"Mistletoe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house—which rose like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however, though visible from The Slopes, was outside ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... spending Christmas with some people in Suffolk, and every one in London assured me that at their house there would be the kind of a Christmas house party you hear about but see only in the illustrated Christmas numbers. They promised mistletoe, snapdragon, and Sir Roger de Coverley. On Christmas morning we would walk to church, after luncheon we would shoot, after dinner we would eat plum pudding floating in blazing brandy, dance with the servants, and listen ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... see?" said East, pointing to a lump of mistletoe in the next tree, which was a beech. He saw that Martin and Tom were busy with the climbing-irons, and couldn't resist the temptation of hoaxing. Arthur stared and wondered more ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... beneath the mistletoe As though she did not know it. She looks quite unconcerned, you know, And pretty, yes,—but, ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... cried, "I know foreign custom. I know everything. Mistletoe! Mistletoe! A kiss for ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... broad smooth carriage road curved gently up a hillside, and on both margins of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance to the waxen ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... palmy steeps With him of race divine yet human heart, Baldur, upon whose beaming front the Gods Gazing, exulted; from whose lips mankind Shall gather counsel. Hand in hand with him Shall stand the blind God, Hoedur, now not blind, That, witless, slew him with the mistletoe, Yet loved him well. Others, both men and Gods, That dread Third Heaven attained, shall make abode With Him Who ever is, and ever was, Enthroned like Him upon its southern cliff, Drinking the light immortal. From beneath, Like winds from flowery wildernesses ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... had dropped in, was suddenly reminded of that lugubrious old ballad, "The Mistletoe Bough," and recited large worn fragments of it impressively. It tells of how a beautiful girl hid away in a chest during a Christmas game of hide-and-seek, and how she was found, a dried vestige, years afterwards. It took a very powerful hold upon Herr Heinrich's imagination. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Skulls and crossbones, sometimes skeletons or skeleton-like figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an earlier period. Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the oak ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... gone out the next morning soon after sunrise to look round the camp, when I saw several birds of a greyish colour, about the size of a common thrush. Their notes, too, reminded me, as they sang their morning song, of the mistletoe thrush. Presently they flew off together, some way up the stream. Turning round, I saw Chickango, Igubo, and several of Mr Fraser's blacks following, with guns in their hands, accompanied by a pack of dogs. I pointed out the birds ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... today at Ashland, as at Hawarden, no tree is felled until it has been duly tried by the entire family and all has been said for and against the sentence of death. I heard Miss McDowell make an eloquent plea for an old oak that had been rather recklessly harboring mistletoe and many squirrels, until it was thought probable that, like our first parents, it might have a fall. It was a plea more eloquent than "O Woodman, spare that tree." A reprieve for a year was granted; and I thought, as I cast my ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... remembered, and things are on a grander scale than usual. The candles build famously, set in the chimney candelabra; the logs are all of the biggest, and as for the Yule himself, he is a veritable Brobdignag; the staircases drop flowers, and holly and mistletoe hang all about. Everything shines, and gleams, and glows. There is to be a boar's head, with, no lack of mustard and minstrelsy, and nothing eatable or drinkable that pertains to Christmas will be wanting. Carols, and waits, and ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... goodwill." She raised her blue eyes at the same moment to the Christmas decorations on the ceiling. They were standing before the parted drapery of the lance window. Midway between the arched curtains hung a spray of mistletoe—the conceit of a mischievous housemaid. Their ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... harnesses, shouted the prices of bright truck for tree ornaments, and pushed through the crowd, offering holly and mistletoe. Circles formed around men exhibiting mechanical turtles or boxing monkeys. From a furry sledge above a shop door, Santa Claus bowed and gesticulated, shaking the lines above his prancing reindeer. I had never ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... sleigh bells peal across the snow; The frost's sharp arrows touch the earth and lo! How diamond-bright the stars do scintillate When Night hath lit her lamps to Heaven's gate. To the dim forest's cloistered arches go, And seek the holly and the mistletoe; For soon the bells of Christmas-tide will ring ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... Synagogue at the United Council, but her swan-like neck was still bowed beneath the yoke of North London, not to say provincial, Judaism. So to-night there were none of those external indications of Christmas which are so frequent at "good" Jewish houses; no plum-pudding, snapdragon, mistletoe, not even a Christmas tree. For Mrs. Henry Goldsmith did not countenance these coquettings with Christianity. She would have told you that the incidence of her dinner on Christmas Eve was merely an accident, though a lucky ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... I did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany—the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run, What three'll be for I do forget, But what's to be has not been yet.... So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, Over and over and ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... festive preparations. Stefan had failed her and she had failed her baby—these two ever present facts shadowed her world. She had bought presents for Lily and the baby, a pair of links for Stefan, books for Mrs. Farraday and Jamie, and trifles for Constance and Miss Mason, but the holly and mistletoe, the tree, the new frock and the Christmas fare which normally she would have planned with so much joy, were missing. Stefan's gift to her—a fur-lined coat—was so extravagant that she could derive no pleasure from it, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... men and beasts—and slay them upon the altar of the thunder-god. There in the darkness was wrought many an evil deed, while human blood was poured forth and watered the roots of that gloomy tree, from whose branches depended the mistletoe, the fateful plant that sprang from the blood-fed veins of the oak. So gloomy and terror-ridden was the spot on which grew the tree that no beasts of field or forest would lodge beneath its dark branches, nor would birds nest or perch among ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... left, was decked with bunches of holly and other evergreens, and from the middle of the beam bisecting the ceiling hung the mistletoe, of a size out of all proportion to the room, and extending so low that it became necessary for a full-grown person to walk round it in passing, or run the risk of entangling his hair. This apartment contained Mrs. Dewy the tranter's ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... which distinguishes them at first sight. In many cases green matter is wanting in their tissues or is hidden by a livid tint that strikes the observer. Such are the Orobanchacc, or "broomropes," and the tropical Balanophorace. Nevertheless, other parasites, such as the mistletoe, have perfectly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... magnolia; Maine, pine cone; Michigan, apple blossom; Minnesota, moccasin; Mississippi, magnolia; Montana, bitter root; Missouri, goldenrod; Nebraska, goldenrod; New Jersey, sugar maple (tree); New York, rose; North Dakota, goldenrod; Oklahoma, mistletoe; Oregon, Oregon grape; Rhode Island, violet; Texas, blue bonnet; Utah, Sego lily; Vermont, red ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... it jolly to have the house all to ourselves!" exclaimed Wynnette, who, mounted on the top of a step-ladder, was engaged in twining the mistletoe in and out among the branches of the chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling. "It is awfully jolly—I mean it is truly comfortable—to have that scalawag—I mean that colonel—away. Odalite, I hope you won't take it ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... served and of course it was in shapes of Christmas trees, and Santa Clauses, and sprigs of holly, and Christmas bells, and Patty's portion was a lovely spray of mistletoe bough. ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... not. I do not wish to show myself beaten before all Egdon, and the sport of a man like Wildeve. We have enough berries now, I think, and we had better take them home. By the time we have decked the house with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... and pale tinted reeds made border at the water's edge. Now in rounding a curve, we passed close to the cypress wood fringed with bush and sedge. Delicate brown festoons of vines hung from the branches; and, high out of reach, mats of mistletoe clung. It seemed one with our mood and our fancy when two round yellow eyes stared out of the shadows, two wide lazy wings were spread, and the bird of daylight slumber took soft, noiseless flight. We were just getting fully in the humour of our new way of travel, drifting on in ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... received the honour of the company; and the pea conferred a like privilege on the lady who drew the favoured lot. The rest of the visitors assumed the rank of ministers of state or maids of honour. The festival was generally held in a large barn decorated with evergreens, and a large bough of mistletoe was not forgotten, which was often the source of much merriment. When the ceremony began, some one repeated ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the fourth was clad in a scarlet gown flecked with white wool to set forth the winter's snow, and broidered over with the burning brands of the Holy Hearth; and she bore on her head a garland of mistletoe. And these four damsels were clearly seen to image the four seasons of the year- -Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. But amidst them stood a fountain or conduit of gilded work cunningly wrought, and full ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... the blood-born mistletoe In the shady smoke. But who are you, twittering to and fro ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... consider the ideal Christmas game. In the first place, it must be a round game; that is to say, at least six people must be able to play it simultaneously. No game for two only is permissible at Christmas—unless, of course, it be under the mistletoe. Secondly, it must be a game into which skill does not enter, or, if it does, it must be a skill which is as likely to be shown by a child of eight or an old gentleman of eighty as by a 'Varsity blue. Such skill, for instance, as manifests itself at Tiddleywinks, that noble ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... drop every separate plum into it and stir it once for luck, or I'll not eat a single slice—for Carol is the dearest part of Christmas to Uncle Jack, and he'll have none of it without her. She is better than all the turkeys and puddings and apples and spare-ribs and wreaths and garlands and mistletoe and stockings and chimneys and sleigh-bells in Christendom. She is the very sweetest Christmas Carol that was ever written, said, sung or chanted, and I am coming, as fast as ships and railway trains can carry me, to ...
— The Birds' Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... geranium, open woods and fields; New England. Erigenia, damp soil; New York, Pennsylvania. Quaker ladies, road-sides, fields; everywhere. Dandelion, road-sides, fields; everywhere. Azalea, New England woods and elsewhere. Benzoin—spice-bush—damp woods; New Jersey, Pennsylvania. American mistletoe, New Jersey ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... rung; On Christmas Eve the Mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... scarlet holly on the streets, and silver mistletoe; The surging, jeweled, ragged crowds forever come and go. And here a silken woman laughs, and there a beggar asks— And, oh, the faces, tense of lip, like mad and mocking masks. Who thinks of Bethlehem today, and one lone winter night? Who knows that in a manger-bed ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus—a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... fern-seed[10] doth bestow, The kernel of the mistletoe; And here and there as Puck should go, With terror to affright him, She nightshade straws to work him ill, Therewith her vervain and her dill, That hindreth witches of their will, Of purpose to ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... exceedingly melancholy man, for he did sit away from the company during the most part of the evening. We afterwards heard that he had been keeping a secret account of all the kisses that were given and received under the mistletoe bough. Truly, I would not have suffered any one to kiss me in that manner had I known that so unfair a watch was being kept. Other maids beside were in a like way shocked, as Betty Marchant has since told me." But it seems that the melancholy widower was merely collecting ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, The holly branch shone on the old back wall And the baron's retainers are blithe and gay, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... rains begin to fall heavily in November; there will be three or four days of steady downpour and then a clear and green week. December is also likely to be rainy; and in this month people enjoy the sensation of gathering for Christmas the mistletoe which grows profusely on the live oaks, while the poppies are beginning to blossom at their feet. By the end of January the rains come lighter. In the long spaces between rains there is a temperature and a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... with all their might, making the more noise and revelry because the Parliament had forbidden the feast to be observed at all. It was easy to tell who was for the King and who for the Parliament, for there were bushes of holly, mistletoe, and ivy, at all the Royalist doors and windows, and from many came the savoury steam of roast beef or goose, while the other houses were shut up as close as possible and looked ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when the mistletoe makes raptures for young hearts and loving