"Plumy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possibly tell you the life story of yon big tree, the warrior of the woods who had beaten down all competitors and enemies and wore his purple cones like the tasseled honor badges of a soldier, with pendulous moving, plumy arms: yet to the eye of the Forester, the life history was there, in the fluted grooved columnar bark, in the knot scars where branches had been discarded to send the main trunk towering above its fellows for light and air, in the wood rings, where a branch had broken and fallen away in ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... irregularly and at various angles, there is a tendency in all to stoop less and less as they near the top of the tree. This structure, typified in the simplest possible terms at c, Fig. 17., is common to all trees, that I know of, and it gives them a certain plumy character, and aspect of unity in the hearts of their branches, which are essential to their beauty. The stem does not merely send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... herds, Tame and free-livers; Doubt not, thy music too In the deep rivers; And the whole plumy flight Warbling the day and night— Up at the gates of light, See, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... two haughty maidens used to be, In pride of plume, where plumy Death had trod, Trailing their gorgeous velvets wantonly, Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod; There, gentle stranger, thou may'st only see Two sombre Peacocks. Age, with sapient nod Marking the spot, still tarries to declare How they once ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... is a School of Instruction at the back of the Western Front set in a valley of green meadows bordered by files of plumy poplars and threaded through by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... ocean, into the woods of La Couresse, where it begins to descend slowly, through deep green shadowing, by great zigzags. Then, at a turn, you find yourself unexpectedly looking down upon a planted valley, through plumy fronds of arborescent fern. The surface below seems almost like a lake of gold-green water,—especially when long breaths of mountain-wind set the miles of ripening cane a-ripple from verge to verge: the illusion is marred only by the road, fringed with young cocoa-palms, which serpentines ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... thing that if Alex had no other engagement, she was to take supper at the Wilburs' on Fridays. She stood before Miss Virginia pulling off her long gloves, looking indeed unusually handsome in a gown of pale gray and a plumy black hat, which she had made herself with a sort of reluctant pleasure ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... house, and affording a cool place, full of scent of flowers and sound of fountains for the burning afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek a breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem faint for heat, and the dim plumy heads of cypress and poplar are motionless against the misty blue sky. In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and behind, elaborate garden walks walled with ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... city, between its rivers, whereon now no sail glinted in the sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of steam, no liner idled at anchor or nosed its slow course ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... state; His river, which, with course indefinite, Wandered across the sands without the wall, And lost itself in finding out the sea: Within, it floated swans, white splendours; lay Beneath the fairy leap of a wire bridge; Vanished and reappeared amid the shades, And led you where the peacock's plumy heaven Bore azure suns with green and golden rays. Ah! here the skies showed higher, and the clouds More summer-gracious, filled with stranger shapes; And when they rained, it was a golden rain That sparkled as it ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... horses were hitched to the mowing machine, and Peter drove out to the meadow. The plumy heads of the tall timothy swayed on their slender stalks as they bowed before the breeze that swept over the meadow, making it look in the sunshine like the rippling ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... Gay birds' wings, plumy pampas grass, strings of wampum, and pretty work in beads, bark, and feathers, pleased the girls. Minerals, arrow-heads, and crude sketches interested the Professor; and when the box was empty, Dan gave Mr Laurie, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... From the redundant petals, streaming back Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy. Faces had they of flame, and wings of gold; The rest was whiter than the driven snow. And as they flitted down into the flower, From range to range, fanning their plumy loins, Whisper'd the peace and ardour, which they won From that soft winnowing. Shadow none, the vast Interposition of such numerous flight Cast, from above, upon the flower, or view Obstructed aught. For, through the universe, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the monarch paused, with doubts oppress'd The beauteous queen relieved his labouring breast: "Hear me (she cried), to whom the gods have given To read this sign, and mystic sense of heaven, As thus the plumy sovereign of the air Left on the mountain's brow his callow care, And wander'd through the wide ethereal way To pour his wrath on yon luxurious prey; So shall thy godlike father, toss'd in vain Through all the dangers of the boundless main, Arrive (or if perchance ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... and looked down at the new pet, who wagged his plumy tail as if to deprecate the punishment ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and faint, This lime-tree bower my prison! They, meantime, My Friends, whom I may never meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge 5 Wander delighted, and look down, perchance, On that same rifted dell, where many an ash Twists its wild limbs beside the ferny rock Whose plumy[178:A] ferns forever nod and drip Spray'd by the waterfall. But chiefly thou 10 My gentle-hearted Charles! thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Littleholme A latticed casement peeps above still gardens Into a crown of druid-solemn trees Upon a knoll as high as a small house, A shapely mound made so by nameless men Whose smoothing touch yet shows through the green hide. When the slow moonlight drips from leaf to leaf Of that sharp, plumy gloom, and the hour comes When something seems awaited, though unknown, There should appear between those leaf-thatched piles Fresh, long-limbed women striding easily, And men whose hair-plaits swing with their shagged arms; Returning in that equal, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... therefore left without expression; at the edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a bird, moth, serpent, snail—all different, and each wrought to the very life—panting—plumy—writhing—glittering—full of breath and power. This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without invention, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... have once set foot by thine. Find ye no merit there? And once again When he met Hector singly, man to man, Not by your bidding, but the lottery's choice, His lot, that skulked not low adown i' the heap, A moist earth-clod, but sure to spring in air, And first to clear the plumy helmet's brim. Yes, Aias was the man, and I too there Kept rank, the 'barbarous mother's servile son.' I pity thee the blindness of that word. Who was thy father's father? A barbarian, Pelops, the Phrygian, if you trace him far! And what was Atreus, thine own father? One Who served ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... The plumy people streak their wings with oil, To throw the lucid moisture trickling off, And wait the approaching sign to strike at once Into ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... was changed in a trice to a coldly civil touching of noses, and the majestic wagging of a plumy tail. After which, side by side, the two collies—big and little—old and new—walked up to the veranda, to be petted by the humans who had so amusedly watched ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... sail a silver sea, Caverned by plumy groves of sunny palm, Broke on my startled vision suddenly; When as but quickly parted, sweet and calm, That long forgot yet ever haunting psalm Floated from lips that flew to greet me home. A meteor flamed; I woke in rude alarm; Above me orbed the temple's ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Grange under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with the scent ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... of the graves, something dark and wild with plumy tail slunk away into the shadows, and seemed a part of the place. The girl stopped a moment to gain courage in full sight of the graves, and the horse snorted, and stopped too, with his ears a-quiver, and a half-fright in ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... high above the rest, Shakes his huge spear, and nods his plumy crest: In throngs around his native bands repair, And groves of lances glitter ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... be fond of each other. And the mill with its booming—the great chestnut-tree under which they played at houses—their own little river, the Ripple, where the banks seemed like home, and Tom was always seeing the water-rats, while Maggie gathered the purple plumy tops of the reeds, which she forgot and dropped afterward—above all, the great Floss, along which they wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagre, come up like a hungry monster, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... do nicely!" Harriet, always happiest in the water, was sitting on the edge of the float, with her feet idly splashing. A glorious September sun blazed down upon the water, there was absolute silence up and down the curving shore. Above the plumy tops of the trees, rising abruptly from the beach with its weather-burned bath houses, the gables and porches of the new home showed here and there. There were other country mansions scattered up and down beside the blue waters of the Sound, but the Carters ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... plumy helmet and the martial mien Might dignify Minerva's awful charms; But more resistless far the Idalian queen— Smiles, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... went along he picked a large bunch of the wayside flowers as an offering to Phoebe—purple knapweed and betony, the plumy dead-pink heads of hemp-agrimony, and tufts of strong yellow fleabane, all squeezed together in his hot little hand. The air seemed alive with butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the "blue skippers" that look like periwinkles blown to life. A bee ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... anguish fell the Fiend, And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought Joyless triumphals of his hop't success, Ruin, and desperation, and dismay, Who durst so proudly tempt the Son of God. 580 So Satan fell and strait a fiery Globe Of Angels on full sail of wing flew nigh, Who on their plumy Vans receiv'd him soft From his uneasie station, and upbore As on a floating couch through the blithe Air, Then in a flowry valley set him down On a green bank, and set before him spred A table of Celestial Food, Divine, Ambrosial, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... lapped his new milk as usual at Uncle Roger's dairy door and then sat blandly on the flat stone before it, giving the world assurance of a cat, sleek sides glistening, plumy tail gracefully folded around his paws, brilliant eyes watching the stir and flicker of bare willow boughs in the twilight air above him. That was the last seen of him. In the morning he ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a plumy curtaine she doth draw, A chrystall mirror sparkles in thy breast, In which her fresh aspect when as she saw, And then her ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... deep breath, and did look out of the window, set high up in the court house, and that he did see the elm trees covering a home which, despite all his perfidy and neglect was full of love for him—love that needed no high sleeves nor great plumy hats, nor twinkling silver bangles, nor jangling gold chatelaines, to make it beautiful. But let us make it of record and set it down here, in this instrument that the court rose, looked into the great brown eyes ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... sun Hath chas'd nights' shadows damp and dun; Forth from his turfy couch, the lark Hath sprung to meet glad day: and hark! A mingling and delicious song Breathes from the blithe-voiced plumy throng; While, to the green-wood hasten we Whose craft is, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... ye, mem!" said the maid and Mistress Blatherwick who was close at hand, came; to which Maggie humbly but confidently making her request had it as kindly granted, and followed her to the barn to fill her pock with the light plumy covering of the husk of the oats, the mistress of Stonecross helping her the while and talking to her as she did so—for the soutar and his daughter were favourites with her and her husband, and they had not seen either of them for ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... plumy leafage hung over the road from each side, meeting and overlapping in the center until they formed an archway so dense that the tropical sun now high in the heavens penetrated it only at intervals. ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... schoolboy, going to the school I like best," he answered, waving a plumy spray of asters as if pointing out the lovely autumn world about them, full of gay hues, fresh airs, and ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... she addressed, in the accents of wonder. "It is impossible!—I watched her green mantle —I watched her plumy bonnet as I saw her hurried from the field, and felt my own inability to follow to the rescue; nor did force or exertion altogether leave me till the waving of the robe and the dancing of the feathers were lost to my eyes, and all hope of ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Mamie," came another loud hail from up the path toward the house and down came the General at top speed, with a plumy setter frisking in his wake. "Aunt Viney says for you to come there to her this minute. They is a-going to be the party and it's right by the Bible to have it, some for Mr. Mark, too. Tobe Poteet said 'shoo' when I told him he couldn't come, 'cause they ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... seriously. I don't want to be so aloof, but—I don't like to touch other people. It is rather horrid of me I suppose to be like those silky, plumy, luxurious Angora cats who never are civil to you and who always jump out of your ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... as the dust of plumy fountains blowing Across the lanterns of a revelling night, The tiny leaves of April's earliest growing Powder the trees—so vaporously light, They seem to float, billows of emerald foam Blown by the South on its bright airy tide, Seeming less trees than things beatified, ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... the boldest triumphs of her worth, NATURE herself invites the REAPERS forth; Dares the keen sickle from its twelvemonth's rest, And gives that ardour which in every breast From infancy to age alike appears, When the first sheaf its plumy ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... elfish, ruddy-faced throng about them. This Christmas Eve they were telling the monks wonderful stories of the Holy Land; its beautiful, vine-clad hills; its tropical, luscious fruits; its towering, plumy palms and hoary cedars; the long lines of caravans that wound over the silent, pathless deserts to bring to its cities the riches of Oriental commerce; the palaces and heathen temples of those cities, and the traditional glory of the Temple, with its magnificence ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... boy's dissembled face; That when, amidst the fervor of the feast, The Tyrian hugs and fonds thee on her breast, And with sweet kisses in her arms constrains, Thou may'st infuse thy venom in her veins." The God of Love obeys, and sets aside His bow and quiver, and his plumy pride; He walks Iulus in his mother's sight, And in the sweet ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Lord of the air, and master of its fate, It seems, it seems, sailing in splendid state Athwart the stretches of the skyey blue. Yet what might be the fleet-winged wanderer's fate. Did either pinion fail? Its flight is true Only when level buoyed upon the plumy two. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... the horizon line a ball of smoke as black as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high explosives. Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they told us, would be shrapnel. The German reply to the enemy's guns issued from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... silver sunset that was closing in, barred by plumy lines of purple cloud; he looked at the high tree-tops that caught the last light and at the birds going heavily homeward, just as if all these things were bits of written ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... sunset, unmatched in beauty since that at Abbeville,—deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple gray, in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in upper sky, like 'using up the brush,' said Joanie; remaining in glory, every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but only in color or light—form steady,) for half an hour full, and the clouds ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... bright scimitar and sable vest, The proud vizier distinguish'd o'er the rest; Six slaves in gay attire his bridle hold, His bridle rich with gems, and stirrups gold; His snowy steed adorn'd with costly pride, Whole troops of soldiers mounted by his side, These top the plumy crest Arabian courtiers guide. With artful duty, all decline their eyes, No bellowing shouts of noisy crowds arise; Silence, in solemn state, the march attends, Till at the dread divan the ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... was taken off when used.[3] At a short distance from the beech, inland, was a lake of some extent, nearly surrounded by lofty, densely-wooded hills. Some wild ducks were seen, and a gun being fired at them, the report raised numbers of the 'plumy tribe,' filling the air with their screams, alarmed at a noise to which they had been unaccustomed. Several native graves were observed, which were very neat; a stone was placed at the head and the grave neatly covered over by plaited sections ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... beside the lilac bushes, her arms still uplifted and fingers outstretched as if beckoning to the plumy sprays above her Head. "Isn't it queer how such things will happen when if I'd been trying to make poetry in my dairy I couldn't have thought of those words for an hour? I guess it was the lilacs that did it. Oh, you are so beautiful! You'd ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown |
