"Luxuriance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lofers, we're goin' to clash." Jean knew from many a futile hunt that wolves were the wariest and most intelligent of wild animals in the quest. From the top of a low foothill he watched the sun rise; and then no longer wondered why his father waxed eloquent over the beauty and location and luxuriance of this grassy valley. But it was large enough to make rich a good many ranchers. Jean tried to restrain any curiosity as to his father's dealings in Grass Valley until the situation had been ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... rising in terraces upon the mountains, and by the calm sheet of the fiord, lying below, where the torrent buried its fury and was still. Beyond, the sea hemmed in this page of Nature, written by the greatest of poets, Chance; to whom the wild luxuriance of creation when apparently ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... door, which a creeping vine, with the luxuriance of nature, was trying to block up, Chin looked round with a feeling of disappointment sending a chill into his ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... else on the prairies knew. She loved all that was strong and untamed, all that was panting with wild and glowing life. Splendidly developed, softly sinewy, warmly bountiful, yet without the least physical over-luxuriance or suggestiveness, Jen, with her tawny hair and dark-brown eyes, was a growth of unrestrained, unconventional, and eloquent life. Like Nature around her, glowing and fresh, yet glowing and hardy. There was, however, just a strain of pensiveness in her, partly owing to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to his penances, Siva is propitiated, and the stream by seven[159] channels finds its way to the plains of India. The spirit and the luxuriance of the description which follows, of the king leading the way, and the obedient waters rolling after his car, appear to us of a high ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... night and morning, and their ice-cold water. Between us and them are the fir-trees, two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet high; and all around, in the burnt land, a wilderness of bloom,—the purple fireweed, that grows taller than our heads, and in the richest luxuriance, of the same color as the Alpine rose,—a beautiful ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... which allusion has before been made, by Rev. Thomas Mozley, there is a description of Maria Rosina in later life. He says she was "tall, strong of build, majestic, with aquiline nose, well-formed mouth, dark penetrating eyes, and a luxuriance of glossy black hair. She would command attention anywhere.... She was very early the warmest and most appreciative of Newman's" (John Henry Newman's) "admirers.... Her great power lay in the portraits she did in chalks.... Besides many portraits of Newman himself ... ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... an ideal scene of tropical luxuriance; cattle and sheep were feeding upon the abundant grasses; but they suddenly took to their heels, with uplifted tails and terrified eyes, at the sight of his white face, a spectacle never before seen on this oasis, peopled hitherto exclusively ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... this article were discovered by a German laborer in a quarry, who observed the increased luxuriance of the grass by his path, when the dust fell from his shoes and clothes. This led to experiments which demonstrated its fertilizing power. With the protracted controversies on gypsum we have nothing to do; certain important facts are established ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... domination and to lose the relish of an honest equality. The principles of our forefathers become suspected to us, because we see them animating the present opposition of our children. The faults which grow out of the luxuriance of freedom appear much more shocking to us than the {88} base vices which are generated from the rankness of servitude. Accordingly, the least resistance to power appears more inexcusable in our eyes than the greatest abuses of authority. All dread of a standing military force is looked ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... rosy, with a lip of crimson velvet. Mossiaes have replaced them generally, and from beds three feet in diameter their great blooms start by the score, in every shade of pink and crimson and rosy purple. There is Loelia elegans, exterminated in its native home, of such bulk and such luxuriance of growth that the islanders left forlorn might almost find consolation in regarding it here. Over all, climbing up the spandrils of the roof in full blaze of sunshine, is Vanda teres, round as a pencil both leaves and stalk, which will drape those ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... Again, each of these groups may not have become totally extinct, but may have left a few species, the modified prototypes of which have existed in each succeeding period, a faint memorial of their former grandeur and luxuriance. Thus every case of apparent retrogression may be in reality a progress, though an interrupted one: when some monarch of the forest loses a limb, it may be replaced by a feeble and sickly substitute. The foregoing remarks appear to apply to the case of the Mollusca, which, at ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... There was soul in her deep hazel eye as its flashes broke through their long, dark, encircling fringe; her jetty locks waved harmoniously, contrasting with the virgin snow of the forehead they wreathed in glossy luxuriance, the unclouded smile played on her lip like the zephyr over a bed of gossamer, or a sunbeam on the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... in which she imagined herself—even felt as if she were capable, if not of marrying Lenorme in the flushed face of outraged society, yet of fleeing with him from the judgment of the all but all potent divinity to the friendly bosom of some blessed isle of the southern seas, whose empty luxuriance they might change into luxury, and there living a long harmonious idyll of wedded love, in which old age and death should be provided against by never taking them into account. This mere fancy, which, poor in courage as it was in invention, she was far from capable of carrying ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... had been growing. The wheat was trampled by the hurrying feet of the dense masses of infantry, as they changed their positions during the battle. In the cornfield artillery had been stationed, and moved about as often as the enemy obtained its range. Hardly a hill of corn is left in its pristine luxuriance. The little that escaped the hoof or the wheel, as the guns moved from place to place, was nibbled by hungry horses during the bivouac subsequent to the battle. Not a stalk of wheat is upright; not a blade of corn remains uninjured; all has fallen ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... character of the buildings with which it is surrounded; and the profusion of statues and marble vases continues the impression which the character of their palaces is fitted to produce. But at Versailles, at St Cloud, and Fountainbleau, amidst the luxuriance of vegetation, and surrounded by the majesty of forest scenery, it destroys altogether the effect which arises from the irregularity of natural beauty. Every one feels straight borders, and square porticoes and broad alleys, to be in unison with the ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... order to obtain a livelihood. As regards scenery, it is difficult to describe its surpassing loveliness, and certainly no exaggeration to say that the traveller in this district is often favoured by a combination most delightful, viz., the soft luxuriance of Italy in the lower slopes and broader valleys, joined with the wildness and grandeur of Switzerland in the narrower glens and loftier mountain ranges. And this apart from the wealth of its historic ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... sheltered, an extensive view over the wide park, was the fragment of the old Place that we have noticed. The rough and undulating rent which marked the severance of the building was now thickly covered with ivy, which in its gamesome luxuriance had contrived also to climb up a remaining stack of tall chimneys, and to spread over the covering of the large oriel window. This fragment contained a set of pleasant chambers, which, having been occupied by the late baronet, were of course furnished ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... gems of the place. Major Budden informs us that they are about one hundred and twenty-eight years old, and were planted in their present position when they had attained about twenty years' growth. Some idea of their luxuriance may be formed when it is mentioned that the girth of each tree exceeds sixteen feet, and the longest branch of one of them measures eighty-four feet in length. In consequence of the habit of these trees "fastigiating" at the base, a very numerous series of lateral ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... piquancy. Of course, a broad line is to be drawn between a work of study and the work of the moment—between the elaborate vigour which prunes and purifies every straggling shoot away, and exhibits its production for a prize-show, and the careless luxuriance which suffers the tree to throw out its shoots under no direction, but that of the prolific power of nature. Yet the plant is the same, and though we by no means say, that even this letter gives demonstration, yet the arrogant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... ourselves in undermining a part of the clay floor under the dried grass upon which we slept. The hole passed under the logs; and we had ascertained that it would be opened behind a wild vine that spread its luxuriance over a great part of the side and roof of our prison. We did not open it at the outside, but contented ourselves by pushing a thin piece of a branch through, lest we had been discovered by the lynx eyes of our master and his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... later Henrys had been merged into the graceful and peaceable hall, the residence of the Rookwoods had early anticipated the gentler characteristics of a later day, though it could boast little of that exuberance of external ornament, luxuriance of design, and prodigality of beauty, which, under the sway of the Virgin Queen, distinguished the residence of the wealthier English landowner; and rendered the hall of Elizabeth, properly so called, the pride and boast ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the other growing things that crowd the Canadian table, and the herds represented the meat, and the unstinted supply of cream and milk and butter. Even the half-cleared land, where tree stumps and bushes still held sway, there was the blueberry, growing with the joyous luxuriance of a ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... strangely drawn-out seconds passed, and then the watchers had their reward. The great, green, mossy wall, with all its luxuriance of orange-tinted bracken and golden fern, seemed to shiver as if touched by a passing wind. Then the quivering motion ceased, the whole centre crumbled softly down, and it was as if some huge, hoary monster, a living earthquake, had leaped from the prison in which it ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... eyes half shut some musing whiffs he drew And thus began: 'I give you all my word, I think this mock-Decameron absurd; Boccaccio's garden! how bring that to pass In our bleak clime save under double glass? 70 The moral east-wind of New England life Would snip its gay luxuriance like a knife; Mile-deep the glaciers brooded here, they say, Through aeons numb; we feel their chill to-day. These foreign plants are but half-hardy still, Die on a south, and on a north wall chill. Had ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... lies the sweep of that graceful shore to Killiney, with the Dalky Islands dotting the calm sea; while inland, in wild confusion, are grouped the Wicklow Mountains, massive with wood and teeming with a rich luxuriance. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... languages shows in the clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now there is no doubt that this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas with tolerable precision; and ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... snow. The surrounding country is remarkable for the bountiful productiveness of its unctuous loam. The scenery, though not wild nor grand, is very picturesque and charming in the peculiar golden haze of its atmosphere. I surveyed with more and more admiration each new scene of blended luxuriance and beauty,—plantations spreading on either hand as far as the eye could reach, and level fields of living green, billowy with crops of rice and maize, and sugar-cane and coffee, and cotton and tobacco; and the wide irregular river, a kaleidoscope of evanescent ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... needle, and assisting her mother in the management of their flower-garden. For this last she had a decided taste, and they had concealed the time-worn character of the old house they occupied by covering it with a luxuriance of floral wealth, so tastefully arranged, and so profuse and gorgeous, that travellers on the dusty highway on which it stood would stop to admire the remarkable blending of the climbing rose, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... blooms in torrid tracts appear, 115 Whose bright succession decks the varied year; Whatever sweets salute the northern sky With vernal lives, that blossom but to die; These, here disporting, own the kindred soil, Nor ask luxuriance from the planter's toil; 120 While sea-born gales their gelid[13] wings expand To winnow[14] fragrance ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... there were in his case many extenuating circumstances which, if he had acknowledged his error and promised amendment, would have procured his pardon. The most rigid censor could not but make great allowances for the faults into which so young a man had been seduced by evil example, by the luxuriance of a vigorous fancy, and by the inebriating effect of popular applause. The esteem, as well as the admiration, of the public was still within his reach. He might easily have effaced all memory of his transgressions, and have shared with Addison the glory ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... causes and are of a very general nature, it is interesting to note that they occur also in the vegetable kingdom. Allowing for all the circumstances which are known to prevent the production of seed, such as too great luxuriance of foliage, too little or too much heat, or the absence of insects to cross-fertilise the flowers, Mr. Darwin shows that many species which grow and flower with us, apparently in perfect health, yet never produce seed. Other plants are ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of all kinds, wheat, barley, millet, zea, and other sorts, grew in abundance; the wheat commonly yielded thirty for one. Besides the vine and the olive, the almond, the date, figs of many kinds, the orange, the pomegranates, and many other fruit-trees, flourished in the greatest luxuriance. Great quantity of honey was collected. The balm tree, which produced the opobalsamum, a great object of trade, was probably introduced from Arabia in the time of Solomon. It nourished about ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... square, where, above the clamorous and rushing crowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun, and the spires and pinnacles of the burgomaster's gathering-halls tower into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy. ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... which seem to indicate that the whole surface was covered by the sea at no distant geological date. The barren tracts are, however, exceptional and a far larger area is richly fertile. Some districts, indeed, such as the Vega of Granada, are famous for the luxuriance of their vegetation. The Guadalquivir (q.v.) rises among the mountains of Jaen and flows in a south-westerly direction to the Gulf of Cadiz, receiving many considerable tributaries on its way. On the north, its valley is bounded by the wild Sierra Morena; on the south, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sculpturesque, the Romantic picturesque. The virtues of the Classical are exquisiteness and incisive significance; of the Romantic, richness and splendor. The dangers of the Classical are coldness and formality; of the Romantic, over-luxuriance, formlessness and excess of emotion. [Footnote: All these matters, here merely suggested, are fully discussed in the present author's 'Principles of Composition and Literature.' (The ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... shining river the hills stood back, and up their steep sides the vine-hung mulberries and close-trimmed olives climbed (olives south of the Serchio are diligently pruned, and lack the generous luxuriance of the north), and against the silver background the sentinel cypresses stood black, like sharp music notes striking abruptly into a vague symphony; and among the mulberry gardens and the olives and the cypresses white ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuriance of undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background, until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage splendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... with its border of scarlet floated with the grace of its own perfect simplicity around that perfect form, and never was royal mantle more splendid than the rippling hair that crowned her head and fell in its luxuriance of curls and waves to her feet. As they again seated themselves side by side, Mrs Jefferson remembered that she was not yet acquainted with the nationality of the stranger. She hastened to repair the error ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... fate of every great religious teacher to have his memory enveloped in a haze of posthumous myths. Even the Gospel history was embellished with marvellous apocryphal legends of the childhood of Christ. Buddhism very soon began to be overgrown with a truly Indian luxuriance of fables, miracles, and pre-existent histories extending through five hundred past transmigrations. In like manner, the followers of Mohammed traced the history of their prophet and of their sacred city back to the time of Adam. And Mohammedan legends were not a slow and natural growth, as in ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Reckoned until that time—if anybody took the trouble of computing him at all—as one of the ugliest of his race, he at once found himself invested with all the attributes of a canine Adonis,—a very Admirable Crichton of dogs,—perfect in intellect, face, figure, and the Hyperion luxuriance of his copious mane and tail. In our youth, we knew—and hated—a small, unmitigated snob of a dog called the Pug, a kind of work-basket bull-dog, diminutive in size, dyspeptic in temper, disagreeable to contemplate, and distressing to be obliged to admire. One of the missions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... extensive grounds, consisting of private gardens and groves, separated from each other by two walls, almost concealed from the eye by the number of trees and bushes which grow there in a state of nature and with all its luxuriance. Vines clamber up into the lofty olive trees, and fall down again in light green festoons, heavy with grapes, which wave in the wind. Slender cypresses rise up from amidst brightly verdant groves of orange, fig, pomegranate, plum, and peach trees. Tall ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... increase the stock of a free community. Most may be taken where most is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... where he stood, which was of a shining whiteness and which reflected the effulgence of the moonlight with an incredible distinction, he observed, stretching before him, long lines of white garden walls, overtopped by a prodigious luxuriance of tropical foliage. ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... him for shelter. A gorgeous, red- flowering vine had smothered one of the flat-topped thorn trees in its luxuriance. The growths of successive years had overlaid each other. Kingozi called two men with pangas who speedily cut out the centre, leaving a little round green room in the heart of the shadow. Thither Kingozi caused to be conveyed ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... between it and the road. A few tall firs climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down towards the village at its foot—a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks, the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red walls, and the masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village—roofs and gables and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance. Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the smoke and clangour of a blacksmith's shop, it was a favourite resting-place of seals. The crab and lobster haunt in the crevices; and limpets, mussels, and the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... journals, newspapers, and memoirs of the time throw (especially for those who can read between the lines) a startling light on that hereditary principle which plays so important a part in our political system. All the ancillary vices flourished with a rank luxuriance. Hard drinking was the indispensable accomplishment of a fine gentleman, and great estates were constantly changing owners ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... flower consists of this purple inflorescence. But such aristocratic culture has made the blossom unproductive of seed. Like many a proud and belted Earl, each of the pampered and richly coloured Daisies pays the penalty of its privileged luxuriance by a disability from perpetuating ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... yellow and purple sphagnum; now passing over bare rock. The main lateral moraines that bounded the view on either hand are from 100 to nearly 200 feet high, and about as regular as artificial embankments, and covered with a superb growth of Silver Fir and Pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance was speedily left behind. The trees were dwarfed as I ascended; patches of the alpine bryanthus and cassiope began to appear, and arctic willows pressed into flat carpets by the winter snow. The lakelets, which a few miles down the valley were so richly embroidered ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... is common in Palestine and the East,'" Miss Harson continued to read, "'and flourishes with the greatest luxuriance in those barren and stony situations, where little else will grow. Its large size and its abundance of five-lobed leaves render it a pleasant shade-tree, and its fruit furnishes a wholesome food very much used in all the lands of the Bible.' Figs were among the fruits mentioned in the 'land ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... suspicion that what to our unaided vision appeared inert elements held a rampant, multitudinous life, nowhere dead, but always surging and changing, ever replacing death and decay with a new life all its own. Nature's luxuriance everywhere fills us with wonder and delight. The fragrant ferny depths of the forest, and the lush growth of the rank marsh-land, the immeasurable sands of the ocean-edge hiding in their mysterious sameness innumerable and beautiful shells ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... rainbow. It was, indeed, a beautiful sight; but our eyes did not dwell long upon it, for other objects were before them that filled us with wonder. Away below—far below where we were—lay a lovely valley, smiling in all the luxuriance of bright vegetation. It was of nearly an oval shape, bounded upon all sides by a frowning precipice, that rose around it like a wall. Its length could not have been less than ten miles, and its greatest breadth about half of its length. We were at its upper end, and ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... make believe for him, make believe very hard—an undertaking in which at first Mr. Bousefield was visibly a blessing. Limbert was delightful on the business of this being at last my chance too—my chance, so miraculously vouchsafed, to appear with a certain luxuriance. He didn't care how often he printed me, for wasn't it exactly in my direction Mr. Bousefield held that the cat was going to jump? This was the least he could do for me. I might write on anything I liked—on ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... ancient lineage. The thick fair mustache had abandoned its enterprising upward curl, and now hung down straight and long. The model parting of the hair was in any case out of the question, a distinguished baldness having taken the place of the old luxuriance, and his figure had fulfilled all the promises of his youth. In his dress Paul still cultivated extreme elegance, only that it partook more of the bucolic now in style than of the drawing-room as in former ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... centuries has been hidden; for all the ruins have been decently cleared away and cities that teem with historical interest seem, with a few exceptions, to have been built last year. The garden of the Villa des Dunes was therefore more remarkable for cleanliness than luxuriance. The house itself was uninteresting, and resembled a thousand others on the coast in that it was more comfortable than it looked. A suggestion of warmth and lamp-light filtered through the ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... great wasteful summer days went by, the glory of the passionate nights of July, the crisper blonde luxuriance of August. Every night there was the calling from the green plot across the Black Water. Every night Aunt Annie wandered, a withered grey ghost, along the hither side of the inky pool, looking for what ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... transport; and almost everywhere the ground is rich black or red cotton soil, which any transport converts into mud in the rain or dust in the drought. Everywhere the fierce heat of equatorial Africa, accompanied by a wild luxuriance of parasitic life, breed tropical diseases in the unacclimatized whites. These conditions make life for the white man in that country sufficiently trying. If in addition he has to perform hard work and make long marches on ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... on the coast in October, 1859, making her first anchorage in the lovely harbor on the west side of Prince's Island. That island, in about 1 30' north latitude, covered with all the luxuriance of tropical growth and verdure, and broken into every conceivable shape of pinnacle, castellated rock and chasm, and frowning precipice, streaked with silvery threads of leaping streams in their dash to the sea, is indeed one of the most enchanting ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... and as free from gesture as an Englishman. His hair was of that red brown with which the Italian painters produce such marvellous effects of colour; and if here and there a silver thread gleamed through the locks, it was lost at once amidst their luxuriance. His eyes were light, and his complexion, though without much colour, was singularly transparent. His beauty, indeed, would have been rather womanly than masculine, but for the height and sinewy spareness of a frame in which muscular ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... small annoyance of the traveller. It is very remarkable, that on reaching the banks of the river[163] Elkos, which we crossed, there was not, on the north side of that river, to my great astonishment, one locust any where to be seen; but the country was flourishing in all the luxuriance of verdure, although the river was not wider than the Thames at Windsor. This extraordinary circumstance was accounted for by the Arabs, who said that not a locust would cross the river, till (sultan jeraad) the king of the locusts should ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... of the district may be mentioned—the Royal fern (Osmunda regalis), which has been found sparingly at Shirlett, in Willey Park, and in Dairley Dingle; the beautiful Beech fern (Polypodium Phegopteris), which grows in the greatest luxuriance in Dairley Dingle, also in a wood in Willey Park; and the Hay fern (Lastrea faenisecii), in Coalbrookdale, and upon Shirlett. Also several other commoner species, as Lastrea Oreopteris, Lastrea spinosa, ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... juice in any quantity, at a cheaper rate than either home-grown or home-made. In their cultivation in this country, practitioners are more liable to err in planting them in too rich, than in too poor a soil; the first adds too much to their natural luxuriance of growth, and always reduces the flavour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... woke up, for he saw that he was in evil case. The spirit of the British raj was falling like a blight and a pestilence upon the means by which he had lived, drying up the fountains of religious revenue and slowly but surely blighting the luxuriance of that pious liberality which always took the form of feeding holy men. He found that he must work for his bread whether he liked it or not, and the only implement of secular work that would not soil his priestly hand was the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... Apparently about seventeen or eighteen years of age, she was rather above the height of woman, delicately formed, although not by any means thin in her person: her figure possessing all that feminine luxuriance, which can only be obtained when the bones are small but well covered. Her face was oval, and brilliantly fair. Her hair of a dark chestnut, and her eyes of a deep blue. Her dress was simple in the extreme. She wore nothing but the white woollen petticoats of the time, so ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... literary and artistic culture of the time. Among the men with whom Duerer found congenial companionship were Adam Krafft, the sculptor; Veit Stoss, whose exquisite carvings in wood may reflect in some measure in the wild luxuriance of the imagination which they display, the restless, "dare-devil" spirit with which his biographers invest him; Peter Vischer, the bronze founder; and last but not least. Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, whose quaint rhymes are a source of delight to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... through the village in order to get some exercise, and breathe the fresh air. I remember the day well. It was in the latter part of May—a warm, sweet, sunny day, with enough of chilliness in the air to give a zest to walking. I was surprised at the ripeness and luxuriance of the foliage, so early for a New England spring; but I was still more surprised at the aspect of our usually silent village. The streets were full of men hurrying to and fro, and groups of men, and women, too, stood at some of the corners. To my utter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... haunted beauties, things that might deeply stir and move; but year by year a simpler, sweeter, healthier kind of beauty made itself felt; such beauty as lies on the bare, lightly washed, faintly tinted hillside of winter, all delicate greens and browns, so far removed from the rich summer luxuriance, and yet so austere, so pure. I grew to love different books too. In youth one demanded a generous glow, a fire of passion, a strongly tinged current of emotion; but by degrees came the love of ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... light. Everywhere the giant boles of trees shooting the height of a church tower into the air without a branch; great rib-rooted trees, and beneath them a fierce and hungry growth of creepers. Where a tree had fallen within the last century or so, these creepers ramped upwards in luxuriance, their stems thick as the body of a man, drinking the shaft of light that pierced downwards, drinking it with eagerness ere the boughs above met again and starved them. Where no tree had fallen the creepers were thin ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... brought her flowers, of which from childhood she had been most passionately fond. These cherished plants seemed to comprehend and requite unaffected love. At the iron window of her prison they appeared to grow with the joy and luxuriance of gratitude. With intertwining leaf and blossom, they concealed the rusty bars, till they changed the aspect of the grated cell into a garden bower, where birds might nestle and sing, and poets ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Far off as lie the regions of the Saskatchewan from the Atlantic seaboard, on which that wave is thrown, remote as are the fertile glades which fringe the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, still that wave of human life is destined to reach those beautiful solitudes, and to convert the wild luxuriance of their now useless vegetation into all the requirements of civilized existence. And if it be matter of desire that across this immense continent, resting on the two greatest oceans of the world, a powerful ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... of ravines and the elevation of rocks and precipices would have been changed into the unerring evidences of fertility and luxuriance of vegetation afforded by the dense forests and gigantic pine-trees of the coast district. We can scarce estimate the transition of feeling and change which would have been produced in their estimate of the country, if they could ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... souls, and Zora held her beating breast day by day lest it rain too long or too heavily. The sun burned fiercely upon the young cotton plants as the spring hastened, and they lifted their heads in darker, wilder luxuriance; for the time ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... schoolroom to the prim splendours of Georgy's state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the mysteries and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... spring rains and melting snows carried the fertilizing ashes deep into the soil. Corn was planted and "dug in"; rye was sowed and "hacked in." The crops were astonishing; the grain grew among the fallen logs and stumps in rioting luxuriance. A stump-pulling was another occasion for a friendly bee, to clear off and put into comely shape the ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... there. Day by day, with his stout pedestrian shoes, he plodded along that level beach,—the eternal ocean on one side, and human existence reduced to its simplest elements on the other,—and he pitilessly weighing each. His mental processes never impress one with opulence and luxuriance, but rather with a certain sublime tenacity, which extracts nutriment from the most barren soil. He is therefore admirably matched against Cape Cod; and though his books on softer aspects of Nature may have a mellower charm, there is none in which the very absence of mellowness can so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... creatures glided about in the seas, and vast sea-worms, or centipedal asps, the parents of modern krakens and sea-serpents, doubtless, accompanied them. There stood that unfinished world reeking with charcoal fumes, its soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic atmosphere. Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of love," slips in to soothe and calm our jaded senses. Certainly, it is hotter here than in Maritzburg—that assertion we are prepared to die in defence of—but we acknowledge that the heat at this hour is not oppressive, and the tropical luxuriance of leaf and flower all around is worth a few extra degrees of temperature. Of course, our talk is of to-morrow, and we look anxiously at the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... Church at about the distance of three miles, and presently entered a lane which led gently down from the hills, which were the same heights I had seen on my right hand, some months previously, on my way from Wrexham to Rhiwabon. The scenery now became very pretty—hedge-rows were on either side, a luxuriance of trees and plenty of green fields. I reached the bottom of the lane, beyond which I saw a strange-looking house upon a slope on the right hand. It was very large, ruinous, and seemingly deserted. A little beyond it was a farm-house, connected with which was a long row ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of its interior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sides in such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in the congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grew here as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yet all is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry and virtue that appeal to the artistic ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... great difficulty. I have been assured, that near Caracas the excellent apples sold in the markets come from trees not grafted. There are no cherry-trees. The olive-trees which I saw in the court of the convent of San Felipe de Neri, were large and fine; but the luxuriance of their vegetation ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... delineates that perfection which the imagination suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of divine Providence actually tends. Moreover, by confining the attention to one series of events and scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the confused luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect, completes the dependence of the parts one on another, and harmonizes the proportions ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... where the earth had remained steadfastly frozen for some hundreds of thousands of years. Wegaruk had a habit of talking when alone, but Alan thought it odd that she should be explaining to herself that the tundra-soil, in spite of its almost tropical summer richness and luxuriance, never thawed deeper than three or four feet, below which point remained the icy cold placed there so long ago that "even the spirits did not know." He smiled when he heard Wegaruk measuring time and faith in terms ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... erects a square, strong and full pile, in which a skilful ornamentation does not efface the general structure, which is not frail sculptured bijou, but a solid durable monument, its coating of red, black and white marble covering it with royal luxuriance, and which, through its healthy and animated statues, its bas-reliefs framed in medallions, recalls the friezes and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... was near the highway. It was from this canon that he had brought the ferns which it had so delighted Ramona to arrange for the decoration of the chapel. The place was filled with them, growing almost in tropical luxuriance; but this was a mile or so farther down, and to reach that spot from above, Alessandro had had to let himself down a sheer wall of stone. The canon at its head was little more than a rift in the rocks, and the stream which had its rise ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... venerable age and sighing their constant hymn give an everlasting pathos to the story of man's day on earth. The hill sides, terraced into beds of flowers—many wild and more cultivated, especially dahlias, which grow in great luxuriance and richness of colour in the hills of India—form the beautiful ground-work of an Indian cemetery in a sanitarium like Mussooree. On that spot, as it lies, the visitor will behold on one side, to the south, the dark shadow of a mountain elevation, called the "Camel's Back," by reason of its shape ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... dense masses of glossy deep-green foliage, are perhaps the most charming of vegetable productions. No idea of their richness and beauty can be formed from the dwarf, round-topped trees, one sees in most orange districts. Here, as in South Africa, they owe their luxuriance to abundant irrigation. Some of the trees at Milis are from thirty-five to forty feet high, and there are said to be 300,000 of them of full growth. The annual produce is estimated at from fifty to sixty millions of fruit, and, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... so parched and dead, are covered at once "as if the earth had given a subterranean birth to heaven." As Roderick Dhu's host rose up at the blast of his bugle, vegetation springs forth, and the land we now wonder at is no longer barren, but teems with tropical luxuriance. Then come the snakes and insects to poison and annoy. Last year, sixteen thousand seven hundred and seventy human beings were reported killed by snakes, while eight hundred and nineteen only were ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... baths make us blush for human nature. The skill of execution did not decline for several centuries; but the lofty ideal was lost sight of, and gross appeals to human passions were made by those who sought to please corrupt leaders of society in an effeminate age. The turgidity and luxuriance of art gradually passed into tameness and poverty. The reliefs on the Arch of Constantine are rude and clumsy compared with those on the Column ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... flowering period is over, the bushes will come in for inspection, and then it will be discovered that a Rose-bush without blossoms is not half as attractive as most other shrubs are. We prune it back sharply in our efforts to get the finest possible flowers from it, thus making it impossible to have luxuriance of branch or foliage. We thin it until there is not enough left of it to give it the dignity of a shrub. In short, as ornamental shrubs, Roses are failures with the exception of a few varieties, and these are not kinds in general ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... without having seen your brother, who is at Montreal, but I am told is expected to-day. I have spent my time however very agreably. I know not what the winter may be, but I am enchanted with the beauty of this country in summer; bold, picturesque, romantic, nature reigns here in all her wanton luxuriance, adorned by a thousand wild graces which mock the cultivated beauties of Europe. The scenery about the town is infinitely lovely; the prospect extensive, and diversified by a variety of hills, woods, rivers, cascades, intermingled ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... and in her bitter anguish stood for minutes regarding Elsie as she lay asleep upon the sofa. She approached and bent over her. The girl had brushed her long fair curls back from her face, and they fell over the cushions in rich luxuriance, a feverish color was on her cheeks, lighting up her loveliness, and her whole appearance was so pretty, so singularly childlike, as she lay there, that it seemed impossible, even then, that she could have anything in common with ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... said to his Manitous: "It is time that the Kickapoos and other red men were punished. They laugh at my thunders, they make mock of my lightnings and hurricanes, they use my bounties without thanking me for them. When their corn grows ripe and tall, instead of imputing its luxuriance to my warm suns and reviving showers, they say, 'We have managed it well;' when their hunt is successful, they place it to account of their own skill and perseverance. Reckoning not, as in times past, of my superintendence over all things, they have banished me altogether ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... Here came the home-seekers of the earlier day, when California was still a province of Mexico; those who had been lured by the glowing stories of the Land of the Sun Down Sea, where orange and lemon, vine and fig flourished and indicated the semi-tropic luxuriance and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... whose "Journals" and "Researches" denote him to be a shrewd and ingenious observer, has favoured us with the original sketches of the above cuts. They represent three of the spots that stud the Southern Pacific Ocean. The first beams with lovely luxuriance in its wood-crowned heights; while the second and third rise from the bosom of the sea in frowning sterility amidst the gay ripple that ever and anon laves their sides, and plashes in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... view is not very extended, it is rich in its parts; and the eye and the mind are filled. The grass is shaven smooth on the bank where the two are sitting; so it is all around, under trees which stand with wilful wildness of luxuriance, grouped and scattered apparently as they would. They are very old, in several varieties of kind, and in the perfect development and thrift of each kind. Among them are the ruins of an old priory. They peep forth here and there from the trees. One broken tower ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Rudham a pretty village: it was too straggling, too bare of trees, which had been planted sparsely and attained no luxuriance of growth; but it was not wholly unattractive this evening, with the setting sun turning to gold the varying bends of the river which ran through the valley, and the cottages and farmhouses dotted here and there with a not unpleasing irregularity, ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... the strand. Then I saw the natives launching their light canoes and paddling off through the surf to the ship; or leapt eagerly into the boat alongside; reached the strip of dazzling beach—strewn now with beautiful shells; plunged into the grateful shade of enticing groves rich with the prodigal luxuriance and fantastic beauty of tropical growth, ablaze with flowers of gorgeous hues, alive with birds whose plumage flashed like living gems, and breathed ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... fruit is shaped like an apple, very prickly, and full of small seeds. Sundal malam or harlot of the night (Polyanthes tuberosa) is so termed from the circumstance of its diffusing its sweet odours at that season. It is the tuberose of our gardens, but growing with great vigour and luxuriance. The bunga mawur (Rosa semperflorens, Curtis, Number 284), is small and of a deep crimson colour. Its scent is delicate and by no means so rich as that yielded by the roses of our climate. The Amaranthus cristatus (Celosia ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... managed to incur his displeasure while yet on the threshold of his house. We were entering it together, when observing a very fine bay-tree by the door-side, I unfortunately expressed surprise at its luxuriance in such a position. "Why should you be surprised?" he asked, suddenly turning upon me with much displeasure in his manner. Not a little disconcerted, I hesitatingly answered that I had imagined the bay-tree required more and greater ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope |
