"Mossy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... family has a few curious saprophytic representatives on the lower slopes. Mertin's coral-root is one of the most common. This generally grows in clusters in the mossy woods, along the trail or government road above Longmire Springs. It is very common all around the mountain at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,500 feet. With it, grow two tway-blades and the rattlesnake plantain. In bogs, two species of piperia, ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... colour, but having an almost identical pattern of pale spots. I also found a single specimen of a most curious species with very long antennae. But my finest discovery here was the Cicindela gloriosa, which I found on mossy stones just rising above the water. After obtaining my first specimen of this elegant insect, I used to walk up the stream, watching carefully every moss-covered rock and stone. It was rather shy, and would often lead me on a long chase from ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... home farm, sometimes at the foot of garden or orchard. Such is noticeably the case throughout Narragansett; almost every farm has a grave-yard, now generally unused and deserted. Sometimes the burying-place is enclosed by a high mossy stone wall, often it is overgrown with dense sombre firs or hemlocks, or half shaded with airy locust-trees. Beautifully ideal and touching is the thought of these old Narragansett planters resting with ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Thus Tarn the hunter took me to the world that faces across the sea of the west on the gate of Munra-O. And so it was that there grew upon me the glamour of the hunt, though I had forgotten Tarn, and took me into mossy places and into dark woods, and I became the cousin of the wolf and looked into the lynx's eyes and knew the bear; and the birds called to me with half-remembered notes, and there grew in me a deep love of great rivers and of all western seas, and a distrust ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... he must have passed this, and he could not pass it without leaving his traces. But no sign of him or the German could be seen. With a darkening face my friend strode along the margin, eagerly observant of every muddy stain upon the mossy surface. Sheep-marks there were in profusion, and at one place, some miles down, cows had left their tracks. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I hope," said Aram, calmly. "Yes, let me think; by this time he must be in France. Dearest, let us rest here on this dry mossy bank for a little while;" and Aram drew his arm round her waist, and, his countenance brightening as if with some thought of increasing joy, he poured out anew those protestations of love, and those anticipations of the future, which befitted the eve of a morrow ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... living can conceive how mossy and dried-up and gnarled and black and unlike a human being such an old plain-dweller could be. The skin was so drawn over brow and cheeks, that he looked almost like a death's-head, and one saw only by a faint ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... it must have been a desolate and austere place until, as at the date when Mark first came there, it was graced by the perfume and gold of acacias, by wistaria and jasmine and honeysuckle, by the ivory goblets of magnolias, by crimson fuchsias, and where formerly its grey walls grew mossy north and east by pink and white camelias and the waxen bells of lapagerias. The garden was a wilderness of scarlet rhododendrons from the thickets of which innumerable blackbirds and thrushes preyed upon the peas. The lawns ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers, through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold the grain-fields golden, where the bison grazed of eld; See the fanes of forests olden by the ruthless Saxon felled,— Plumed pines that spread their shadows ere Columbus spread his sails. Firs that fringed the mossy meadows ere the Mayflower braved the gales, Iron oaks that nourished bruin while the Vikings roamed the main, Crashing fall in broken ruin for the greedy marts ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... at the fountain's sliding foot Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside My soul into the boughs does glide; There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and claps its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch—and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun; bright pencils of yellow light fall ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... invariably followed, sooner or later, by that increase of vegetable and animal life which it is their object to produce, so, we may suppose, it was with European savages in the olden time. The sight of the fresh green in brake and thicket, of vernal flowers blowing on mossy banks, of swallows arriving from the south, and of the sun mounting daily higher in the sky, would be welcomed by them as so many visible signs that their enchantments were indeed taking effect, and would ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... hastened his departure. She assured him that the others were close behind, and that nothing could suit her better than to rest on a mossy stone that happily presented itself till ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... when ye're a shapeless cairn! As yet ye little ken about the matter, But twa-three winters will inform ye better. When heavy, dark, continued a'-day rains, Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, Or haunted Garpal[64] draws his feeble source, Arous'd by blust'ring winds an' spotting thowes, In mony a torrent down the snaw-broo rowes; While crashing ice ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... mind's eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as "truth" and "honor" and now and then just "kindness." Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... in the NW. of Ireland, in the province of Ulster, the most mountainous in the country; is mossy and boggy, and is indented along the coast with bays, and fringed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shepherd king and queen, Painted and frail amid her nodding bows, Under the sombre branches, and between The green and mossy garden-ways she goes, With little mincing airs one keeps to pet A darling and provoking perroquet. Her long-trained robe is blue, the fan she holds With fluent fingers girt with heavy rings, So vaguely ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... fuller on earth could white it, that flung its skirts over the clumps of trees and scattered farm-houses, and was only divided where the Tochty ran with black, swollen stream. The great moor rose and fell in swelling billows of snow that arched themselves over the burns, running deep in the mossy ground, and hid the black peat bogs with a thin, treacherous crust. Beyond, the hills northwards and westwards stood high in white majesty, save where the black crags of Glen Urtach broke the line, and, above our lower Grampians, we caught glimpses ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... this species on the low, mossy and sheltered hills along the dreary coast of Labrador. In the midst of the mosses and lichens that covered the rocks the bird imbedded its nest, composed of fine grasses, arranged in a circular form and lined with the feathers ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... usual, for neither Menard nor Father Claude could overcome the influence of Danton's heavy face and the maid's troubled eyes. After the supper the two strolled away, and sat just out of earshot on a mossy knoll. For hours they talked there, their voices low, save once or twice when Danton's rose. They seemed to have lost all count of time, all heed of appearances. Menard and the priest made an effort at first to appear ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... that stretched its great arms out over the low dark house, which seemed to be creeping nearer and nearer to its mighty trunk for protection, until of late years the spreading branches had dropped their store of glossy acorns and embossed cups even on the farther slope of its mossy roof, a good twenty yards away from the scarred and rugged bole. "Two decks and a passage"—two moderate-sized rooms with a wide open pass-way between, and a low dark porch running along the front—constituted all that was left of a once well-known place of public refreshment. At each end a stone ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles on its way, tho' quarrelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling waters of Neptune's blue domain, 'mid mossy banks, fanned by gentlest zephyrs, played on by the glorious sunlight or 'neath the shadows cast o'er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest. What about that, Simon? ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... among the thickly growing pine trees in the plantation by her side, casting quaint shadows on the cone-strewn ground, across the little piece of broken paling in the bottom of the dry ditch, and upon the mossy bank where his head was resting upon a sweet-smelling tuft of heather. Most of all it flashed and glittered upon the inch or two of steel which still lay buried in his side—a curiously shaped little dagger which, although she strove to keep her eyes away from it, ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... well back from the road. He met nobody, except an occasional countryman driving a wood-laden team. Presently the road lay between stately groves of oaks, although now and then they stood on one side only of the highway. Nearly all the oaks bore a shag of dried leaves about their trunks, like mossy beards of old men, only the shag was a bright russet instead of white. The ground under the oaks was like cloth-of-gold under the sun, the fallen leaves yet retained so much color. James heard a sharp croak, then a crow flew with wide flaps of ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... we will go and see them, if you like. But, on our way, I must tell you what happened to me as I approached the spring. I was walking upon the wet stones with my head down, guided by the slight noise of the clear little jet of water which bursts from the heart of the mossy rock. I was about to sit down on the stone which forms a natural seat at the side of it, when I saw that the place was already occupied by a good friar whose pale, haggard face was half-hidden by his cowl of coarse cloth. He ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... foliage. The garden was in the first fresh flush of spring—that idyllic season which, in Italy more than in any other land, realises the glowing descriptions of the poets. Plucking a leafy twig from the branches and a gray lichen from the trunk as mementoes of the place, I sat down on the mossy hole, and tried to bring back in imagination the haunted past. Nature was renewing her old life; the same flowers still covered the earth with their divine frescoes; but where was he whose spirit informed all the beauty and translated its mystic ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... had the fine grounds, with their soft mossy sloping lawns, and tranquil brimful waters and shadowy groves of oak and elm, great immemorial trees, looked lovelier than they did that day to greet their ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... the hills, for there was a strong brake to keep it safe. And the dogs were either invited to ride with Jones, or were permitted to get to the bottom as best pleased them with Ben, which meant a scamper through fields of blue forget-me-nots and purple lupine, over damp and mossy dells, and along the slopes where tiny birds were hidden in cozy nests about which ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... of the Peraean rills, And of that other ridge whose barren back Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack, South-westward to Cleone. There she stood About a young bird's flutter from a wood, Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, By a clear pool, wherein she passioned To see herself escap'd from so sore ills, While her robes ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... milk, and set forth into the forest. The doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron's table. The whole of your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the estrats, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the summit was very difficult on account of the slippery clay earth and the tough network of plants; but the last five hundred feet were unexpectedly easy, the very steep summit being covered with a very thick growth of thinly leaved, knotted, mossy thibaudia, rhododendra, and other dwarf woods, whose innumerable tough branches, running at a very small height along the ground and parallel to it, form a compact and secure lattice-work, by which one mounted upwards as on a slightly ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... in the woods," sighed Nan, as she sat down on a green mossy seat beneath a great oak tree. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Meadow Brook • Laura Lee Hope
... shooting was going forward, she would frisk around me as I strolled in a meadow, gay with my favourite cowslips, or run before me as I passed along a lane, where primroses were peeping out of its mossy sides, looking back every now and then to see if I was following her. There was the dew still glittering on the flowers, which, from their situation, had not yet felt the influence of the morning sun, reminding me of some favourite lines ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... situated than any other building on the street. Here the land made a slight ascent, giving a more extended view of the valley and distant hills than at any other point. The business character of this street mingled oddly in summer with the rural life around it. At several right-angles, green and mossy lanes, arched by venerable elms, seemed to be offering their crooked elbows to lead it back to the simple pastoral ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... and still in the mossy glade that I threw myself down on the grass, remaining until it got nearly dark, when I thought it about time to return to the ship, though loth to leave the doves, who cooed a soft farewell after me, which I continued to hear long after I ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a young lady who is just now blooming into the maturity of womanhood, are toiling up a gentle slope, where the spring sun lies warmly. The old man totters, though he leans heavily upon his cane; and he pants as he seats himself upon a mossy rock that crowns the summit of the slope. As he recovers breath, he draws the hand of the lady in his, and with a trembling eagerness he points out an old mansion that lies below under the shadow of tall sycamores; and he says,—feebly ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... the burden to a close, A shout from the whole multitude arose, That lingered in the air like dying rolls Of abrupt thunder, when Ionian shoals 310 Of dolphins bob their noses through the brine. Meantime, on shady levels, mossy fine, Young companies nimbly began dancing To the swift treble pipe, and humming string. Aye, those fair living forms swam heavenly To tunes forgotten—out of memory: Fair creatures! whose young childrens' children bred Thermopylae its heroes—not yet dead, But in old marbles ever beautiful. ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... revealed to me that night, and faintly shadowed forth to her, now drew us together more and more, and for a time our companionship was almost constant. We read, we walked, we talked together; we wandered through summer groves in the twilight, or, seated on the mossy root of some old tree, watched the light dying in the west, and the stars come out one by one; or viewed the sun slowly and majestically disappearing beneath the horizon, gorgeous with clouds of purple and of gold; or marked the varied changes of the sky on the calm expanse of summer water, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... later, in his small bare room underneath the mossy roof, with the small square window through which the breezes blew, Allan stood and looked about him. Dinner was over. It had been something of a feast, with unusual dainties, and a bunch of lilacs upon the table. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... tree, fruit tree; pulse, legume. Adj. vegetable, vegetal, vegetive^, vegitous^; herbaceous, herbal; botanic^; sylvan, silvan^; arborary^, arboreous^, arborescent^, arborical^; woody, grassy; verdant, verdurous; floral, mossy; lignous^, ligneous; wooden, leguminous; vosky^, cespitose^, turf-like, turfy; endogenous, exogenous. Phr. green-robed senators of mighty woods [Keats]; this is the forest ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dim light that filtered through the branches, walking in so uncertain a place was attended with a good deal of danger; for not only was there a likelihood of falls leading to broken legs, but broken necks also were an easy possibility by the chance of a slip upon the mossy edge of one or another of the many ledges, followed by a spin through the air ending suddenly upon the jagged rocks below. Indeed, so ticklish did I find my way that I began to think that the Indians had spoken no more than the simple ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... ancient trees of the wooded peninsula. Music was resounding in the place, and water sang in the kettles. The body of the crocodile, in tow of the boats, turned from side to side; sometimes presenting its belly, white and torn, sometimes its spotted back and mossy shoulders. Man, the favorite of nature, is little disturbed by his ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... storms had roared and crashed among Its branches, breaking here and there a limb; But every now and then broad sunlit days Lovingly lingered, caught among the leaves. Yes, it had known all this, and yet to us It does not speak of mossy forest ways, Of whispering pine trees or the shimmering birch; But of quick winds, and the salt, stinging sea! An artist once, with patient, careful knife, Had fashioned it like to the untamed sea. Here waves uprear themselves, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... of Teign Valley, at a point not far distant from that where Will Blanchard met John Grimbal for the first time, and wrestled with him beside the river, there rises a tall bank, covered with fern, shadowed by oak trees. A mossy bridle-path winds below, while beyond it, seen through a screen of wych-elms and hazel, extend the outlying meadows of ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... falling mantles over dresses never cognizant of crinoline: gentlemen, with cocked-hats, their bag-wigs and ties appearing behind; and beneath their puce-coloured coats, delicate silk tights and gossamer stockings were visible, as they trod the mossy lawn of the Palace Gardens at Richmond, or, followed by a tiny greyhound, prepared for the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... mile and a half of walking we came to an oak wood. The road dipped suddenly between cool, green, mossy banks and lay in deep, grateful shade from the arching oaks above. I climbed the bank on one side and looked into the wood. It was very thick and wild, apparently rarely penetrated. Through the close-growing stems of the undergrowth I saw a bluebell ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... step his jaded spirits rose. He was a passionate lover of mountains, with that modern spirit which finds in them man's best refuge from modernness. The damp fragrance of the mossy banks and bare hedges; the racing freshness of the stream, and the little eddies of foam blown from it by the wind; the small gray sheep in the fields; the crags overhead dyed deep in withered heather; the stone farmhouses with ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Tripp. "It's a girl. A beauty. One of the howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with dew— violets in their mossy bed—and truck like that. She's lived on Long Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against her on Thirty-fourth Street. She'd just got in on the East River ferry. I tell you, she's a beauty that would take the hydrogen out of all the peroxides ...
— Options • O. Henry
... a blaze of flowers. He walked slowly through the long avenues of trees, past mossy marbles and old-time columns, and threading the grove by the bronze lion, came upon the tree-crowned terrace above the fountain. Below lay the basin shining in the sunlight. Flowering almonds encircled the terrace, and, in a greater spiral, groves of chestnuts wound in ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... sat on a mossy old log, laughing until his sides ached. "Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!" laughed Striped Chipmunk, holding his sides. Over in the Green Forest he could still hear Chatterer the Red Squirrel crying "Thief! Robber!" as he chased his big cousin, Happy Jack, and ...
— Happy Jack • Thornton Burgess
... the forest, the wooded hillside and the little lake may not be the exact words, but the thought is there just as White Pigeon expressed it to me that evening when we sat on the mossy bank of the lake at Grasmere and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... waste land, called the Wilderness, had for us all the charms of a primeval forest. Here in the early spring we used to come and watch the first violet uplifting its head from the dark green leaves behind the mossy boles, and listen for the first note of the blackcap, the nightingale's herald, and the first coo of the wood-pigeons among the bare and newly-budding trees. And here, in the summer, we used to come as soon as breakfast was over with as many story-books ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... more the little princess was dreaming in the midst of the loveliest dreams—of summer seas and moonlight and mossy springs and great murmuring trees, and beds of wild flowers with such odours as she had never smelled before. But, after all, no dream could be more lovely than what she had left behind ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... his passion to the full. During one of his grand expeditions, two remarkable events had place. A gigantic boar dug open with his tusks a marvellously clear spring, which bubbled forth so vigorously, and purled so bright and cool along the mossy fields, that a brook was formed from it immediately. This discharged itself into the low grounds with rare turns and windings; so that Herbert was fain to fix a village there, and to name it after the boar, and the brook which his ferocity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... of her own had she none—and often both her parents—who lived in a hut by itself up among the mossy stumps of the old decayed forest—had to leave her alone—sometimes even all the day long, from morning till night. But she no more wearied in her solitariness than does the wren in the wood. All the flowers were her friends—all the birds. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... very tired indeed; and the bank with its cool shade looked so tempting that at last she seated herself upon it, letting her feet sink deep into its mossy side. She clasped the precious pail tightly in her hands, but the noise inside grew louder, and now it had an angry sound. "Oh, I wonder what it ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie
... domain, and to penetrate its fastnesses proved a scratchy performance, resulting in a long rent down the front of Raymonde's skirt, and several tears in Aveline's muslin blouse, to say nothing of wounds on wrists and ankles. There was quite a clearing in the middle, with soft, mossy grass and clumps of hemp agrimony, and actually a small apple-tree with nine apples upon it. They were green and very sour, but the girls each sampled one, with a kind of feeling that by so doing they were taking formal possession of the territory, though, with Paradise for an analogy, it ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... have never met with any one that has seen them in England in the winter. I believe they are not fond of going near the water, but feed on earth-worms, that are common on sheep-walks and downs. They breed on fallows and lay-fields abounding with grey mossy flints, which much resemble their young in colour; among which they skulk and conceal themselves. They make no nest, but lay their eggs on the bare ground, producing in common but two at a time. There is reason to think their young ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... the liberty of the individual and of the fact that "hurting couldn't make her good," she executed a solitary little dance on the green, mossy sward beneath the trees. It was rather a painful process, since certain portions of her anatomy still tingled from the retributive strokes of justice, but she set her teeth and accomplished the dance with a consciousness of unholy glee that ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... of the "base, the untrue!" I have tasted the cup they have given to you; I've felt the deep sorrow in the living green Of a low mossy grave by the silvery stream. But the dear mother I then sought for in vain Is an angel presence and with me again; And in the still night, from the silence deep, Come the bright angels to ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... a secret plan for driving a four-in-hand, seconded Tom's idea, and finally it was decided that they should go to Mossy Pond, a beautiful glen ten miles from Westerton, in a rocky region on the lake shore apart from the farming country. Sibyl took the list, and went out to deliver the invitations which Aunt Faith had wisely confined to the immediate neighbor-hood. Mr. Leslie was the only one who lived at some distance, ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... feet the plain broke away sharply, in a series of steplike sandy benches, to where the Rio Grande bore quartering across the desert, turning to the Mexican sea; the Mesilla Valley here, a slender ribbon of mossy green, broidered with loops of flashing river—a ribbon six miles by forty, orchard, woodland, and green field, greener for the desolate gray desert beyond and the yellow hills of sand edging the valley floor. Below him Las Uvas, chief ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... precipitous mountains, made a disagreeable impression on me. I thought if I were to be drowned I should prefer the blue sea to that cold, black pool. The flora was lovely, and on returning from our expeditions in the evening, the damp, mossy banks were luminous with glowworms: I never saw so many, either before or since. We never fail to make acquaintances wherever we go, and our friends at Munich had given us letters to various people who were passing the summer there, many of whom had evening receptions once a week. At ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... a mossy trail. The shade fell thin, warm, and coloured, from leaves so tender that the light passed through their half-transparent panes. Overhead there was the delicate scent of green things and of sap, and underfoot the deep smell of moss ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... buildings spread below him; he seemed to be looking down upon them; and as they approached the blurred and refracted edge of the picture they became indistinct. There were also trees curious in shape, and in colouring a deep mossy green and an exquisite grey, beside a wide and shining canal. And something great and brilliantly coloured flew across the picture. But the first time Mr. Cave saw these pictures he saw only in flashes, his hands shook, his head moved, the vision came and went, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... series of tiny waterfalls, its banks fringed with azalea bushes and slender cherry trees. Then he walked slowly along the path that led upward, winding to and fro through clusters of pines and cedars and over mossy slopes to the little house which stood in a clearing at the top of the garden surrounded by fir trees and backed by ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky. Lucy. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... improvements; and among others he fell to draining a piece of outlying waste and unreclaimed land of Lord Cumnor's, which was close to Squire Hamley's property; that very piece for which he had had the Government grant, but which now lay neglected, and only half-drained, with stacks of mossy tiles, and lines of up-turned furrows telling of abortive plans. It was not often that the squire rode in this direction now-a-days; but the cottage of a man who had been the squire's gamekeeper in those more prosperous days when the Hamleys could afford to preserve, was close to the rush-grown ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... frost has opened the burs! It has done half their work for them already. 8. How they laugh and sing, and shout to each other as they fill their baskets! The sun looks down through the yellow leaves; the rocks give them mossy seats; the birds and squirrels wonder what these strange people are doing in their woods. 9. Jeannette really helps, though she is only a little girl; and her father says at night, that his Jane is a dear, good child. This makes her very happy. She thinks about it at ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... so too," said she; "and then we will have that lovely maroon and crimson carpet that I saw at Lowe's;—it is an ingrain, to be sure, but has a Brussels pattern, a mossy, mixed figure, of different shades of crimson; it has a good warm, strong color, and when I come to cover the lounges and our two old arm-chairs with a pretty maroon rep, it will make such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... only took his seat,—the mossy seat prepared for him,—and declared himself to be now at the service of any who wished to consult or converse with him. Instead of thrusting his own opinions and reproofs upon them, as it was M. Kollsen's wont to do, he waited for the people to open their minds to ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... said Gerald, but he leaned forward and struck a match. "It is a cave!" he cried, and put his knee on the mossy stone he had been sitting on, scrambled ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... Cora," he answered, as he gently laid her down on the mossy rocks, and went and brought her water from the spring in ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... headstones around me! some newly put up, and others mossy and grey; it was a humbling yet an edifying sight, preaching, as forcibly as ever Maister Wiggie did in his best days, of the vanity and the passingness of all human enjoyments. Mouldered to dust beneath the tufts lay the blithe laddies with ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... head of the rapid, and it was beautiful there. A long terrace stretched away for miles ahead. It was thinly wooded, as they all were, with spruce and a few poplars, smooth, dry, and mossy, and thirty feet below us was the river with North Pole Brook coming in on the other side. It was an ideal ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... sentinelled the street, gay lifeguards of autumn; through dark green cedars the crimson creeper threaded its sprays of blood-red; birches, gilded to their tops, swayed to every wind, and drooped their graceful boughs earthward to shower the mossy sward with glittering leaves; heavy oaks turned purple-crimson through their wide-spread boughs; and the stately chestnuts, with foliage of tawny yellow, opened wide their stinging husks to let the nuts fall for squirrel and blue-jay. Splendid sadness clothed all the world, opal-hued mists ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... little islands has been joined to the main land with gravel carted into the river, and a bleach-house or some other abomination erected upon it. The place is disenchanted. The sad Genius of Romance who once loved to stretch his limbs upon the mossy rocks, and catch inspiration from watching the foam and listening to the roar, has departed with a shriek, never ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... the mountains drew closer in the crystal air, and the washed fields renewed their green. So bright and sunny was the morning that the late summer wore the air of spring. Cary stood still beside a log, huge and mossy, that lay beside the road. "Let us rest here a moment," he said, and, taking his seat, began to draw in the dust before him with the butt of his whip. "I do not remember seeing you that day. I did not know ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... to take real delight in bright things, especially pebbles and flowers for their own sake. Its little lean-to, or bower of sticks, which has been built in our own Zoological Park in New York City, is fronted by a cleared space, which is usually mossy. To this it brings its colorful treasures, sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, which are renewed when faded and replaced by others. All this has, probably, something to do with courtship, which should ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... since remained. How long it had taken him to accomplish this passage he could not guess, but from the sun's position it seemed to be about noon when he again beheld day. He sat down, dazzled and fatigued, on the mossy floor of the grotto, and watched the mountain torrent eddying and sweeping furiously past in the gorge beneath his retreat. After a while he slept, and awoke towards evening faint with hunger and bitterly regretting the affliction which prevented him from ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... been got up among a few select friends. Upon the last afternoon of their stay at D—— they went for a ramble into a pretty little copse wood, the children were looking for berries, and Isabel sat upon a mossy bank reading. ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... little maid's steps were so light and elastic, as if a fairy were gliding over the dewy grass; and sometimes she walked so slowly, so wearily, as if a little old grandmother came limping along, hunting for lichens on the mossy ground. ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... flame still glowed on, apparently undiminished. The curtain of night seemed to be suddenly undrawn. Objects the most minute were visible as in the broad view of day. The brown heath, the grey and the mossy stone, were each distinguishable, but clad alike in one bright and unvarying colour, red as the roaring furnace. Soon the great magazine of inflammable matter in the interior caught fire, and rolled out in a wide mass of light, like the first burst ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... childlike charm, As candor leads desire, Now with a clasp of blossomy arm, A butterfly kiss of fire; Now with a toss of tousled gold, A barefoot sound of green, A breath of musk, of mossy ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... seasons had been sweet to her: dear to her was "the summer, clothing the general earth with greenness," and the winter, when "the redbreast sits and sings be-twixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of the mossy apple-tree." She had listened to "the eave-drops falling in the trances of the blast," and seen them "hang in silent icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon." There had been no change in nature unnoticed or unbeloved by her. The unbroken silence reigning around her, heightened ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the sign of recovering health. Kind nature put that district to sleep while she operated on the disquieted lower functions. I looked on my later self as one observes the mossy bearded substances travelling blind along the undercurrent of the stream, clinging to this and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... listen to the music of the god who ruled them. For as Pan sat in the shade of a forest one night and piped on his reeds until the very shadows danced, and the water of the stream by which he sat leapt high over the mossy stones it passed, and laughed aloud in its glee, the god had so gloried in his own power that ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the rolling hills like ribbons of dental cream squeezed out evenly on rich green velour. Chateaux, pearl white centres in settings of emerald green, push their turrets and bastions above the mossy plush of the mountain side. Lazy little streams silver the valleys ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... of the 21st, we left our encampment, and soon after arrived at the Mossy Portage, where the cargoes were carried through a deep bog for a quarter of a mile. The river swells out, above this portage, to the breadth of several miles, and as the islands are numerous there are a great variety of channels. Night overtook ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... began to mow the bracken with great scythes, and to carry it away in carts which tilted and elbowed their way down the mossy, heather-fringed tracks. Here and there the down-stretched arms of the firs caught the topmost fronds of bracken and swept them from their murdered brethren, and held them precariously suspended, only to drop them when the first wind ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... that all were to take part in the race—consequently all were bent on losing not one moment of practice. They swam, off and on, for the whole morning—occasionally throwing themselves upon the mossy bank, to rest and get their breath, then going at it again ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... masses lay heaped at its foot, grotesque yet solemn. Then there were larger masses, piles of enormous boulders on his right, as if a whole cliff had crashed to fragments; and a great expanse of them, mossy and weed-covered, stretching on his left to the water's edge. He was aware of them, too, ahead of him, extending in the gloom indefinitely. And soon he had to pick out a tortuous way between the mighty heaps on one hand and the far-spread belt ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... snake across your path Stretches in his golden bath: Mossy-footed squirrels leap Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep: Yaffles on a chuckle skim Low to laugh from branches dim: Up the pine, where sits the star, Rattles deep the moth-winged jar. Each has business of his own; But should you distrust ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... parish, now called Monzievaird, but formerly Monivaird, and anciently Moivaird, is believed to be Gaelic, and to signify, not the hill, but rather the "mossy plain" of the bards. It is difficult to say how far this carries us back. The Bards are not to be confounded with the Druids, a religious class from which they were quite distinct. The bards seem to have been the seanachies, antiquaries, poets, and genealogists. ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... fir-top floats, an airy isle, High o'er the mossy ground; Harmonious silence breathes the while In ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... gazing at us and waving their hats; and small boats with ladies in them waving their handkerchiefs; and passed the green shore of Staten Island, and caught sight of so many beautiful cottages all overrun with vines, and planted on the beautiful fresh mossy hill-sides; oh! then I would have given any thing if instead of sailing out of the bay, we were only coming into it; if we had crossed the ocean and returned, gone over and come back; and my heart leaped up ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... have no hesitation in confessing that it was the most uncomfortable meal I ever ate. But I kept my fears to myself, and only once was caught by Gunson looking anxiously around at the slope clotted with tree, bush, and clump of mossy rock, when his smile made me turn to my tin mug ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... in the great forest, and filling their basket with strawberries, Haensel and Gretel came to a beautiful mossy tree-trunk where they concluded to sit down and rest before going home. They had wandered so far that they really didn't know that they were lost, but as a matter of fact they had no notion of where they were. Without knowing it, they had gone ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... hardship, of toil and endless tasks, from day-break until long after dark, and with the most primitive facilities one can imagine. Only on calendars do we see a beauteous Indian maiden draped in velvet, reclining on a mossy bank, and gazing at her own image in a placid pool. That Indian is the figment of a fevered artist brain in a New York studio. Should a real Indian woman try that stunt she'd search a long way for the water. Then she'd likely recline in a cactus bed and gaze at ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks; a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher; a mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy ones; behind him the loveliest of wooded hills, all toned down by graceful culture, and before him the silvery mirrors of Windermere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... shapes of flowers: the heath, the fox-glove with its bells, The palmy fern's green elegance, fanned in soft woodland smells; The milkwort on the mossy turf his nice touch fingers trace, And the eye-bright, though he sees it not, he finds it ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... were now making the best of their way home, sometimes along well-trodden paths or across the plains, sometimes wading through deep sand or mossy bogs, and then through forests of pine, oak, birch, and alder. The pine forest was called the King's Wood; the oak forest was sacred to the God Taara; the forest where the slender birch-trees grew was called the Maidens' Wood, and the alder-wood was ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the night on the mossy bank of a small stream, overshadowed by large cotton-woods through which the stars peered, and the new moon with its silvery crescent gleamed faintly as the shadows ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... chilled at sunset, the ground crisped, and ere dusk a hoar frost was insidiously stealing over growing grass and unfolding bud. It whitened the pavement in front of Briarmains (Mr. Yorke's residence), and made silent havoc among the tender plants in his garden, and on the mossy level of his lawn. As to that great tree, strong-trunked and broad-armed, which guarded the gable nearest the road, it seemed to defy a spring-night frost to harm its still bare boughs; and so did the leafless grove ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... thing! You're as innocent as your own daisies, and it is a shame to take you from your mossy bed. Don't you know there is work and work? God says, "Go work in My vineyard," and we good Christians answer, "Yes, Lord, but let some one else go ahead and take out the stumps." The most of us like to do our spiritual farming on a western scale. ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... she approached the tiny ford, warily, she saw a saddled horse tied to a sapling and a man seated on a mossy log. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... glorious walk from Dumbarton to Loch Lomond through this enchanting valley. The air was mild and clear; a few light clouds occasionally crossing the sun chequered the hills with sun and shade. I have as yet seen nothing that in pastoral beauty can compare with its glassy winding stream, its mossy old woods and guarding hills and the ivy-grown, castellated towers embosomed in its forests or standing on the banks of the Leven—the purest of rivers. At the little village called Renton is a monument to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... still known as the Pilgrim's Way, someone who wore the ugly uniform of a Guards officer (which is a sort of du Maurier survival demanding Dundreary whiskers). He seemed to hesitate ere he turned aside, opened the gate and began to mount those hundred and twenty mossy steps which led ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... By a mossy bank a little girl—a miniature Audrey—stout, rosy, and ragged, stood with a yellow straw hat aslant on her yellow hair, eating the leaves from a spray of beech in her hand. Audrey looked at us, eating the beech leaves steadily, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... ranks of trees. They, in thy sun, Budded and shook their green leaves in thy breeze, And shot toward heaven. The century-living crow Whose birth was in their tops, grew old and died Among their branches, till at last they stood, As now they stand, mossy, and tall, and dark, Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold Communion ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... is "The Great Stone Face," which appeals strongly to younger readers, especially to those who have lived much out of doors and who cherish the memory of some natural object, some noble tree or mossy cliff or singing brook, that is forever associated with their thoughts of childhood. To others the tale will have added interest in that it is supposed to portray the character of Emerson as Hawthorne ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... shepherd is a king whose throne Is a mossy mountain, on Whose top we sit, our crook in hand, Like a sceptre of command, Our subjects, sheep grazing below, Wanton, frisking to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... fair little wood of silver birches on the West Branch of the Neversink, somewhat below the place where the Biscuit Brook runs in? There is a mossy terrace raised a couple of feet above the water of a long, still pool; and a very pleasant spot for a friendship-fire on the shingly beach below you; and a plenty of painted trilliums and yellow violets and white foam-flowers to adorn your woodland banquet, if ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... venerable rose-bush; and there is something analogous to this in human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental—who can give the world nothing but flowers—should die young, and never be seen with gray hairs and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy bark and scanty foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that beauty is not worthy of immortality. Nothing else, indeed, is worthy of it; and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on the other hand, grow old without reproach. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... next bit of cotton clings to a bush above a mossy log. The trap is gone and for ten minutes we hunt carefully over every inch of ground. Finally my wife discovers it fifteen feet away and stifles a scream for in it, caught by the neck and still alive, is a huge rat nearly two ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... graze, and we gave him a little milk to-night, as well as to the jackal. Fritz had taken the precaution to cover the eyes of his eagle, and tying it fast by the leg to a branch, it rested very tranquilly. We then retired to our mossy beds, to recruit our strength for the ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... clear, crystal pools, a long winding chain, doubling back on itself in loops and curves—form the source of the permanent flow of the Roper; pools only a few feet deep, irregular and wide-spreading, with mossy-green, deeply undermined, overhanging banks, and lime-stone bottoms washed into terraces that gleam azure-blue ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... he took up his position there. At eleven o'clock, Dalbrque climbed a bank, scrambled over a wire fence, hid his bicycle under the branches and moved away. It seemed impossible to follow him in the pitchy darkness, on a mossy soil that muffled the sound of footsteps. Rnine did not make the attempt; but, at daybreak, he came with his chauffeur and hunted through the park all the morning. Though the park, which covered the side of a hill and was bounded below by ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... fullness of years has passed away. But he is not forgotten, and in the spring-time loving hands gather the wild flowers, which grow so sparsely there, and scatter them upon the mossy mound that ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... mounted with cannon, protected the humble buildings erected for the use of the first settlers on what is now the Custom-house Square. The little stream—not much more than a rivulet except in spring—which for many years rippled between green, mossy banks, now ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... red-clay hills and innumerable little streams ends my riding for the present, and the road eventually leads into a cul-de-sac, the source of the little streams and the home of spongy morasses whose deceptive mossy surface may or may not bear one's weight. Bound about the cul-de-sac is a curious jumble of rocks and red-clay heights; the strata of the former inclining to the perpendicular and sometimes rising like parallel walls above the earth, reminding one of the "Devil's Slide" in ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... have recently shared, unconsciously illustrates this, when he speaks of the privilege men like him enjoy, when free "to saunter forth with a delightful sense of leisure, and know that nothing will go wrong, although he should sit down on the mossy parapet of the little one-arched bridge that spans the brawling mountain-stream." On that Indian-summer day when Irving was buried, no object of the familiar landscape, through which, without formality, and in quiet grief, so many of the renowned and the humble followed his remains from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... had not gone beyond the woods when Kasya had seated herself under the mossy stone to weave her garlands. Its rays were thrown upon her face, broken by the shadows of the leaves and twigs. The work did not proceed rapidly, for Kasya was tired from heat and running in the woods. Her sunburnt hands moved ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Selden suggested, as they reached an open ledge of rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy boulders. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... a gleaner bringing down her one sheaf of corn to an old watermill, itself mossy and rent, scarcely able to get its stones to turn. An ill-bred dog stands, joyless, by the unfenced stream; two country boys lean, joyless, against a wall that is half broken down; and all about the steps down which the girl is bringing her sheaf, the bank of earth, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... yard at his father's house, the moss-covered roots of which were Judie's favorite playing place. This moss, he remembered, was nearly all on the north side of the trees, whose southern roots were bare. All the other mossy trees he could remember taught the same lesson, namely, that the green moss which grows around the bases of trees, grows chiefly on the north side. He had no doubt that the law was a general, if not a universal one, and as the mossy trees were very numerous, he had a guide easily ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... Echo-dwarf upon the ground, but the little rogue did not go away. He concealed himself between some low, mossy rocks, and he was so much of their color that you would not have noticed him if you had been looking ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... drifted swiftly along. In front of them, at the corner of the lake, near the road, was a mossy boat-house under a walnut tree, and a little landing-stage where a boat was moored, wavering like a shadow on the still grey water, below the green, decayed poles. All was shadowy with ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... is not yet. Even now, however, in 1690, the hoary cloister is only a battered and weatherbeaten fragment. It is almost covered by the branches of the trees that, planted right against the walls, have spread their limbs like creepers over the mossy ruins, as though endeavoring to protect the venerable pile. And here, sitting on a huge slab that has fallen from the broken arch above, is a small boy of ten. His name is Ebenezer Erskine; he is the son of the minister of Chirnside. Like his father, he was born ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... neatly kept and well-trimmed, bespoke recent care and attention; following a handsome alley of lime-trees, we reached a little jet d'eau, whose sparkling fountain shone diamond-like in the moonbeams, and escaping from the edge of a vast shell, ran murmuring amidst mossy stones and water-lilies that, however naturally they seemed thrown around, bespoke also the hand of taste in their position. On turning from the spot, we came directly in front of an old but handsome chateau, before which stretched a terrace of considerable extent. Its balustraded ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... milky petals—murmuring waters, on the bosom of which black swans majestically floated, and the graceful water-fowl, with their tender broods covered with silken down, darted restlessly in every direction, in pursuit of the insects among the reeds, or the fogs in their mossy retreats. Perhaps it might have been the enormous hollies, with their dark and tender green foliage; or the bridges uniting the banks of the canals in their embrace; or the fawns browsing in the endless avenues of the park; ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Anne followed with curiosity in her eyes, and with her firm little mouth pouted up to a puzzled shape. On reaching the mossy mill- head she found that he had fixed in the keen damp draught which always prevailed over the wheel an AEolian harp of large size. At present the strings were partly covered with a cloth. He lifted it, and the wires began to emit a weird harmony which ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... masonry. From the walls the vineyards & olive orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. There are several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of breeds not familiar to me. Roses overflow the retaining-walls, & the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters. The house is a very fortress for strength. The main walls—all brick covered with plaster—are about 3 feet thick. I have several times tried to count the rooms of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... heart?" he cried, stamping his foot on the mossy turf, "that you always laugh when I am ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... good, but the majority of them are satisfactory. Delicious bits of English landscape scenery peep out along the pages, as one turns the leaves of this beautiful collection. An old village church rising among the graves of centuries, a bird's-nest snug and warm in the boughs of a mossy tree, a group of old-time worshippers gathered on the grass, a brook making its way through flower-enamelled banks, a shepherd with his flock couched on the hill-side, and other similar scenes of quiet and rest, abound in this volume. The printer and the binder have produced as luxurious a specimen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... celebrated her festival of resurrection at Easter, and the day after the morrow joyous Whitsuntide would begin. Fresh green life was springing from the stump of every dead tree; even the rocks afforded sustenance to a hundred roots, a mossy covering and network of thorny tendrils clung closely to them. The wild vine twined boldly up many a trunk, fruit was already forming on the bilberry bushes, though it still glimmered with a faint pink hue amid the green of May. A thousand blossoms, white, red, blue and yellow, swayed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... due to a sudden sinking in the mossy causeway until she was almost buried in the tall ferns. Jack helped her out, shivered a moment, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... rock. The other day, passing by a ledge near the top of a mountain in a singularly desolate locality, my eye rested upon one of these structures, looking precisely as if it grew there, so in keeping was it with the mossy character of the rock, and I have had a growing affection for the bird ever since. The rock seemed to love the nest and to claim it as its own. I said, what a lesson in architecture is here! Here is a house that was built, but with such loving care and such beautiful adaptation ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... pearly lustre of the moon went out: The mossy banks and the meandering paths, The happy flowers and the repining trees, Were seen no more: the very roses' odors Died in the arms of the adoring airs. All—all expired save thee—save less than thou: Save only ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... inviting enough and a child wouldn't have feared to be there. Dean Burn came down from its cradle far away in the hills and threaded Dean Woods with ripple and flash and song. The beck lifted its voice in stickles and shouted over the mossy apron of many a little waterfall; and then under the dark of the woods it would go calm, nestle in a backwater here and there, then run on again. And of all fine spots on a sunny day the Hound's Pool was ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... large, to be sure, but its capacity was already so far taxed that it could not provide a jury room. It was therefore the custom of the bailiffs to use as a jury room an open, mossy glade shaded by a great live oak tree on the farther bank of the Llano, and distant two or three hundred yards from the court house. Here, therefore, the jury were conducted, the bailiffs retired to some distance, and discussion of ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... wings folded. The tombs were various as the lives now hidden beneath—commonplace, odd, original, simple, forced, pretentious, modest. In some the floor-stones were freshly cleaned and loaded with flowers, memorials, and miniature gardens of a Chinese elegance in littleness. In others the mossy slabs were mouldering or parting, and were covered with brambles and high weeds. But all bore well-known names, names distinctly Parisian, names of lawyers, judges, merchants of eminence, ranged here in rows as in the haunts of business and trade. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... they gazed on the narrow blue channel as it poured swiftly around a bend in the woods above and vanished from sight beneath the crooked arches of a mossy stone bridge a quarter of a mile below. The opposite shore was rocky and lined with pine trees, and over their tops could be seen against the horizon the jagged crest line of the ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... careful tend those fragrant lovely flowers, close of a day the doors, And with thine own hands take the can and sprinkle water o'er the mossy pots. Red, as if with cosmetic washed, are the shadows in autumn on the steps. Their crystal snowy bloom invites the dew on their spirits to heap itself. Their extreme whiteness mostly shows that they're more comely than all other flowers. When ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the woods; my feet were denuded of their commonplace attire and arrayed in white hose, beautifully clocked, and those precious slices, and my poor conscience tortured about my vanity. The girls also exchanged theirs for morocco slippers. We concealed our walking shoes under a mossy log ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm |
