did ted the new mown grass; There came a gay and lovely may From out the nigh morass. Clad in a dress of silk was she, Green as the leaves which deck the tree, Her head so winsomely to see With bulrush plaited was. ...
— The Brother Avenged - and Other Ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... the ear of which is two hand-breadths long and as big as a great bulrush, the stem or straw being almost as thick as a man's little finger. The grains are white and round, shining like pearls that have lost their lustre, and about the size of our pease. Almost their whole substance turns ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... takes them two years to be a dragonfly! Now this is the curiousest part of it, so you listen tight, for I don't believe you know it. When it is ready it knows somehow, and the ugly, grubby thing climbs up out of the water on a flag or a bulrush, and bursts open ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five, is pretending to stop the ocean with a bulrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires which were kindled for heretics will serve also for the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... passed along the lane, and the sun was setting, so the prospect of a night in the marsh nerved Sam to make a frantic plunge toward the bulrush island, which was nearer than the main-land, and looked firmer than any tussock around him. But he failed to reach this haven of rest, and was forced to stop at an old stump which stuck up, looking very like the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... it, Blanderon, who had been asleep, started up, and came forth to the gate with a huge oak-tree in his hand, which he flourished about his head as if it had been a light battle-axe, in a loud voice comparing the Knight's spear to a bulrush, and threatening to hurl him and his Squire down the side ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... she said, pointing to a little bulrush-clad isle, from which a kind of natural causeway, not more than six feet wide, projected like a tongue among muddy shallows peopled by coots and ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... gravely past all this toward the chair of the Gnome King, who stretched out his sceptre, a tall bulrush of gold, and touched the jackdaw, who at once turned ...
— The Magic Soap Bubble • David Cory
... Hunt,[14] "many a man, and woman too, now quietly sleeping in the churchyard of St. Levan, would, had they the power, attest to have seen the witches flying into the Castle Peak on moonlight nights, mounted on the stems of the ragwort." Amongst other plants used for a similar purpose were the bulrush and reed, in connection with-which may be quoted the Irish tale of the rushes and cornstalks that "turn into horses the moment you bestride them[15]." In Germany[16] witches were said to use hay for ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... pilgrimage—then, too, it is not difficult to persuade some like-minded friend to share one's solitude. And so the quiet hours tick themselves away in an almost monastic calm, while one's book grows insensibly day by day, as the bulrush rises on the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the second division was not responsible. The smash was before that. Probably it came with the realization that he stood beneath the shadow of the Criminal Law. Be that as it may, the ex-financier emerged from prison a broken man. But for the interest of Mr. Blithe, the senior partner of Bulrush & Co., who had had him met at the gates and straightway sent him for a month to the seaside, poor Mr. Slumper must have sunk like a stone. When he was fit to follow an occupation, he was encouraged to accept a living wage, the work of an office-boy, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged Among the bulrush beds, and clutch'd the sword, And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... chestnut rails, and the stream of cattle was pouring through and spreading out over the great pasture. I watched the little groups of muleys strike out through the deep broom-sedge hollows and the narrow bulrush marshes and the low gaps of the good sodded hills, spying this new country, finding where the grass was sweetest and where the water bubbled in the old poplar trough, and what wind-sheltered cove would be warmest to a fellow's belly when he lay ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that, he became a Captain,—a by-word,—and lived and died a broken bulrush. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... by anemophilous plants, and the distance to which it is often transported by the wind, are both surprisingly great. Mr. Hassall found that the weight of pollen produced by a single plant of the Bulrush (Typha) was 144 grains. Bucketfuls of pollen, chiefly of Coniferae and Gramineae, have been swept off the decks of vessels near the North American shore; and Mr. Riley has seen the ground near St. Louis, in Missouri, covered with pollen, as if sprinkled with sulphur; and there was ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... Cullerne. It is here that the Cull, which has run for miles under willow and alder, through deep pastures golden with marsh marigolds or scented with meadow-sweet, past cuckoo-flower and pitcher-plant and iris and nodding bulrush, forsakes better traditions, and becomes a common town-sluice before it deepens at the wharves, and meets the sandy churn of the tideway. Mr Sharnall had become aware that he was tired, and he stood and leant over the iron paling that divides the roadway from the stream. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... swirling dust, like the gigantic phantoms of some spirit-world. I look into another valle, and behold shining waters— lakes like inland seas—with sedgy shores and surrounded by green savannas, and vast swamps covered with reeds and "tulares" (bulrush). ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... This is generally chewed in the mouth as a cane; but it is also peeled by the women, and, when dried, it is boiled with milk to give it sweetness. A grain called dochan, a species of millet, is likewise cultivated to a considerable extent; when ripe, it somewhat resembles the head of the bulrush. The whole of this country would grow cotton and ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... provision is made for the perpetuation of the race - a necessity to any plant that refuses to thrive unless it stands in water. Ponds and streams have an unpleasant habit of drying up in summer, and often the pickerel weed looks as brown as a bulrush where it is stranded in the baked mud in August. When seed falls on such ground, if indeed it germinates at all, the young ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... she, sweet little girl, was waiting his return in loneliness. All the other crowned heads of Christendom are titled nobodies beside these mighty potentates. The General of the Jesuits wields, they say, wonderful power; but his sceptre is a bulrush beside the truncheon which these kings of the earth hold in their grasp. And here, yes, here in Republican America, the thousands who scout Napoleon, frown on Victoria, and pity the Pope, do nightly homage to this mighty dynasty, and find grace and loveliness in their bottle noses and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... is this tumult? Bacchus is not here, Nor tympanies nor brazen castanets. 185 How are my young lambs in the cavern? Milking Their dams or playing by their sides? And is The new cheese pressed into the bulrush baskets? Speak! I'll beat some of you till you rain tears— Look up, not downwards when I ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... taught that the disconformity between the Papists and us is not so much in any external use of ceremonies, as in the substance of the service and object whereunto they are applied. But, good man, he seeks a knot in the bulrush; for, 1, There is no such difference betwixt our ceremonies and those of the Papists, in respect of the object and worship whereunto the same is applied, as he pretendeth; for, as touching the exercise and worship whereunto holidays are applied, Papists tell us,(636) that they keep Pasche ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... The bulrush nods unto his brother The wheatears whisper to each other: What is it they say? What do they there? Why two and two make four? Why round is not square? Why the rocks stand still, and the light clouds fly? Why the heavy oak groans, and the white ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson |
