"Vernal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... budding breasts like fragrant fruit Of love were ripening to be pressed: Her voice, that shook my heart's red root, Yet might not break a babe's soft rest! More liquid than the running brooks, More vernal than the voice of Spring, When Nightingales are in their nooks, And all the leafy thickets ring. The love she coyly hid at heart Was shyly conscious in her eye; O! who that looked could help but love? Not I, ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... expectations," as he termed them, was undone, the notice of some persons of rank began to reach him. Shenstone, however, deeply colours the variable state of his own mind—"Recovering from a nervous fever, as I have since discovered by many concurrent symptoms, I seem to anticipate a little of that 'vernal delight' ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... enjoyment might hardly have been increased had her thoughts been more free from Robin's troubles, when she came down dressed for her first party, so like a lily of the valley in her delicate dress, that Owen acknowledged that it justified her choice, and murmured something of 'in vernal green and virgin white, her festal robes, arrayed.' Phoebe was only distressed at what she thought the profanation of quoting from such a source in compliment to her. Honora was gratified to find the lines in his memory upon any terms. Poor dear Honor, in one case at ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects," says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became 'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... moved the Senate when paying the last tribute to his dead body, coffined and there before them in the Senate chamber—may know how those estimated the man who knew him best. Friend of my heart, farewell! We soon shall meet, with vernal ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... lonely by the mournful forest streams, The loveliness and melody of childhood's happy dreams; Pale flowers, the vermeil-tinted, lightly fanned by vernal breeze, Whose fitful breath went sighingly among the solemn trees; Sunny streamlets, gushing clearly in their fresh and tameless glee, Sparkling onward, ever onward, toward a golden summer sea. Fairy isles of green were sleeping on its softly-heaving breast, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... are so happily situated as to afford bees proper pasturage both in the beginning of the season and also the autumn; it was the advice of Celsus that, after the vernal pastures are consumed, they should be transported to places abounding with autumnal flowers; as was practised by conveying the bees from Achaia to Attica, from Euboea and the Cyclad Islands to Syrus, and also in Sicily, where they were brought to Hybla from ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... sickness, and have counted time by the repercussions of pain! Rheumatism, cold, and fever have formed to me a terrible combination. I close my eyes in misery, and open them without hope. I look on the vernal day, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... peerless panorama of Ireland's portfolio, unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize regions, for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent translucent glow of our mild ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... makes the greatest vernal shoot is apt to make the least autumnal. Authors in general who have met celebrity at starting, have already had their reward; always their utmost due, and often much beyond it. We cannot hope for both celebrity and fame: supremely fortunate are the few who are ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... long the feeling of antiquity. CICERO, in his "Dialogue on Old Age," employs a beautiful analogy drawn from Nature, marking her secret conformity in all things which have life and come from her hands; and the human mind is one of her plants. "Youth is the vernal season of life, and the blossoms it then puts forth are indications of those future fruits which are to be gathered in the succeeding periods." One of the masters of the human mind, after much previous observation of those who attended ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... to the grove, having spent the last ten mornings there. Mr. Charteris had overrated her modest literary abilities so far as to ask her advice in certain details of his new book, which was to appear in the autumn, and they had found a vernal solitude, besides being extremely picturesque, to be conducive to the forming of really matured opinions. Moreover, she was assured that none of the members of the house-party would misunderstand her motives; people were so much less censorious ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... which we can never hope to understand more than partially and imperfectly. And it is this, taken together with the fact that he is the first English poet to read whom is to enjoy him, and that he garnished not only our language but our literature with blossoms still adorning them in vernal freshness,—which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the gallery of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest so inexhaustible for the historical as well as ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... tint of orange, or rose, or lilac, according to the stain of the sky, and there is no light in the rocky South that so tenderly touches the soul as this. Here the spurge drinks of the wine of heaven with golden lips wide open; but the hellebore, which has already lost all its vernal greenness, and is parched by the drought, ripens its drooping seeds sullenly on the shadowy side of the jutting crag, and seems to hate the sun. Higher and yet far below the plateau is a little field where ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... are kept. Let us give back to youth the indulgence of those passions, those coquetries, love and its terrors, love and its delights, and that fascinating company which followed the coming of the Franks. At this vernal season of life no fault is irreparable, and Hymen will come forth from the bosom of experiences, armed with confidence, stripped of hatred, and love in marriage will be justified, because it will have ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Nature, beating still With throbs her vernal passion taught her,— Even here, as on the vine-clad hill, Or by the Arethusan water! New forms may fold the speech, new lands Arise within these ocean-portals, But Music waves eternal wands,— Enchantress of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... longer drown the mind in sleep; But breathe the vernal air! Our hours may thus improvement reap, And ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... made, or the set of currents taken into account, yet voyages were for the most part accomplished with very tolerable accuracy and safety. An ample commerce grew up under Sidonian auspices. After the vernal equinox was over a fleet of white-winged ships sped forth from the many harbours of the Syrian coast, well laden with a variety of wares—Phoenician, Assyrian, Egyptian[1430]—and made for the coasts and islands of the Levant, the AEgean, the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... to be found in an old play. "Enter Robin Goodfellow, in a suit of leather, close to his body, his hands and face coloured russet colour, with a flail."—Grim, the Collier of Croydon, Act 4, Scene 1. At other times, however, he is presented in the vernal livery of the elves, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... vernal prime And widely known as "rathe," why bloom so late? Was it the lure of so-called "Summer-time," Extended well beyond the usual date? Our thanks for which reprieve Are SMILLIE'S, though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... the mild whispers use Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes, That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... everywhere under cultivation, and apparently rich and prosperous. Our road was admirable, and we rolled along at the rate of one Norsk mile (seven miles) an hour, through a land in full blossom, and an atmosphere of vernal odours. At the end of the second station we struck the main road from Christiania to Drontheim. In the station-house I found translations of the works of Dickens and Captain Chamier on the table. The landlord was the most polite and attentive Norwegian we had seen; but he made us pay for ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... of this terrible wind, which blows in the Mexican Gulf, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox, are known not only to the sailors, but to all those who have lived some time in this city. The variation in the barometer is the surest sign. A land breeze from the north-west first blows gently, then varies to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... that vernal hour The sacred city is in shades reclining, With gilded turrets in the sunrise shining: From sainted Magdalene's aerial tower Sounds far aloof that ancient chant are singing, And round the heart again those solemn ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... There was even a singular compensation to this amicable invasion; the inhabitants sometimes found gold in those breaches in the banks made by the overflow. To wait for the "old Rattlesnake sluicing" was a vernal ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... lambkin lying on the grass So stiff and cold while strangers careless pass, Never again to frisk amongst the flowers, Never again to skip in vernal bowers. Oh, little lambkin, death is hard for thee, Though many a weary wight would gladly flee From all the trouble of this mortal life, And bid Farewell to grief, ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... driving snow, or when in a calm and lucid interval of genial weather we hear him sing, if possible, more richly than before. His song reminds us of a coming season when the now dreary landscape will be clothed in a blooming garb befitting the vernal year—of the song of the Blackbird and Lark, and hosts of other tuneful throats which usher in that lovely season. Should you disturb him when singing he usually drops down and awaits your departure, though sometimes he merely retires to a neighboring ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... and partly covered with a sort of matlike carpeting. A strain of low music, above and around, undulated as if from invisible instruments, seeming to belong naturally to the place, just as the sound of murmuring waters belongs to a rocky landscape, or the warble of birds to vernal groves. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with mist o'erstrown, Rides the dark ocean on this icy throne; When ships thro vernal seas with light airs steer Their midnight march, and deem no danger near. The steerman gaily helms his course along, And laughs and listens to the watchman's song, Who walks the deck, enjoys the murky fog, Sure of his chart, his magnet and his log; ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... myrtle, Love, summer-tressed and vernal-eyed, At morn or eve is seen to wander, A dark-haired girl is at his side." ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... is Greek. Even without foreign influence, Greek polytheism would have developed a Goddess of Love, as did the polytheism of the North (Frigga) and of the Aztecs. The rites of Adonis, the vernal year, are, even in the name of the hero, Oriental. "The name Adonis is the Phoenician Adon, 'Lord.'" {44} "The decay and revival of vegetation" inspires the Adonis rite, which is un-Homeric; and was superfluous, where the descent ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... and late; From the old world's divine and distant date, From the sublimer few, Down to the poet who but yester-eve Sang sweet and made us grieve, All come, assembling here in order due. And here I dwell with Poesy, my mate, With Erato and all her vernal sighs, Great Clio with her victories elate, Or pale Urania's deep and starry eyes. Oh friends, whom chance or change can never harm, Whom Death the tyrant cannot doom to die, Within whose folding soft eternal charm I love to lie, And meditate ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the worst came to the worst the lottery could be suppressed. At this I knew my business was done, and all present, after signing a document which M. du Vernai gave them, took their leave, and I myself left directly afterwards with a friendly leave-taking from M. du Vernal. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... recommenced our wanderings. Ah, in those forests, how many trees, marked by my knife, bear on their roots or bark a sign by which I shall ever recognize them! They are those whose shade she enjoyed; those beneath which she breathed new life, basked in the warmth of the sun, or inhaled the sweet vernal scent of the trees. The stranger sees, but dreams not that they are to another the pillars of a temple, whose worshipper is on earth though its divinity is in heaven. I still visit them once or twice each spring, on the anniversaries of these walks; and when the axe lays one low, it seems ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Adonis, with the hymeneal Fresh vernal buds half sunk between His youthful curls. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... drew My little feet, when life was new. When woods in early green were dressed, And from the chambers of the west The warm breezes, travelling out, Breathed the new scent of flowers about, My truant steps from home would stray, Upon its grassy side to play, List the brown thrasher's vernal hymn, And crop the violet on its brim, With blooming cheek and open brow, As young and gay, sweet rill, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... passed with us as a Sabbath to our spirits. The anvils of Fear were hushed, and the shuttles in the looms of Anxiety were at rest, while Hope again walked abroad in those sunny fields where, amidst vernal blossoms and shining dews, she expatiates on the delights of the flowing cluster and the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... forget to blaw, An' vernal suns revive pale nature, A shepherd lad by chance I saw, Feeding his flocks by ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... from sleep; A twitter and a warble That make the pulses leap: A watching, as in childhood, For the flowers that, one by one, Open their golden petals To woo the fitful sun. A gust, a flash, a gurgle, A wish to shout and sing, As, filled with hope and gladness, We hail the vernal Spring. ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... party, the party which is to Woodbridge what the Mardi Gras is to New Orleans, the Carnival to Rome, and what the Feast of the Ygquato Bloom was to the ancient Aztecs. It is always held on the twenty-first of March, Sunday of course excepted, and it is known as the Vernal. Not to be seen at it is too bad. Not to be invited—unlike the lupercals before mentioned it requires invitations—is a blight mercifully spared all but the most painfully outre. Of these the Coogans, who live in Center and whose connubial infelicities are proverbial, ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... my vernal years, while on my head Fate's early smiles a meteor-lustre shed. No painful fear, no troubles, then had power To break the current of one peaceful hour. Oft as I trod the meadow's verdant round, Or pierced the echoing forest's gloomy bound, Or traced the willowy margin of the stream, ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... prosperous and happy. In Vasavadatta, the daughter of Pradyota, I have a wife whom I adore, and in Vasantaka, a friend in whom I can confide. Attended by such a friend, at such a season, and so disposed I might fancy myself the deity of desire, and this vernal celebration held in honour of myself. Kausambi outvies the residence of the god of wealth. Her numerous sons are clad in cloth of gold, decked with glittering ornaments and tossing their ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... well why life unshared Was ordained me of yore. In pairing time, we know, the bird Kindles to its deepmost splendour, And the tender Voice is tenderest in its throat. Were its love, forever by it, Never nigh it, It might keep a vernal note, The crocean and amethystine In their pristine Lustre linger on its coat. [Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in Monna Innominata ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... few guards; in every town and village through which they passed, crowds surrounded them with gratulations; the inns where they stopped were besieged with well-wishers; Nature, too, seemed to hail their release with vernal beauty; and so they journeyed on, to be received as honored guests rather than prisoners-of-state at the Castle of Gradisca. Their sojourn here was as recreative as was consistent with that degree of supervision necessary to prevent escape; they were at liberty to walk about, to make and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... ask me to send you some verse. I accordingly send you a scrap of recent manufacture, and you will observe that instead of forwarding my epic on Sevastopol, I select something that is fitter for these present vernal love days than ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... a beauty in the white, sunlit landscape spread before me that compelled my glance. To some it might compare but ill with the luxuriant splendour that is of the vernal season; but to me there was a wondrously impressive charm about that solemn, silent, virginal expanse of snow, expressionless as the Sphinx, and imposing and majestic by virtue of that very lack of expression. From Fabriano, at our feet, was spread to the east, the broad plain that ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... to be of any use, except to a Zoologist with antiquarian eyes: one Jerboa. Hares are rather common in some parts, and about here there is a Lagomys. Of birds there are but few, but as the vegetation is chiefly vernal, these creatures may perhaps be abundant. The game birds are quail, three species of partridge, a huge Ptarmigan? Pterocles of Loodianah. The fauna is richest in Saurian reptiles, and of these one might make a very good collection. I have only seen two snakes, and both ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... nature's renewal. He discovered the liquid light of her dark eyes in the rippling darkness of the streams; the lilies recalled the faintly tinted paleness of her cheeks; the silene roses, scattered throughout the hedges, called forth the remembrance of the young maiden's rosy lips, and the vernal odor of the leaves appeared to him like an emanation of her graceful ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... in Heaven, Ned, and Things on Earth, and Things under the Earth. The old Story, whereof you have alreadie seen many Parcels; but, you know, my Vein ne'er flows so happily as from the autumnal to the vernal Equinox. Howbeit, there is Something in the Quality of this Air would arouse the old ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... like a bird that sings At morning on a vernal bough! The springtide at the heart of things Sang as the spring knows how. And fair was she, and both were young; We knew not what made time so good; Nature with glamour-tutored tongue Spread glory ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city to the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories of Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the high ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... far vernal Bourns of being, came to me Dream-like, plangent, and eternal Memories ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... rapidly cooling masses of syrup. The mechanical process of drawing the arms backwards and forwards is in itself an uninteresting occupation, but somehow under these Canadian maples, in that bracing mountain atmosphere, and amid all the accessories of this peculiar vernal pic-nic, taffy-making is an exhilarating, picturesque amusement. The girls get ruddy with the exertion; they pant, they strain, they duck their heads when their lovers creep behind to steal a kiss, or they ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... beyond plovers and lovers. I am still, however, harassed by the unauthentic Muse; if I cared to encourage her - but I have not the time, and anyway we are at the vernal equinox. It is funny enough, but my pottering verses are usually made (like the God-gifted organ voice's) at the autumnal; and this seems to hold at the Antipodes. There is here some odd secret of Nature. I ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the efficient cause, the tendency to suicide should be as great at the time of the fall equinox as it is at the time of the spring equinox; but this is not the case. Two hundred and seventy-two suicides out of every thousand occur in the vernal equinoctial period and only two hundred and fifteen in the autumnal equinoctial period, and this proportion holds good throughout the whole northern hemisphere. Light, therefore, must ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays: Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy: In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more: Now pall the tasteless meats and joyless wines, And Luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, Diffuse the tuneful lenitives ...
— English Satires • Various
... morning, of that soft vernal temperature, that seems to thaw all the frost out of one's blood, and to set all nature in a ferment. The very fishes felt its influence: the cautious trout ventured out of his dark hole to seek his mate, the roach and the dace rose ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... felt in the river, the lion and the flame;—this it is, that is the true imagination. Shakspeare writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... morning, just as the vernal equinox had blown a few ships into harbor, a stranger was announced, and immediately recognized by the master of the house as a 'Don' something—a Spanish merchant, whose kindness to a young member of the family had been often mentioned in his letters from Mexico. One ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... always kept their Easter, like the Jewish Passover, on the fourteenth day of the first moon after the vernal equinox; and thus pertinaciously opposed the Roman Church and Nicene synod, which had fixed Easter to a Sunday. Bingham's Antiquities, l. xx. c. 5, vol. ii. p. 309, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... transport dies away: Some more refin'd transcribe their Opera-loves On Iv'ry Tablets, or in clean white Gloves: Some of Platonic, some of carnal Taste, Hoop'd, or un-hoop'd, ungarter'd, or unlac'd. Thus thick in Air the wing'd Creation play, When vernal Phoebus rouls the Light away, A motley race, half Insects and half Fowls, Loose-tail'd and dirty, May-flies, Bats, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... took his way through the devious footways where the shadow was chill, and through the broad campos where the sun was tenderly warm, and the towers of the church rose against the speck-less azure of the vernal heaven. As he went along, he frowned in a helpless perplexity with the case of Don Ippolito, whom he had begun by doubting for a spy with some incomprehensible motive, and had ended by pitying with a certain degree of amusement and a deep sense of the futility of his compassion. He presently ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... the vernal breeze Sweet odours waft from blooming trees, So, too, the grateful savour spreads To distant ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... June has lit her splendid lamp In the broad meadow lush and damp, Where loves the brook in loops to loiter, And tufted vernal to pitch ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... walk, and sweetly talk, Till the silent moon shine clearly; I'll grasp thy waist, and, fondly prest, Swear how I love thee dearly; Not vernal showers to budding flow'rs, Not autumn to the farmer, So dear can be as thou to me, My fair, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... the desecration of those old heathen burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being. Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Spring, And every leaf, intensely blossoming, Makes the year's sunset pale the set of day. O Youth unprescient, were it only so With trees you plant, and in whose shade reclined, Thinking their drifting blooms Fate's coldest snow, You carve dear names upon the faithful rind, Nor in that vernal stem the cross foreknow That Age may bear, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... occasion in spring, and another in autumn, on which the day and the night are each twelve hours at all places on the earth. When the night and day are equal in spring, the point which the sun occupies on the heavens is termed the vernal equinox. There is similarly another point in which the sun is situated at the time of the autumnal equinox. In any investigation of the celestial movements the positions of these two equinoxes on the heavens ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... Dugan's cafe was feasible; so Danny yielded to the vernal season as far as a glass of bock. Seated in a dark, linoleumed, humid back room, his heart and mind still groped after the mysterious meaning of ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... our era is the Era of Unbelief, why murmur under it; is there not a better coming, nay come? As in long-drawn systole and long-drawn diastole, must the period of Faith alternate with the period of Denial; must the vernal growth, the summer luxuriance of all Opinions, Spiritual Representations and Creations, be followed by, and again follow, the autumnal decay, the winter dissolution. For man lives in Time, has his whole earthly being, endeavor and destiny shaped for him by Time: only in the transitory Time-Symbol ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... and there covered with a sparse growth of timber. The waters from these mountain reaches had cut a channel for themselves known as Little Yosemite Valley, where pour the two wonderful cataracts known as Nevada Falls and Vernal Falls. Their deep roar came up from the valley. Mamie felt that she would be content to watch that scene the whole ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... List to the vernal breezes! List to the minstrels' strain! 'Tis the poet's song they are singing, And the ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Gentle creatures haunted it, and there was none to make afraid; wood-pigeons cooed and crickets chirped their shrill roundelays, anemones and lady-ferns looked up from the moss that kissed the wanderer's feet. Warm airs were all afloat, full of vernal odors for the grateful sense, silvery birches shimmered like spirits of the wood, larches gave their green tassels to the wind, and pines made airy music sweet and solemn, as they stood looking heavenward through veils of summer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the wind in the naked trees inspired their hearts with a mysterious gladness. And on days when the sun shone—the February days when winter "wears on its face a dream of spring"—they never tired of talking about how they were going to spend their time out of doors during the coming vernal and summer months. For that Fan would remain another year at Eyethorne was now looked upon as practically settled, since three-quarters of the first year had gone by and Miss Starbrow had said no word in her ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... career above, Unchallenged (till they've had their fling); Or Little Willie's vernal shove Anticipates the dawn of Spring; When Neutrals want an open door Kept wide for their commercial dealings, And we must risk to lose the War Rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... From all around echoed the happy cries of birds; the vernal air thrilled and vibrated in great running arpeggios to the wonder-music of the winds. The river ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... twining her vernal wreath around the brows of patriot Hope. He concluded with some cautionary lines ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the insect race, ordained to keep The silent sabbath of a half year's sleep! Entom'd beneath the filmy web they lie And wait the influence of a kinder sky; When vernal sunbeams pierce the dark retreat, The heaving tomb distends with vital heat; The full formed brood, impatient of their cell, Start from their trance, ...
— The History of Insects • Unknown
... his rage; he now shut up Within his iron cave, the effusive south Warms the wide air and o'er the vault of heaven Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent." ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... become in another age cultivated fields, and the solitude he produces will be succeeded by a powerful and healthy population. The results of these events in the moral and political world may be compared to those produced in the vegetable kingdom by the storms and heavy gales so usual at the vernal equinox, the time of the formation of the seed; the pollen or farina of one flower is thrown upon the pistil of another, and the crossing of varieties of plants so essential to the perfection of the vegetable world produced. ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motion would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a banquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with life and fire and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... days and six hours; but it exceeds this by about eleven minutes. As no allowance was made for these minutes, which amount to a day in about one hundred and thirty years, the current year had, in process of ages, advanced ten days beyond the real time. Thus the vernal equinox, which really took place on the 10th of March, was assigned in the calendar to the 21st. To rectify this important error the New Style, or Gregorian calendar, was introduced, so called from Pope Gregory XII. Ten days ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... they had not guarded and kept unplundered the territory under their command, and for this reason they were quite unwilling to join the rest of the army in the invasion. But Belisarius said that the opinion of these two men was not in the least degree true; for it was the season of the vernal equinox, and at this season the Saracens always dedicated about two months to their god, and during this time never undertook any inroad into the land of others. Agreeing, therefore, to release both of them with their followers within sixty days, ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of mortal life in the highest. He wondered how it was that he could have waited so long for her since the first night ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... degraded this autumnal festival, the Sun-fte Mihrgn (which balanced the vernal Nau-roz) into Michaelmas and its goose-massacre. It was so called because it began on the 16th of Mihr, the seventh month; and lasted six days, with feasts, festivities and great rejoicings in honour of the Sun, who now begins his southing-course to gladden the other ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... historical orator follows here the opinion of M. Dupuis, who, in his learned memoirs concerning the Origin of the Constellations and Origin of all Worship, has assigned many plausible reasons to prove that Libra was formerly the sign of the vernal, and Aries of the autumnal equinox; that is, that since the origin of the actual astronomical system, the precession of the equinoxes has carried forward by seven signs the primitive order of the zodiac. Now estimating ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... violets, and the gardens with roses: the banks by the side of the road seem one continued bed of cowslips. In plain words, Spring here indeed seems to hold her throne, and to reign in all that vernal sweetness and loveliness which is imputed ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... glided imperceptibly away, and as imperceptibly vernal bloom and beauty stole over ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the grounds are wet and low, There the trees of goat-peach grow. Soft and fragrant are their flowers, Glossy from the vernal showers. Joy it were to me, O tree, Ties of home to ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese group, blowing tiny, gem-like buds with puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping them all vernal breezes, unseen, yet sensed on every inch of the canvas—what are these things but the music of an art original at its birth and never since reborn? The larger rhythms of the greater men do not sweep us along with them in Botticelli. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... crowds, scorch'd with the summer's heats, In courts the wretched lawyer toils and sweats; While smiling Nature, in her best attire, Regales each sense, and vernal joys inspire. Can he, who knows that real good should please, Barter for gold his liberty and ease?"— This Paulus preach'd:—When, entering at the door, Upon his board the client pours the ore: He grasps the ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... VERNAL-GRASS.—This is found frequently in all our best meadows, to which it is of great benefit. It is an early, though not the most productive grass, and is much relished by all kinds of cattle. It is highly odoriferous; if ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... with their vernal beauty rife, To all the Gospel preach, The Resurrection and the Life, In ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... by the silence of the deserted spot, and attracted by these dark shades, became a Parisian for a few days, rejuvenating with his vernal songs the old echoes of the city, again it seemed that the same voice whispered softly through the trembling ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... compliment to the brides, were celebrated after the Persian fashion, and during the vernal equinox. For at no other period, by the ancient laws of Persia, could nuptials be legally celebrated. Such an institution is redolent of the poetry and freshness of the new world, and of an attention to the voice of nature, and the analogies of physical life. The young ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... me where's the vi'let fled Late so gaily blowing; Springing 'neath fair Flora's tread, Choicest sweets bestowing? Swains the vernal scene is o'er, And the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... course of ages the spring equinox must traverse the southern or watery region of the zodiac. This, on their system, signified a submergence of the whole universe in water, and the Deluge myth would symbolize the safe passage of the vernal Sun-god through that part of the ecliptic. But we need not spend time over that view, as its underlying conception is undoubtedly quite a late ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... "is twenty miles in length and fifteen in width, and is enclosed by the Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Tom ranges, and the abrupt cones of Toby and Sugar Loaf, while the Green Mountains lie to the north, whence the rich soils have been brought by thousands of vernal floods. Grove-like masses of elms mark well the townships of Northampton, Easthampton, Southampton and Westhampton, Hatfield, Williamsburg and Whately, Hadley, ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... Of pure and silver shells, that lie before, Glittering in the glory of the sun; And Julio hath landed him, like one That aileth of some wild and weary pest; And Agathe is folded on his breast,— A faded flower! with all the vernal dews From its bright blossom shaken, and the hues Become as colourless as twilight air— I marvel much, that she was ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... in Union Square, And timid breaths of vernal air Go wandering down the dusty town, Like ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... America it is one of the most common of wild animals. In all parts you may meet with it. In the hot lowlands of Louisiana—in the tropical "chapparals" of Mexico—in the snowy regions of Canada—and in the vernal valleys of California. Unlike the deer, the wild cat, and the wolverine, it is never mistaken for any other animal, nor is any animal taken for it. It is as well-known in America as the red fox is in England, and ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the geranium at my window. It had put forth two sickly leaves. Two sickly leaves for me, and the world alive with vernal things! Spring, thou Queen of ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... that unfolded themselves, as the gloom of the night deepened. I felt as if in the curious apartments of that vast edifice the fragments of a beautiful story, which I could follow for some distance, but of which I could never see the end, flew about in a sudden gust of the vernal breeze. And all the same I would wander from room to room in pursuit of them the whole ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... whether tilting or in rest, Was worthiest watching; and his face, once seen, Gave to the promise of his royal mien Such rich fulfilment as the opened eyes Of a loved sleeper, or the long-watched rise Of vernal day, whose joy o'er stream and ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... physician tended to impair confidence. Then Leon Coventry went away, and Boggs discovered (or invented) an important engagement with a growing family of clothes-moths in a Connecticut country house. So there remained only the faithful Phil. One swallow does not make a summer; nor does one youth with a vernal proboscis convince a skeptical public that it is enjoying the fearful companionship of a subversive and revolutionary cult. Patronage ebbed out as fast as it had flooded in. Barbran's eyes were as soft and happy as ever ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... girls had chosen for their picnic was ideal. It was a patch of short fine grass near the edge of the cliff, with a bank for a seat. The ground was blue with the beautiful little flowers of the vernal squill, and clumps of sea-pinks, white bladder campion, and golden lady's fingers bloomed in such profusion that the place was like a wild garden. The air was soft and warm, for it was one of those beautiful ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... might be questioned. I am rather inclined to believe in 'the impulse from a vernal wood,' though of course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to mean simply the advance to a great personality. You would agree with ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... elaborate parallel between the Hol[i] and the Lupercalia, etc. (Carnival). But the points of contact are obvious. One of the customs of the Hol[i] celebration is an exact reproduction of April-Fool's day. Making "Hol[i] fools" is to send people on useless errands, etc. (Festum Stultorum, at the Vernal Equinos, transferred by the Church to the first ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... thou youthful Time, When joy and innocence were ours, When life was in its vernal prime, And redolent of sweets and flowers. Come back—and let us roam once more, Free-hearted, through life's pleasant ways, And gather garlands as of yore— Come ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... was that bound Us twain together, beauteous river; And, though these limbs just crawl around That once would scarcely touch the ground, And alcohol upsets my liver, Still, in a punt or lithe canoe I can revive my vernal heyday, Pretend the sky's ethereal blue, The golden kingcups' cheery hue, Spell my, as well as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... tribes intended to leave at night; their kindred in Succoth must be ready to go forth with them. There was great rejoicing among the Hebrews, who like those of their blood in the city of Rameses, had assembled in every house at a festive repast on the night of the new moon after the vernal equinox when the harvest festival usually began. The heads of the tribes had informed them that the day of liberation had arrived, and the Lord would lead them into the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... weary of your companionship, whither would depart the memories and the associations with which each of you is hallowed! Would ever the modest flowers of spring-time, budding in pathways where I no longer wander, recall to my failing sight the vernal beauty of the Puritan maid, Captivity? In what reverie of summer-time should I feel again the graciousness of thy ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... speed the hour already fixed When, mid the bathers (freely mixed), In a polite costume I mean to plunge beneath the spray And, washing from a soul at play The City's stain—three times a day— Restore its vernal bloom. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various |