lips will soon come 'round again. Heaven grant us all to be young and confiding enough for all the love and joy and the glad music of the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... Along the river-bottoms and low grounds the sycamore is found as clean-limbed, tall and stately as elsewhere. The cottonwood, too, is common, though generally dwarfed, scraggy and full of dead limbs. A willow still more scraggy, and having many limbs destroyed with mistletoe, is often found in the same places. The elder rises above the dignity of a shrub, or under-shrub, but can hardly be found a respectable tree. Two varieties of oak are common, and the alder forms here a fine tree along ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... which attends the fairest complexion. It was, she thought, the Britoness Vanda; but her countenance was no longer resentful—her long yellow hair flew not loose on her shoulders, but was mysteriously braided with oak and mistletoe; above all, her right hand was gracefully disposed of under her mantle; and it was an unmutilated, unspotted, and beautifully formed hand which crossed the brow of Eveline. Yet, under these assurances ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... beforehand by Mrs. Darling and Grace, that nothing might be wanting to add to the festivities of the happy re-union. If they could not deck the walls with holly and mistletoe grown on the island, they could have it brought from the mainland by the boys and girls when they came. Pictures, curtains, and books, were all made the most of; and to crown the whole, or rather, as the foundation of the whole, the house was ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... supposed to be quite allowable for grown-up people, ladies and gentlemen, to kiss anyone they know on New Year's Day. A Belgian lady once told me that it brought good luck to kiss an officer of the army; but, of course, there are limits to this, as there are to kissing under the mistletoe in England. ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... Grass Region of Kentucky Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales The Bride of the Mistletoe A Kentucky Cardinal. Aftermath. A Sequel to ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... and Sorrow are but names. But who, that bears a mind matured to thought, A heart to feel, shall look abroad this day And speak of happiness? The church is deckt With festive garlands, and the sunbeams glance From glossy evergreens; the mistletoe Pearl-studded, and the holly's lustrous bough Gleaming with coral fruitage; but we muse Of laurel blent with cypress. Gaze we down Yon crowded aisle? the mourner's dusky weeds Sadden the eye; and they who wear them ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Teetzel very gallantly sent me over a huge turkey, an eighteen-pounder, and to-morrow I have to go into Buckhorn for my mail-order shipments. We have decorated the house with a whole box of holly from Victoria and I've hung a sprig of mistletoe in the living-room doorway. The children, of course, are on tiptoe with expectation. But I can't escape the impression that I'm merely acting a part, that I'm a Pagliacci in petticoats. Heaven knows I clown enough; no one can accuse me of not going through the gestures. But it seems like fox-trotting ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... gloom the shabbiness of the furniture could not be seen, and the fire-light danced playfully over the worn, comfortable-looking chairs drawn up to the hearth, on the holly and mistletoe which decorated the walls, and the great cluster of geranium and Christmas roses which the Adairs had sent to Janetta the day before. Everything looked homelike and comfortable, and perhaps it was no wonder that Wyvis—accustomed to the gloom of his own home, or the garish splendor ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his plough under an elm-tree, and, looking up, he perceived that from the fork upward one half of it was dead; mistletoe had sucked the life out of it, and lower and lower to the main body, deeper and deeper to the vital heart of it, the sap was being drawn away. An irresistible impulse impelled him to take the jack-knife from his pocket, and as far as he could reach cut away this alien and deadly growth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... herself in white, With crystal buttons shining, A spangled scarf, all lacy-light About her shoulders twining; A bunch of pearly mistletoe, A twig of ruddy holly, She tucked among her curls, and oh, She was so ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... we go, O'er the mountains, Under the boughs of mistletoe, Log huts we'll rear, While herds of deer and buffalo Furnish the cheer. File o'er the mountains—steady, boys For game afar We have our rifles ready, boys!— Aha! Throw care to the winds, Like chaff, boys!—ha! And join in ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... in the house, this evening, and as this gives me room at the table, I am going to begin to answer your letter. George is out of town, and all the rest, including the servants, have gone to see the Mistletoe Bough. It is astonishing how slowly you get well; and yet with such heat and such smells as you have in Chicago, it is yet more astonishing that you live at all. I thought it dreadful to have the thermometer stand at 90 deg. in my bedroom, three weeks running, and to sniff a bad sniff now and then ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... a Willow, and he was very old, And all his leaves fell off from him, and left him in the cold; But ere the rude winter could buffet him with snow, There grew upon his hoary head a crop of Mistletoe. ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... approval of those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Strenia. The same in Poitou and Perche, anciently the country of the Druids, is derived from their rites. For the Poitevins for Etrennes use the word Auguislanneuf, and the Percherons, Equilans, from the ancient cry of the Druids, Au guy l'an neuf, i.e. Ad Viscum, annul novus, or to the mistletoe the new-year, when on new-year's day the Pagans went into the forests to seek the mistletoe on the oaks. See Chatelain, notes on the Martyr. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... beautiful Christmas. My father was in the highest of spirits, and would have the house decorated with holly and mistletoe. He went out to a few parties, but he was always unwilling to leave my mother, though she wished him to go; then, when we were quite alone, the wind wailing, the snow falling and beating up against the windows, she would ask me to read to her the beautiful gospel story of the star in the East and ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... another feature of the work of preparation in which all were glad to take part, the gathering of the evergreens—red-berried holly, mistletoe with its glistening pearls, ground-pine, moss, and other wood treasures—for the decoration of parlor, hall, and dining-room, and, above all, of the old village church, a gleeful labor in which the whole neighborhood ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of "The Sporting Times" of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from "Kirby's Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me at least thirty years ago. I had not looked at the account, spoken of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and danced and blazed, and crackled and roared. Oh, it knew it was Christmas, that fire did, and the mistletoe and holly and running ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... and incantations, the dexterous introduction, by a jocose old gentleman, of a mistletoe-bough into the festoons draping the chandelier, and divers other tricks, all of which were taken in excellent part by the victims thereof, and vociferously applauded by the spectators. The great hall-clock had rung out twelve strokes, and two or three methodical seniors were beginning ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... because her husband had adopted the white convention of jealousy and monogamy. Only Tahitians like Tetuanui now knew anything about the order, and so many generations had they been taught shame of it that the very name was unspoken, as that of the mistletoe god was among the Druids after St. Patrick had accomplished his ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... past, still made the standard works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no going,—not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer,—not to that time, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... garden beds empty. The park looked sodden, dank and cheerless. Summer was long dead and over, yet frosts had not begun, bringing suggestions of mistletoe ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... of mistletoe, The warmth of holly berry, These I combine, O lady mine, To make thy yule-tide merry. And shouldst thou learn, sweet, to return My love, nor deem it folly, Twined in thy hair the snow fruit wear, And on ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... the place, visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house—and there may ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... prognostic of any change of weather. The missel-thrush is a wild and wary bird, keeping generally in open fields and commons, heaths and unfrequented places, feeding upon worms and insects. In severe weather it approaches our plantations and shrubberies, to feed on the berry of the mistletoe, the ivy, or the scarlet fruit of the holly or the yew; and, should the redwing or the fieldfare presume to partake of these with it, we are sure to hear its voice in clattering and contention ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... among the early Britons branches of the sacred mistletoe, which had been cut with solemn ceremony in the night from the oak trees in a forest that had been ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... submissive tact made the best of things; and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-room, and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair retired to rest, the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with a tender melancholy, permeated the house, and the servants were growing excited in advance. The servants weren't going to ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Santa Claus again, and then his face seemed to shine like the sun, and there seemed to be wreaths of holly and bunches of mistletoe sticking all over him, and he sprang into his sleigh, the reindeer shook their horns, making the bells jingle like anything, and then, off on top of the snowflakes rode Santa Claus, ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... weird Druid held his mistletoe; There, for the scorched son of the sand, coiled bright, The torrid snake was hissing sharp and low; And there the Western savage ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... fringe of light reeds and giant bulrushes. All round the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms tall grasses and forest trees, with here and there a spreading colabar festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine. Sunny blue reflected, with the gaunt old trees, in the tiny gleaming seas among ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... reservation is a part of the great tableland of southeastern Arizona, being a succession of mountains and high, park-like mesas, broken here and there with valleys and watered by limpid streams. The highlands are wooded with pine, cedar, fir, juniper, oak, and other trees, while in the valleys are mistletoe-laden cottonwood as well as willow, alder, and walnut, which, with smaller growths, are interwoven with vines of grape, hop, and columbine, in places forming a veritable jungle. On every hand, whether on mountain or in valley, many varieties of cactus grow in profusion; and in springtime canon ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... bakes, and boils, and steams, and broils, and fries, by a complicated apparatus which, whatever may be its other virtues, leaves no space for a Christmas fire. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum-pudding, the true image of the earth, flattened at the poles; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch; the life and joy of the old hall, when the squire and his household and his neighbourhood were ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... preparations were completed before the return of the church party, for the service had been unusually lengthy, and Esmeralda was champing with impatience before the latch-key clicked in the lock. There was great kissing and hugging beneath the mistletoe, and Bridgie was sent flying upstairs to take off her wraps, in preparation for ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... reach, They rise aloft and skim the air, and settle each by each Upon the very wished-for place, yea high amid the tree, Where the changed light through twigs of gold shines forth diversedly; As in the woods mid winter's chill puts forth the mistletoe, And bloometh with a leafage strange his own tree ne'er did sow, And with his yellow children hath the rounded trunk in hold, So in the dusky holm-oak seemed that bough of leafy gold, As through the tinkling shaken foil the gentle wind ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... was a hint dropped from any source that Richard Perry Stanlock was entitled to the slightest credit for these magnificent doings. He spent Christmas at home in a quiet unassuming way amid the family decorations of holly and mistletoe, and a vast litter of presents, oranges, apples, nuts, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... be recollected that, during the Christmas festivities at Manor Farm, after a certain amount of kissing had taken place under the mistletoe, Mr. Pickwick was "standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased countenance on all that was passing round him, when the young lady with the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies, made a sudden dart forward, and ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... place of the idea of the Deity incarnated by avatars in human forms; I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth—oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, lamas, monks, muftis, exhorters; I see where druids walked the groves of Mona—I see the mistletoe and vervain; I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... great stickler for the old English customs, and always had the yule-log brought in with great ceremony. With his own hands he suspended the mistletoe from the chandelier in the hall, which he always obtained from Dimmerly Manor in England. Lottie, without thinking, stood beneath, watching him, when, with a spryness not in keeping with his years, he sprang down and gave ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... which looked like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... for my father lived till a 'underd, an' then on'y went through slippin' on a wet stone an' breakin' a bone in 'is back; an' my grandfather saw 'is larst Christmas at a 'underd an' ten, an' was up to kissin' a wench under the mistletoe, 'e was sich a chirpin' old gamecock. 'E didn't look no older'n you do now, an' you're a chicken compared to 'im. You've wore badly like, not ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... mistletoe, which Seraphine Dasher had mischievously suspended over the doorway, looked like a chaplet of pearls; the pointed stems of yew became frosted in silver; the variegated holly was transformed into branches of malachite, ornamented with a network of gold, its bright red berries glowing with a ruddy ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... meant now, but we had never heard those singular growths called "witches' brooms" before. Unlike mistletoe, the broom is not a plant parasite, but a growth from the fir itself, like an oak gall, or a gnarl on a maple or a yellow birch; but instead of being a solid growth on the tree trunk, it is a dense, abnormal growth of ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... lovely the room looked, for the table was a mass of roses fresh from Paris, and the walls and ceiling were green with mistletoe and holly. Moreover, the old room was warm with the hearts of friends and the cheer from blazing logs that crackled merrily up the blackened throat of my chimney. And there were kisses with this feast that came from the ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... frame. The contemplation of this figure, beautifully executed as it is, intuitively inculcates a serious consideration of the value and blessings of a temperate; and well-spent life; it induces a thoughtful reflection that a life of goodness alone insures an end of peace. The holly, the mistletoe, the ivy, the acorn shell, the leafless branch, and the fruitless vine encircle the brow-fit emblems of the period which marks an exchange of time for eternity. All the figures are rendered complete by a carved lion's foot, at the bottom of each, and above the feet is a connecting ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... that she had left the door ajar, taking away the key; then she would rush back like a stout round whirlwind, and in a minute more Barrie would be a prisoner, almost like the fair bride in "The Mistletoe Bough," only there was more air in the garret than in the oak chest that shut with a spring. But Barrie was used to taking risks—risks insignificant compared with this, yet big enough to supply salt and sugar for the dry daily ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Water Eloquence. May Flower Welcome. Marigold Sacred affection. Marigold and Cypress Despair. Mandrake Rarity. Mignonette Your qualities surpass your charms. Morning Glory Coquetry, Affectation. Mock Orange Counterfeit. Myrtle Love in absence. Mistletoe Insurmountable. Narcissus Egotism. Nasturtium Patriotism. Oxalis Reverie. Orange Blossom Purity. Olive Peace. Oleander Beware. Primrose Modest worth. Pink, White Pure love. " Red Devoted love. Phlox Our hearts are united. Periwinkle Sweet ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... fancied that he could borrow a little from a distinguished companion. I have often seen this in life, (I am now an old and experienced rat,) I have seen a mean race following and flattering their superiors, ready to lick the dust from their feet, not from real admiration or attachment, but, like a mistletoe upon a forest tree, because they had no proper footing of their own, and liked to be raised on the credit of another. It is easier to them to fawn than to work, to flatter the great than to follow ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... sorts of nonsensical gifts out of paper and cardboard and paste; no one was forgotten. Mrs. Lynch declared herself "as rich as rich" with bracelets and a necklace made of red berries. Mrs. Budge, forgetting, when Robin held a sprig of mistletoe over her head and daringly kissed her wrinkled cheek, that "things was going to sixes and sevens," laughed until her sides ached at Harkness in his silly clown's cap. Robin and Beryl, with much solemnity, exchanged purchases ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... am like to mistletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about: so I by thee. What need I then to fear at all So long as I about thee crawl? But if that tree should fall and die, Tumble shall heaven, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle burning on, Shadows lurking everywhere: Some one came, and ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... There was no doubt about that. But it and his own adjoining sitting-room, into which he shuffled in his slippers, attracted by a great light there, had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove. The leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... else can hurt Baldur, for I have exacted an oath from all of them." "What," exclaimed the woman, "have all things sworn to spare Baldur?" "All things," replied Frigga, "except one little shrub that grows on the eastern side of Valhalla, and is called Mistletoe, and which I thought too young and feeble ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... presents—dictionaries, sugared crackers, and perfumed soap—and now that their vacation has begun, their little brown heads can be seen bobbing up and down in the blue sea. Their Christmas-tree will be the royal palm; and nipa boughs their mistletoe. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... made in the dark forest of an evening. And the forest,—it seemed an impenetrable mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths: the live-oak (chene vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and twined in the mistletoe's death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume over the waters, and wondrous flowers and vines and trees with French names that bring back ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... running parallel to the coast, on which the long-leaved or peach-pines flourish. This region is generally called the Pine Barrens. Wild vines encircle the trees, and among them are seen the white berries of the mistletoe. In winter these Pine Barrens retain much of their verdure, and constitute one of the marked features of the country. Amid them are numerous swamps or morasses. One of great size, extending to not less than forty miles from north to south, and twenty-five ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... mistletoe, about which there are so many pretty Christmas legends, is a deadly enemy of many trees. The seed of this fungus is carried, by the birds or by the wind, from one tree to another. When it sprouts, tiny roots go down through the bark to the sap, on which ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... of mistletoe, tender and fair, grew high above the field," and such a little thing it was, with its dainty green leaves and waxen white berries, nestling for protection under the strong arm of a great oak, that the goddess passed it by. Assuredly no scathe could come to Baldur the Beautiful from a creature ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... Scandinavian people were as wrong as those that we found in Mallet and Temple. But with all his misinformation, Warton managed to get at many truths about Icelandic poetry, and his presentation of them was fresh and stimulating. Already the Old Norse mythology was well known, even down to Valhalla and the mistletoe. Old Norse poetry was well enough known to call forth ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... his beryl-coloured wave; than Rhine What river from the mountains ever came More stately! most the simple crown adorns Of rushes and of willows interwined With here and there a flower: his lofty brow Shaded with vines and mistletoe and oak He rears, and mystic bards his fame resound. Or gliding opposite, th' Illyrian gulf Will harbour us from ill." While thus she spake, She touched his eyelashes with libant lip, And breathed ambrosial odours, o'er ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... disagreement, with mutual respect, and some approaches to good-will; and Sir Duncan Yordas, being skillfully removed, spent his Christmas (without knowing much about it) in the best and warmest bedroom in the rectory. But Mordacks returned, as an honest man should do, to put the laurel and the mistletoe on his proper household gods. And where can this be better done than in that grand old city, York? But before leaving Flamborough, he settled the claims of business and charity, so far as he could see them, and so far as the state of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... poor rogue! And so the poor lads came up to London hoping to find a gallant captain who could bring them to high preferment, and found nought but—Tom Fool! I could find it in my heart to weep for them! And so thou mindest clutching the mistletoe on nunk Hal's shoulder. I warrant it groweth still on the crooked May bush? And ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... most melancholy tunes, playing, with a more profound solemnity, the gloomiest psalms and lamentations. When he ventured upon secular music, he never performed anything more lively than "The Mistletoe Bough," or "Barbara Allen," and into each he threw a spirit so much more dismal than the original, as almost to induce his hearers to imitate the example of the disconsolate "Barbara," and "turn their faces to the wall" in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... white strings of pop-corn to hang over it like wreaths of snow," he said, "so I am going down the lane for some mistletoe that grows in one of the highest trees. The berries are ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... And Sleep, I wot, will grudge us not his best: In winter earlier sink the suns to rest, And eke the sooner shall our toils be sped; When in the embers glowing There'll be love-charms worth the knowing, Or, at Yule-tide, mazes threaded, with the mistletoe o'erhead. ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Guion house it was considered as the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... smile illumined her happy young face, Her roguish eyes twinkled, and gayly Her Grace Crossed the old polished floor with a step light and quick, And her high slipper heels went clickety-click. She looked cautiously round,—she was all by herself; Like a mischievous elf, She took from a shelf A mistletoe spray with its berries like pearls; Then tossing her head and shaking her curls, In a manner half daring and yet half afraid, The madcap maid, with a smile that betrayed Expectant thoughts of her lover dear, Fastened the spray to ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... trees would become so loaded with the white clinging snow that they would snap off and fall to the ground. Away would troop the birds in the day-time then to feast upon the scarlet berries of the holly, the pearly dew-like drops of the mistletoe, or the black coaly berries that grew upon the ivy-tod; and away and away they would fly again with wild and plaintive cries as Jack Frost would send a cutting blast in amongst them to scare them away. How the poor birds would look at the man cutting logs of wood to take ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... strung with garlands of Christmas green that it looked like a bower. Bunches of mistletoe and holly added their colors to the holiday cheer. ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Turdus viscivorus, Linnaeus. French, "Merle Draine," "Grive Draine."—I quite agree with the remarks made by Professor Newton, in his edition of 'Yarrell,' as to the proper English name of the present species, and that it ought to be called the Mistletoe Thrush. I am afraid, however, that the shorter appellation of Missel Thrush will stick to this bird in spite of all attempts to the contrary. In Guernsey the local name of the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai," by which name Mr. Metivier mentions it in his 'Dictionary ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... past eleven, an' aw think ther's few but what'll be able to see monny a place where they've missed it. An' if soa we'd better mak th' best o'th' few days left to mak what amends we can. Owd Christmas comes in smilin', with his holly an' his mistletoe, an' his gooid tempered face surraanded wi' steam of plum puddin' an' roast beef—tables get tested what weight they can bear—owd fowk an' young ens exchange greetin's, punch bowls steam up; an' lemons an' nutmegs suffer theresen to be rubbed, ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... follows to its head. The peasants have cultivated patches of ground along the stream; the slopes are covered, first with chestnuts and then with hoary firs—a rare growth, in these parts—from whose branches hangs the golden bough of the mistletoe. And now the stream is ended and a dark ridge blocks the way; it is overgrown with beeches, under whose shade you ascend in steep curves. At the summit the vegetation changes once more, and you find yourself among magnificent stretches of pines that ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... says that a black rock will kill him; but it does not, although he flies before it. Glooskap declares that a handful of down will cause his death. The double entendre of the swoon is entirely wanting in the Western tale, as is the apparent harmlessness of the medium of death. In the Edda the mistletoe, the softest, and apparently the least injurious, of plants, kills Balder; in the Wabanaki tale it is a ball of down or a rush. The Chippewas change it, like savages, to a substantial root and a black rock, thereby manifesting an insensibility to the point ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... leaves and scarlet berries, and the white-berried, pale green mistletoe may be closely copied. All these and many more are made on the same principle, and in so simple a manner that even quite a little child may succeed in producing ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... centre of the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr. Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done honour to a descendant of Lady Tollimglower ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... always says the old walls might fall in at any time; but since you told me about the lights being seen, I've been thinking that perhaps he has heard about them too, and that's why he won't come here if he can help it. But we can ask him. What is the 'Mistletoe Bough'? Is it ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... old country 'tis Christ- mas, and to-night I'm thinking of the mistletoe and holly berries bright. The smoke above our chimbley pots I'd dearly love to see, And those dear folks down in Devon, how they'll talk ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... fine in its new dress of holly berries, mistletoe and cedar. Across the front was hung in big red and white letters, "Unto us a Child is Born." Over the organ was suspended ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... its leaves it harbors a small insect (coccus), whose sweet secretion is much relished by the ants. Dr. Beccari mentions an epiphytal plant growing on trees in Borneo, the seeds of which germinate, like those of the mistletoe, on the branches of the tree; and the seedling stem, crowned by the cotyledons, grows to about an inch in length, remaining in that condition until a certain species of ant bites a hole in the stem, which then produces a gall-like growth that ultimately constitutes ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... you will be so good," said the mistletoe. "I have my roots fixed in you already; and I am growing day by day. Later on, I shall put forth little green blossoms. They're not much to look at; but then the berries will come, beautiful, juicy white berries: the blackbird ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... other and her hands were laid palm to palm as her body swayed backward and forward in rhythmic movement. "They go out in the woods and cut cart-loads of holly and mistletoe and pine and Christmas-trees, and dress the house, and the fires roar up all the chimneys, and they kill ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... tedious, this meant more than it does to-day. The visitors received a joyous welcome, not a sort of empty every-day one. Plum pudding, roast beef, and mince pies and nuts were the order of the day, for beverage various kinds of drinks. Holly and mistletoe and evergreens obtained in nearly every house; in fact it was a joyous day from morn till night. Games of various kinds were played. Toys for children, rudimentary toys and picture books, cheap, and such as the too knowing children of to-day would turn up their little noses at, and my ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... head of the staircase we looked down into a hall gaily lit with paper lanterns. Holly and ivy wreathed the broad balustrade, and the old pictures around the walls. A bunch of mistletoe hung from a great chandelier that sparkled with hundreds of glass prisms, and under it a couple of footmen in gilt liveries and powder crossed at that moment with trays of ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... she was as horrid a little prig as Constance, who on her side felt a pang of envy as she thought of Rose going to church and singing hymns and carols to her father and mother, while she, after a struggle under the mistletoe, which made her hot and miserable, had to sit playing waltzes. One good-natured lady offered to relieve her, but she was too much afraid of the hero of the mistletoe to stir from her post, and the daughter of her kindly friend had no ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... after this, on Christmas Eve, that Sara, coming into his special den with a gay little joke on her lips and a great bunch of mistletoe in her arms, was arrested by the sudden, chill ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... which completely covered the beds of limestone and in places hid the streams. The rest of the mountain was thickly wooded. Here were great oaks and splendid evergreens with trunks like mossy pillars, from the branches of which hung garlands of ivy and mistletoe, and persimmon trees, the odour of which pervaded every nook and corner of the wood—an illusive, fragrant something that made the heart glad. In places the wild muscadine and scuppernong vines stretched from tree to tree, making arbours which were ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... was when 'mid the maidens you would pull The fiery raisin with profound delight; When sprigs of mistletoe ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... husband's family, though the poor girl, of course, underwent tortures before she was sure of their decision. Fred, who with his father and mother was to join in the great feast, brought Sally home from Wallacetown that same night, and took advantage of the mistletoe which Sylvia had hung up, right before them all. Thomas and Molly, both wonderfully citified already, appeared during the course of the next afternoon from opposite directions, and Molly played, and Thomas expounded scientific farming, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... advantage to the museums. He showed Sam how to remove them without injuring them. A little further on they came to a wild growth of holly, crazy with berries and burnished thorny foliage, and near at hand a mistletoe bough loaded with tiny ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... fir in a disused petrol-tin, and, after a visit to the canteen, decorated it with boxes of Turkish delight, sticks of chocolate, packets of chewing-gum, oranges, lemons, soap, and bits of Government candles. It was a Christmas tree of some distinction. And mistletoe? No, we couldn't find any mistletoe, but then, as Monty said, it would have no point on Gallipoli, there being no—just so; when we should be home again for Christmas of next year, we would claim an extra kiss ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... remember at Christmas—oh, ten years ago—and your grandfather had a party for you. There was mistletoe in the hall, and we danced and stopped under ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... ticketed ready for distribution. And then the party invited to the servants' hall, and the great dinner, and the new clothing for the school-girls, and the church so gay, with their new dresses in the aisles, and the holly and the mistletoe. I know we are not in England, my dear uncle, and that you have lost one of your greatest pleasures—that of doing good, and making all happy ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... beautiful pictures That hang on Memory's wall, Is one of a dim old forest, That seemeth best of all; Not for its gnarled oaks olden, Dark with the mistletoe; Not for the violets golden That sprinkle the vale below; Not for the milk-white lilies That lean from the fragrant ledge, Coquetting all day with the sunbeams, And stealing their golden edge; Not for the vines on the ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... worship, has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For, searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... of her letters, (which neither is inserted,) is thus described:—'A piece of ruins upon it, the remains of an old chapel, now standing in the midst of the coppice; here and there an over-grown oak, surrounded with ivy and mistletoe, starting up, to sanctify, as it were, the awful solemnness of the place: a spot, too, where a man having been found hanging some years ago, it was used to be thought of by us when children, and by the maid- servants, with a degree of terror, (it being actually the habitation ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... who, from their knowledge of the arts and sciences of the day, were the ministers of religion and justice, as well as the teachers of youth to the whole community, and exercised an absolute control over the unlearned people whom they governed; they worshipped in oak groves, and the oak tree and the mistletoe were sacred to them; the heavenly bodies appear to have been also objects of their worship, and they appear to have believed in the immortality and transmigration of the soul; but they committed nothing to writing, and for our knowledge of them we have ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in the large kitchen of the Maison Commune Estaminet, at a long table decorated with mistletoe and holly. The dinner—the result of two days' "scrounging" under the direction of George—was too good to be true. We toasted each other and sang all the songs we knew. Two of the Staff clerks wandered in and told us we were the best of all possible despatch riders. We drank to them uproariously. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... that its rounded leaf presents a fresh green in February. It does not die away, it appears as green as spring, and pieces of the wall are ornamented with it as thickly as the iron-headed nails in old doors. One plant grows out of the hard stem of a hawthorn tree, as if it were a parasite like the mistletoe; probably there is some crack which the plant itself has hidden. If every plant and every flower were found in all places the charm of locality would not exist. Everything varies, and that gives the interest. These purplish stones, where ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... that tree at the conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... twelve days of Christmas, provided everything was done conformably to ancient usage. Here were kept up the old games of hoodman blind, shoe the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, bob apple, and snap dragon; the Yule-clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe with its white berries hung up, to the imminent peril of all the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... cannot think why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own lapses ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... damsel donned her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry-men go To gather in the mistletoe. Then opened wide the baron's hall To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And ceremony doffed his pride. The heir, with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord underogating share The vulgar game of post-and-pair. ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... delightful day of preparation for the greatest festival in all the year—the day when in most households there are many little mysteries afoot, when parcels come and go, and are smothered away so as to be ready when Santa Claus comes his rounds; when some are busy decking the rooms with holly and mistletoe; when the cook is busiest of all, and savoury smells rise from the kitchen, telling of good things to ...
— The Christmas Fairy - and Other Stories • John Strange Winter
... was forced to admit that a Jersey Christmas had its compensations. The doors of the back parlor, mysteriously locked for days, were opened and in the room, gay with holly, mistletoe, and laurestinus, appeared a most delightful little Christmas tree, itself rather foreign in appearance since it was a laurel growing in a big pot. Real English holly concealed the base and merry ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... wife of Balder, personified pure and tender love. Balder was the fair god who loved light and lived a life of purity and innocence. The evil Loke induced Balder's blind brother, der, to throw an arrow of mistletoe at him and he fell dead. When Nanna saw the body of her dead husband carried out to the funeral pyre, her heart ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... Christmas party Under the mistletoe Along with a ripe, slack country lass Jostling to ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... your nature, in all act and look and speech? By that large induction only I your law of being reach. Now I hear of this wrong action—what is that to you and me? Sin within you may have done it—fruit not nature to the tree. Foreign graft has come to bearing—mistletoe grown on your bough— If I ever really knew you, then, my friend, I know you now. So I say, "He never did it," or, "He did not so intend"; Or, "Some foreign power o'ercame him"—so I judge the action, friend. Let ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... robins cowering on the lee side of the larger branches where the snow could not fall upon them, while two or three of the more enterprising were making desperate efforts to reach the mistletoe berries by clinging nervously to the under side of the snow-crowned masses, back downward, like woodpeckers. Every now and then they would dislodge some of the loose fringes of the snow-crown, which would come sifting down on them and send them screaming back to camp, where they ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... oranges and sweetmeats, those overcoat-pockets contain! What child ever lived who did not believe grandpa's pocket a cornucopia for all juvenile desires? The day passes on. The turkey never looked browner or juicier, and the blaze on the pudding-sauce never burned bluer; the kissing under the mistletoe was never more delightful, nor the blindman's-buff ever played with a greater zest: but the merriest Christmas must end. Your little girl, tired and sleepy, kneels at your feet, and you pass your fingers through her soft curls, while she repeats her simple prayer: "God ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... robed majestically, and wearing a wreath of mistletoe in his flowing white wig. His false beard reaches almost to his waist. He carries a staff ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... robins, belated on their way down from the upper Meadows, linger in the Valley and make out to spend the winter in comparative comfort, feeding on the mistletoe berries that grow on the oaks. In the depths of the great forests, on the high meadows, in the severest altitudes, they seem as much at home as in the fields and orchards about the busy habitations of man, ascending the Sierra as the snow melts, following the green footsteps of Spring, until ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... account of Balder, the sun-god, who was slain because of the jealousy of Loki (fire). Loki knew that everything in nature except the mistletoe had promised not to injure the great god Balder. So he searched for the mistletoe until he found it growing on an oak-tree "on the eastern slope of Valhalla." He cut it off and returned to the place where the gods were amusing themselves ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... Gordian knot nothing can untie. The tree once clasped in its coils is fated, yielding up its sap and life without a struggle to cast off its deadly enemy. Many trees are observed whose stems bear branches only, far above the surrounding woods, laden with bunches of alien foliage,—parasites like the mistletoe. Indeed, this forest seems like vegetation running riot, and with its clumps of dissimilar foliage fixed like storks' nests in the tops of the trees, recalling the same effect which one sees on the St. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Timidity Meadow Lychnis, Wit Meadowsweet, Uselessness Mercury, Goodness Mesembryanthemum, Idleness Mezereon, I Desire to Please Mignonette, You are Good Milfoil, War Milkwort, Hermitage Mint, Virtue Mistletoe, I Surmount Mock Orange, Counterfeit Monkshood, Deadly Foe Near Moonwort, Forgetfulness Morning Glory, Affectation Moschatel, Weakness Moss, Maternal Love Mosses, Ennui Motherwort, Concealed Love Moving Plant, Agitation Mulberry, White, Wisdom Mushroom, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Western Australia, with brilliant orange-coloured flowers, Nuytsia floribunda, N.O. Loranthaceae; which is also called Tree Mistletoe, and, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... at the house, where there were feasting and dancing and much merry-making. One incident of it do I remember most distinctly,—that having, with consummate generalship, cornered Mistress Dorothy under a sprig of mistletoe, I suddenly found myself utterly bereft of the courage to carry the matter to a conclusion, and allowed her to escape unkissed, for which she laughed at me most unmercifully once the danger was passed, though she had feigned the utmost indignation while the ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson |
