"Yew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... called from its holly-like leaves. For Birch we also find Birk, a northern form. Beech often appears in compounds as Buck-; cf. buckwheat, so called because the grains are of the shape of beech-mast. In Poppleton, Popplewell we have the dialect popple, a poplar. Yeo sometimes represents yew, spelt yowe by Palsgrave. [Footnote: The yeo of yeoman, which is conjectured to have meant district, cognate with Ger. Gau in Breisgau, Rheingau, etc., is not found ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... stately figure and a stern, careworn face met the boy, and they leaned upon a broken dial, and the father reasoned with the son of Right and Truth and Liberty, and something touched upon the Tyrannicides of old. The yew trees drooped their sombre boughs about the figures, and they were gone, and in their place roared and swelled the Chesapeake.... The sound of the storm became the sound of a battle-cry. He saw a clanging fight where sword ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... queer beasties we dug up under the yew-tree last autumn," suggested Merle Denham. "Those wriggling transparent things, I mean. Don't you remember? We kept them in a box, and didn't know whether they'd turn out moths, or butterflies, or ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... long, straggling beard meditatively. "Wal, I don't know, they're a darned mean crowd anyway." And then, with a sudden change of manner, "Say, look here, mister; hev yew finally made up your mind ter remain on this island among a lot ev outrageous, unclothed, ondelikit females, whar every prospeck pleases an' on'y man is vile; or air yew game ter come in pardners with me in the schooner an' run her in the sugar ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... took up her burden and, with patient courage, bore it for the sake of the dead first, and then for the sake of the living. Round her son, growing into sturdy young manhood, her heart's roots wound themselves, striking deep into his life, till one day he, too, was laid beneath the yew trees in the churchyard. From that deep shadow she came forth, bearing her cross of service to her kind, to live a life fragrant with the airs of Heaven, in fellowship with Him who, for love of man, daily gave ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... other, but the whole formed one group. Mr. Robert Brown has been kind enough to examine the wood: he says it belongs to the fir tribe, partaking of the character of the Araucarian family, but with some curious points of affinity with the yew. The volcanic sandstone in which the trees were embedded, and from the lower part of which they must have sprung, had accumulated in successive thin layers around their trunks; and the stone yet retained the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... The burial-ground itself was surrounded and shut in with a belt of trees. Save the small time-discoloured church and the roofs of the cottage and the minister's house, no building—not even a cotter's hut—was visible there. Beneath a dark and single yew-tree in the centre of the ground was placed a rude seat; opposite to this seat was a grave, distinguished from the rest by a slight palisade. As the young Evelyn passed slowly by this spot, a glove on the long damp grass beside the yew-tree caught her ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all. Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops—it was February—and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed glimpsing in through uncurtained windows, into sordid rooms where human beings moved as if sordidly unaware. She enjoyed the smell of a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So common! so ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Dick, a strange, uncouth figure, at whom the archers of the guard laughed, nudging each other. In his bony hand, however, he held that at which they did not laugh, namely, the great black bow, six feet six inches long, which he said had come to him "from the sea," and was fashioned, not of yew, but of some heavy, close-grained wood, grown perhaps in Southern or even in far Eastern lands. Still, one of them, who had tried to draw this bow to his ear and could not, said aloud that "the Suffolk man would do naught with that clumsy ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... bites, food poisoning, cantharides. 1. Irritant { Vegetable—all strong purgatives, hellebores, savin, { yew, ergot, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... chairing to-morrow; and the public-houses are crowded; and there is an indistinct hubbub in street and alley, with sudden bursts of uproarious shouting; and the clouds to the west look red and lurid round the sun, which has gone down behind the church tower,—behind the yew-trees that overshadow the quiet grave of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... put for shelter from the sun under the far-projecting thatch of a farmhouse. The gardens are full of sun-flowers and hollyhocks, fuchsia and golden rod; the walls are covered with jasmine and passion-flowers. Old, old churches make us feel like day-flies. The yew in the churchyard five minutes' walk from here is said to be 900 years old; the church itself is thirteenth century, but into its walls were built fragments of a former church, far older, on the same site. It carries us more than half-way back to the ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... be debonair, But we 've a weird to dree, I wis we maun be bumpit sair By boaties two and three: Sing stretchers of yew for our Toggere, Sith we ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... around Bobby, unafraid; swallows swooped down from their mud villages, under the dizzy dormers and gables, to flush the flies on his muzzle, and whole flocks of little blue titmice fluttered just overhead, in their rovings from holly and laurel to newly tasseled firs and yew trees. ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... enchanted island in the middle of the sea. It was called the Isle of Yew. And in it were five important kingdoms ruled by men, and many woodland dells and forest glades and pleasant meadows and grim mountains inhabited ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... hills ran smoothly up, so high, that in the winter the sun only peeped above the ridge for an hour or two; beyond the house, the valley wound away into the heart of the hills, and at the end a black peak looked over. The place was very sparsely inhabited; within a close of ancient yew trees stood a little stone church, and a small parsonage smothered in ivy, where an old priest, a cousin of the knight, lived. There were but three farms in the valley, and a rough track led over the hills, little used, except by drovers. At the top of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the second gate, they saw a black figure go by on an old white horse; then they came out on a long ascending lane with deep ruts, bordered by fresh soft turf on either sides, with hawthorn hedges, and at intervals dark yew trees. ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were no flowers in the garden; only the yew-tree by the gate that hung her waxen blossom along the undersides of the branches. Hazel hated the look of the frozen garden; she had an almost unnaturally intense craving for everything rich, vivid, and vital. She was all these things herself, as ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... upon a terrace bordered by a thick yew hedge, and descending by steps to a lower terrace, he became aware of voices in a strange tone and key—not loud, but, as it were, intensified far beyond the note of ordinary talk. Ashe stood still; for he had recognized ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... me,—and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls,[338-9] without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then,—and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees,[338-10] or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at,—or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me,—or basking in the orangery,[338-11] till I could ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... onie cumen her onyenes, we willen and hoaten th{ae}t alle ure treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan. And for th{ae}t we willen th{ae}t this beo stedef{ae}st and lestinde, we senden yew this writ open, iseined with ure seel, to halden ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... dashing like a kingfisher at a fish. In our own country the larger titmouse (Parus major) may be seen climbing branches, almost like a creeper; it often, like a shrike, kills small birds by blows on the head; and I have many times seen and heard it hammering the seeds of the yew on a branch, and thus breaking them like a nuthatch. In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... in the sleeper's ear Of wo and danger near; And mist will hide the pale, cold moon, And the stars will seem like the sparkling flies That twinkle in the prairie glades, In my brother's month of June— Murky shades, dim, dark shades, Shades of the cypress, pine, and yew, In the swamp of the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... beauty. Well, railing is in this case allowable, for see that brazen front of maiden sixty, guiltless of curls, with a huge structure of bonnet cocked straight at the top of her head, like the roof of a market-house, and her broad, square skirts of faded green, deformed by formal knots of yew and holly. Look with what a blushless face of triumph she eyes her poor tottering neighbour opposite, who never appears destined "to suffer a recovery." Oh, 'tis remorseless! But look down that vista of charity children in slate coloured Quaker bonnets, stuck ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... your Sister's: and used to think what a little waspish Dilettante it was: and now I see he was something very much better indeed: and I only hope I may have Courage to face my Death as he had. Dickens loved him, who did not love Humbugs: and Chorley would have two strips of Gadshill Yew {54} put with him in his Coffin. Which again reminds me that—a propos of your comments on Dickens' crimson waistcoat, etc., Thackeray told me thirty years ago, that Dickens did it, not from any idea of Cockney ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... instrument formerly used at sea, consisting of only one large graduated arc of 90 deg., three vanes, and a shank or staff. Also the bow of yew, a weapon of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... good deal of herself. When she and her spouse married, they lived close to the manufactory, in a sweet little villa replete with every elegance and convenience—a pond, which they called a lake—laburnums without end; a yew, clipped into a dock-tailed waggon-horse; standing for three horses and gigs, with an acre and half of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... They arrived in about an hour at the cemetery; the weather was mild, but dull, and in harmony with the funeral ceremony. Among the groups which flocked towards the family vault, Chateau-Renaud recognized Morrel, who had come alone in a cabriolet, and walked silently along the path bordered with yew-trees. "You here?" said Chateau-Renaud, passing his arms through the young captain's; "are you a friend of Villefort's? How is it that I have never met you at ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wallflowers that he brought to Ireland from the Azores, and the Affane cherry, are still found where he first planted them by the Blackwater. Some cedars he brought to Cork are to this day growing, according to the local historian, Mr. J. G. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The four venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown and intermingled into a sort of summer-house thatch, are pointed out as having sheltered Raleigh when he first smoked tobacco in his Youghal garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco.... A few steps further on, where the town-wall of the thirteenth century ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... and from behind the old yew arbour came the shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought Barbara flying out of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The yelping ceased. Mr. Ras Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria, Jaffery and I looked at one another in ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... to London, and finally to Canterbury.] centuries. I myself know nothing certain for or against this belief; but, supposing the case to be as it is represented, then this would be the aeonian period of these animals, considered as individuals. Among trees, in like manner, the oak, the cedar, the yew, are notoriously of very slow growth, and their aeonian period is unusually long as regards the individual. What may be the aeon of the whole species is utterly unknown. Amongst birds, one species at least has become extinct in our ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... together in one grave in Willesden churchyard. There is a small yew-tree west of the church. Beneath that tree let us lie. In one grave, mind. Do you ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to offer, for the injuries to atone, and Hogni also. * * * She then inquired who would go the steeds to saddle, the chariot to drive, on horseback ride, the hawk let fly, arrows shoot from the yew bow? ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... pedlar, the party passed the church, and the sexton, who was digging a grave in the yard, came forward to look at them; but on seeing John Law he seemed to understand what had happened, and resumed his employment. A wide-spreading yew-tree grew in this part of the churchyard, and near it stood a small cross rudely carved in granite, marking the spot where, in the reign of Henry VI., Ralph Cliderhow, tenth abbot of Whalley, held a meeting of the tenantry, to check ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... novelist all the world over, and he at once involved himself generously in the case. The two men returned at Mr. Polly's initiative across the churchyard to the Potwell Inn, and came upon the burst and damaged rook rifle near the new monument to Sir Samuel Harpon at the corner by the yew. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... his feelings, though she did not know the actual story, for Kitty was very reserved and kept her troubles to herself. The Major made no remark about the garden, which in itself was somewhat curious, for strangers were always in raptures over this old-world garden, with its yew-trees cut in quaint shapes, and its high walls, and its flowers, which seemed, every one of them, to belong to ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... garden. There are tall, lopped lime-trees all round the lawn, in the summer making a high screen of foliage, but now bare. If we take the flagged path round the house, turn the corner, and go towards the garden, the yew trees grow thick and close, forming an arched walk at the corner, half screening an old irregular building of woodwork and plaster, weather-boarded in places, with a tiled roof, connected with the house by a little covered cloister ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a certain little village with grey stone cottages which lay in this direction, and liked to look at the site of the old hall near the road: nothing remained of it but the tall gate posts and rusty iron gates looking strangely dreary and deserted, and within one could see, between some dark yew trees, an old terrace walk with stone steps and balustrades—the most ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... him on an ivy leaf on the ground," said Babs, "under the yew-tree down there. I can find him ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... down the garden-bed, Mid box and thyme and yew, And spikes of purple lavender, And spikes of larkspur blue, The bind-weed tendrils win their way, And ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... this battle is ended, some one would be slain, and so murder done. Then the family of him who was killed would haply have ye cited, and mayhap it might e'en come to the hanging, for some of they boys ha' great folkeys behind them. Go ye to Tom Fletcher, Master Myles, and buy of him good yew staves, such as one might break a head withal, and with them, gin ye keep your wits, ye may hold your own against knives or short swords. I tell thee, e'en though my trade be making of blades, rather would I ha' a good stout cudgel in my hand than the best ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... front door closed softly behind us, I stood blinking nervously in the dim green light which entered through the row of columns at the rear, beyond which I saw the curving stairway and the two miniature yew trees at its foot. There was a strange musty smell about the house—a smell that brings to me now, when I find it in old and unlighted buildings, the memory of the high ceiling, the shining floor over which I moved so cautiously, and ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... here is plentie of yew for bowstaues. I caused three horse loades to be bought vs for to know the trueth: but they were cut out of season this moneth of April, the sap being in them. Three moneths I neuer left speaking ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... be no Covenanter, and writes with disgust of an intruded Scots minister, whose first action was to cut down the ancient yews in the churchyard. Izaak's religion, and all his life, were rooted in the past, like the yew-tree. He is what he calls 'the passive peaceable Protestant.' 'The common people in this nation,' he writes, 'think they are not wise unless they be busy about what they understand not, and especially about religion'; as Bunyan was busy at that very moment. In Walton's ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... Tables turned; an Evening Scene, on the same subject Animal Tranquillity and Decay, a Sketch The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman The Last of the Flock Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite The Foster-Mother's Tale Goody Blake and Harry Gill The Thorn We are Seven Anecdote for Fathers Lines written at a small distance from my House and sent me by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... of youth is like a branch of yew, for if it is bent it soon straightens. By the third day I was on my feet again, with only the stiffness of healing wounds to remind me of those desperate passages. When I could look about me I found that men had arrived from the ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... clung to the ledge for a brief moment or two, and then a yell arose from above, as he went down a few feet and felt what seemed a violent blow against his side. The next instant his hands had closed upon the tough stem of a stunted yew, and he was hanging there, hitched in the little branches, saved from falling farther, but unable to move from the fear of tearing the shrub from its root-hold in a crack of the cliff, where there was not a trace of anything else to which ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... against his will, sat and sang another song; and in the meanwhile the party had broken up, and wandered away by twos and threes, among trim gardens and pleasaunces, and clipped yew-walks— ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... derived from that of New Guinea, in which country the same deficiency and the same luxuriance is to be observed. Out of the seventy-eight genera in which the Moluccan land-birds may be classed, no less than seventy are characteristic of Yew Guinea, while only six belong specially to the Indo-Malay islands. But this close resemblance to New Guinea genera does not extend to the species, for no less than 140 out of the 195 land-birds are peculiar to the Moluccan islands, while 32 are found also in New Guinea, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... by an old uncle, with a small estate of about one hundred pounds a-year. Behind this house, and contiguous to it, was a kitchen-garden of about half an acre, and at the bottom of the garden, and cut off from it by a tall yew hedge, was a bowling-green, containing just about as much ground as Corporal Trim wished for;—so that as Trim uttered the words, 'A rood and a half of ground to do what they would with,'—this identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... allus clears up before he comes to bury—ribs and shins and big 'un's as won't break up. Skulls breaks up easy; you just catches them a snope with yer spade, and they splits up down the joinin'. Week afore last I dug up two beauties under that yew; anybody might a' kep' 'em for a museum. I've knowed them as would ha' done it, and sold 'em for eighteenpence apiece. But I couldn't bring ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... but he was a narrow ailing man, and his maiden-sister, Miss Girzie, was the scrimpetest creature that could be; so that, in their hands, all the pretty policy of the Breadlands, that had cost a power of money to the old laird that was my patron, fell into decay and disorder; and the bonny yew-trees that were cut into the shape of peacocks, soon grew out of all shape, and are now doleful monuments of the major's tack, and that of Lady Skimmilk, as Miss Girzie Gilchrist, his sister, was nick-named by every ane ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... let him alone. He's all right. Now here's yew tew have landed here days, yew may say, outer the Albytross, and yew goes to spensife hotel, wasting yew're money, when we've got quite a home for strangers like yew for half what yew pay, and we'll get yew a ship to Fraser, Skimalt, or wheer ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... "O bows of yew, if ye be true, In London, where ye were bought, Fingers five, get up belive[71], ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... house a young man sketching or writing under a yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy, startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... times. It is a large, gloomy-looking place I was going to say haunted-looking. It stands in a grove of yew trees." ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... of a leafless tree, is a sign of great sorrow; and of a branchless trunk, a sign of despair and suicide. The elder-tree is more auspicious to the sleeper; while the fir-tree, better still, betokens all manner of comfort and prosperity. The lime-tree predicts a voyage across the ocean; while the yew and the alder are ominous of sickness to the young and of death to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... enclosing the fruit, as the usual phrase would indicate, but on the end with the fruit behind it. The stone is only about the size of a sweet-pea, and the fruit only about twice that size, altogether not unlike a yew-berry, but of a very pale red. It grows on a tree just like an arbor vitae, and is well tasted, though not at all ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... lived in rude waggons or in huts made of the branches of trees. Of metals, native copper may have been beaten into ornaments, but tools and weapons were mostly of stone. Bows were made of the wood of the yew, ... trees were hollowed out for canoes by stone axes, aided by the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the serious pieces, the better part of the volume. The Foster-Mother's Tale is in the best style of dramatic narrative. The Dungeon, and the Lines upon the Yew-tree Seat, are beautiful. The Tale of the Female Vagrant is written in the stanza, not the style, of Spenser. We extract a part ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... these words. They coloured his farewell to Beckley: the dear old downs, the hopgardens, the long grey farms walled with clipped yew, the home of his lost love! He thought of them through weary nights when the ghostly image with the hard shut eyelids and the quivering lips would rise and sway irresolutely in air till a shape out of the darkness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... house of Sir James Colquhoun, who is owner of almost all the thirty islands of the Loch, which we went in a boat next morning to survey. The heaviness of the rain shortened our voyage, but we landed on one island planted with yew, and stocked with deer, and on another containing perhaps not more than half an acre, remarkable for the ruins of an old castle, on which the osprey builds her annual nest. Had Loch Lomond been in a happier climate, it would have been the boast of wealth and vanity to ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... ancestors of those little flowers have occupied that undisturbed sunny nook, and may think how few living families can boast of as ancient a tenure of their land. Large elms protrude their rough branches; old hawthorns shed their annual blossoms over the graves; and the hollow yew-tree must be at least coeval with the church. But whatever may be the beauties or defects of the surrounding scenery, this was the residence of Jane Austen for twenty-four years. This was the cradle of her genius. These were the first objects which inspired ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... "Well, yew've chopped enough fer two meals, son," replied the farmer, and turning toward the kitchen door, he called: "Here, Maw, fix this boy up with suthin' t'eat—enough fer a couple of meals ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... raise those melancholy impressions, which are the merit of such scenes, and which can scarcely anywhere be felt more completely. The cloisters form a dismal area, in the centre of which grows the most prodigious yew-tree I ever beheld, in one great stem, two feet diameter, and fourteen feet high, from whence a vast head of branches spreads on every side, so as to perform a perfect canopy to the whole space. I looked for its fit inhabitant; ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... end and the beginning Are one thing to thee, who art past the end. O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend, For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning, No triumph and no labour and no lust, Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust. O quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought, Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night With obscure finger silences your sight, Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought, Sleep, ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... crimson atilt on a swaying twig. Wings! Wings! And a little ruffled-out throat which sings. The forest bends, tumultuous With song. The woodpecker knocks, And the song-sparrow trills, Every fir, and cedar, and yew Has a nest or a bird, It is quite absurd To hear them cutting across each other: Peewits, and thrushes, and larks, all at once, And a loud cuckoo is trying to smother A wood-pigeon perched on a birch, "Roo—coo—oo—oo—" "Cuckoo! Cuckoo! That's one for you!" ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... into Mr. St. John's face without the least apparent fear. Boys sometimes call the little blue-tit Billy Biter, no doubt from personal experience of the sharpness of Mr. Tit's beak. The great tit which we can see under the yew tree in our garden, almost any hour of the day, is very common in the neighbourhood, and I dare say if we look well about us during our walk we ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... a triangular slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... what the tarnation mischief do yew mean by firin' them brass popguns of yourn at me, eh? What right have yew to shoot at a ship flyin' the galorious Stars and Stripes? D'ye see them handsome barkers of mine?"—pointing to a fine display of eighteen- pounders, six ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... The bow was made in England: Of true wood, of yew-wood, The wood of English bows; So men who are free Love the old yew-tree And the land ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mighty sore fer ee, so us be!" said old Benjamin Blake, who had helped to bring her home. "But teddin fer yew nor I, Jacob, tu go fornenst His will." And he went out ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... possible, either a patrol garden or individual Guides' gardens. Let them grow flowers and vegetables for profit to pay for their equipment, etc. Show all the wild plants which may be made use of for food. Find yew trees; report if any good branches ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... that southwestern coast they found a land warm and winning as the south they had left behind—a land of ever-green woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak and fir; rich southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft drapery of ferns upon the rocks. There were red masses of overhanging mountain, but in the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed, ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... sprinkles she the juice of rue, That groweth underneath the yew; With nine drops of the midnight dew, From lunary[11] distilling: The molewarp's brain mixed therewithal; And with the same the pismire's gall: For she in nothing short would fall, The Fairy ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... common grave, far from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres, far from all the tombs of fancy which display in the presence of eternity all the hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner, beside an old wall, beneath a great yew tree over which climbs the wild convolvulus, amid dandelions and mosses, there lies a stone. That stone is no more exempt than others from the leprosy of time, of dampness, of the lichens and from the defilement of the birds. The water turns it green, the air blackens it. It is not near ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Summers had breathed their bloom, Had breathed their bloom on her dainty cheek, When they bore her away to the voiceless tomb With hearts so full they were like to break. And down in the churchyard old and green, In the churchyard green where the yew-tree waves, A dark little mound of earth is seen— One billow more ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Philip's dwelling fronted on the street, The latest house to landward; but behind With one small gate that open'd on the waste, Flourish'd a little garden square and wall'd: And in it throve an ancient evergreen, A yew tree, and all round it ran a walk Of shingle, and a walk divided it: But Enoch shunn'd the middle walk and stole Up by the wall, behind the yew; and thence That which he better might have shunn'd, if griefs Like his have worse or ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... neighbours, and held it in his hand—he thought he should be more at ease holding something in his hand—as he walked on to the far end of the garden, where he remembered there was the largest row of currant-trees, not far off from the great yew-tree arbour. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... when she was laid in her little coffin. She was pale, and so very cold. There were some flowers lying on her pillow, and a rose-bud in each little hand. The soul of the dear baby was gone to God; and her body was laid in a grave, under the yew tree in ...
— Pretty Tales for the Nursery • Isabel Thompson
... faltered, and shut his eyes, expecting the Indian to bound upon him. But when he opened his eyes again, the savage was gone! He must have slipped behind a ragged old yew which had once been clipped and trimmed to ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... left of the lawn, a high plastered wall—masked by hollies, bay, yew, and at the far end by masses of airy, pink-plumed tamarisk—shut off the eastward view. But straight before him all lay open, "clean away to the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of emotion remembering his impending ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... To dream of a yew tree, is a forerunner of illness and disappointment. If a young woman sits under one, she will have many fears to rend her over her fortune and the faithfulness of her lover. If she sees her lover standing by one, she may expect to hear of his illness, or misfortune. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the rock, or a lodgment of earth appears, the yew-tree, indigenous in such situations, contrasts its deep and glossy green with the pale grey of the limestone; but the goat, the old adventurous inhabitant of situations, inaccessible to every other quadruped, has been lately banished from the sides of Gordale. But the wonders of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... Lewis! Monk or Bard, Who fain would make Parnassus a churchyard! Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow, Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou; Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand, By gibbering spectres hailed, thy kindred band; Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page To please the females of our modest age; All hail, M.P., from whose infernal brain Thin-sheeted ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... no heed to the interruption, but yew-yawed hither and yon after his stupid nose. Like every other porcupine that I have followed, he seemed to have nothing whatever to do, and nowhere in the wide world to go. He loafed along lazily, too full to eat any of the beechnuts that he nosed daintily out of the leaves. He tried a bit of bark ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted."[192] Another little circumstance struck him as a proof that the classes immediately above the rank of labourer were worse off in France than they were here. The taste for dressing yew-trees into the shape of pyramids and obelisks by "that very clumsy instrument of sculpture" the gardener's shears had gone out of fashion in this country, merely because it got too common, and was discarded by the rich and vain. The multitude of persons able to indulge the taste was sufficiently ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... latter days, established a chapel in the neighbourhood, of which no vestige was now visible, though the churchyard which surrounded it was still, as upon the present occasion, used for the interment of particular persons. One or two shattered yew-trees still grew within the precincts of that which had once been holy ground. Warriors and barons had been buried there of old, but their names were forgotten, and their monuments demolished. The only sepulchral memorials which remained were the upright headstones which mark the graves ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... terrace was the one part of the old Elizabethan garden left entirely unaltered. On either side rose up a giant wall of yew, shaped like a castle bastion, at least ten feet thick; and between the two ran a broad gravel path up to the sun-dial, bordered on either side by huge herbaceous beds, blazing with the color of late summer. In two or three places grass paths crossed these, leading ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... what does it matter?' thought the queen to herself, 'I have only one life, and I can but lose it.' And not caring what she did, she left the palace and seating herself under a yew tree, poured out ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... is wild and drear, And sad the dark yew's shade; The flowers which bloom in silence here, In silence ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the City, Mrs. Hasluck was out visiting, Miss Hasluck was in the garden. I told the supercilious footman not to trouble, I would seek her there myself. I guessed where she would be; her favourite spot had always been a sunny corner, bright with flowers, surrounded by a thick yew hedge, cut, after the Dutch fashion, into quaint shapes of animals and birds. She was walking there, as I had expected, reading a book. And again, as I saw her, came back to me the feeling that had swept across me as a boy, when first outlined against ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the dense walls of box and yew showing dark against a saffron sky, the half-defaced knightly figure above the great portico, the tiled floor of the hall, where a few white rose-petals ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... showy, various-coloured garments, and sooty skin, contrasted with the picturesque and lovely appearance of the scenery, produced an unspeakably charming effect. The foliage exhibited every variety and tint of green, from the sombre shade of the melancholy yew, to the lively verdure of the poplar and young oak. "For myself," says John Lander, "I was delighted with the agreeable ramble, and imagined that I could distinguish from the notes of the songsters of the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... for it was about a mile and a half to the chapel; we would have to walk three miles at least, and if it rained, we should probably catch heavy colds. We thought of the damp of the wood, and the drip from the melancholy boughs of yew and fir growing about that sepulchre on the hillside. But there was no danger of rain; Castle Island lay in the misted water, faint and grey, reminding me of what a splendid burial I might have if the law did not intervene to prevent me. And as we followed the straggling ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a little esplanade of green turf, faced with a low wall toward the ditch, allowing the eye to run down a long, narrow avenue of gigantic elm-trees, meeting at the top in the perfect semblance of a Gothic aisle, and bordered on each hand by hedges of yew, six feet at least in height, clipped into the form and almost into the solidity of a wall. At the far end of this avenue, which must be nearly two-thirds of a mile in length, one can discern a glimpse of a formal ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... destruction of all foreign refugees from the Grass, or at very least their exclusion from the benefits of the lootings. In every case the mob answered them in almost identical language: "Fair play," "Share and share alike," "Yer nyme Itler, maybe?" "Come orf it, sonny, oo er yew? Gord Orlmighty's furriner, aint E?" Having heckled the speakers, they proceeded cheerfully to clean out all stocks of available goods—the refugees getting their just shares. There must be a peculiar salubrity about the English air. Otherwise ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Berkshire downs, and itself on a gentle elevation, there is an old hall with gable ends and lattice windows, standing in grounds which once were stately, and where there are yet glade-like terraces of yew trees, which give an air of dignity to a neglected scene. In the front of the hall huge gates of iron, highly wrought, and bearing an ancient date as well as the shield of a noble house, opened on a village ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the Sun would seem to be also due to the Chinese. Confucius relates that during the reign of the Emperor Yew-Wang an eclipse took place. This Emperor reigned between 781 B.C. and 771 B.C., and it has been generally thought that the eclipse of 775 B.C. is the one referred to, but Johnson doubts this on the ground that this eclipse was chiefly visible in ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... single file, they revealed to Cosmo the age-long neglect of the place. Next appeared a wing built out from the back of the inner court of the castle—in a dilapidated, almost dangerous condition. Then he came to a great hedge of yew, very lofty, but very thin, like a fence of old wire that had caught cart-loads of withered rubbish in its meshes. Here he heard the sound of a spade, and by the accompanying sounds judged the implement was handled by an old man. He peeped through the hedge, and caught ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... varnished too soon, like those pictures painted for sales, which crack all over six months after purchase. Your disposition has not been properly directed; you are not cultivated; you have been stifled, pruned; you have been shaped like those yew-trees at Versailles which represent goblets and birds. Still, you are women at the bottom, though you no ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... me sorrow," "Your absence is a pleasure." For this, according to the code of Mr. Thomas Miller (third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured plates) you would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure, wormwood for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew, and Cruelty by the stinging-nettle. There is always a little risk of mixing your predicates in this kind of communication, and he might, for instance, read that his Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss the point of the stinging-nettle. That and the gorse carefully concealed ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... but a month ago he had been so eager to see. Poor Nancy! her cheeks had shared the fate of roses, and were withered now. She had taken the illness on the same day with Esmond—she and her brother were both dead of the small-pox, and buried under the Castlewood yew-trees. There was no bright face looking now from the garden, or to cheer the old smith at his lonely fireside. Esmond would have liked to have kissed her in her shroud (like the lass in Mr. Prior's pretty poem), but she rested many foot below ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "decked with holm, ivy, bays, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green. The conduits and |273| standards in the streets were likewise garnished."{41} Many people of the last generation will remember the old English mode of decoration—how sprigs of holly and yew, stuck into holes in the high pews, used to make the churches into miniature forests. Only upon the mistletoe does a trace of the ecclesiastical taboo remain, and even that is not universal, for at York Minster, for instance, some was laid ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... my leddy, for I could creep out at the window o' the pantry, and speel down by the auld yew-tree weel eneugh—I hae played that trick ere now. But the road's unco wild, and sae mony red-coats about, forby the whigs, that are no muckle better (the young lads o' them) if they meet a fraim body their lane ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... school perfectly agreed. The garden was as fascinating as the house, and proved an absolute dream of delight, with its smooth bowling-green, its winding paths, its charming little arbours overgrown with creepers, its clipped yew hedges, and its unexpected flights of steps. It might have been designed as a kind of terrestrial paradise for girls. The big lawns afforded space for so many tennis courts that there was no need for the younger ones to hover about, waiting enviously until their elders had finished ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... keeping generally in open fields and commons, heaths and unfrequented places, feeding upon worms and insects. In severe weather it approaches our plantations and shrubberies, to feed on the berry of the mistletoe, the ivy, or the scarlet fruit of the holly or the yew; and, should the redwing or the fieldfare presume to partake of these with it, we are sure to hear its voice in clattering and contention with the intruders, until it drives them from the place, though it watches and attends, ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... He's as tough as fifty-year-old yew. Nothing couldn't kill him; but look, sir, look! See how they're getting up to the ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... solitude in which this way is usually traversed. Some miles on this side of Coniston there is a farmstead—a gray stone house, and a square of farm-buildings surrounding a green space of rough turf, in the midst of which stands a mighty, funereal umbrageous yew, making a solemn shadow, as of death, in the very heart and centre of the light and heat of the brightest summer day. On the side away from the house, this yard slopes down to a dark-brown pool, which is supplied with fresh water from the overflowings of a stone cistern, into which some rivulet ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Max replied after a survey of the close- clipped lawn, boasting that velvety turf which only centuries of care can perfect. Great groups of laurel proudly proclaimed the right of the Manor to its name; carefully trimmed hedges of yew and box protected borders already gay with spring flowers, and beyond the grounds shimmered the sea. Max's glance was one of affection, for this was the scene ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... circling waves, a fruitful soil! And ninety cities crown the sea-born isle: Mix'd with her genuine sons, adopted names In various tongues avow their various claims: Cydonians, dreadful with the bended yew, And bold Pelasgi boast a native's due: The Dorians, plumed amid the files of war, Her foodful glebe with fierce Achaians share; Cnossus, her capital of high command; Where sceptred Minos with impartial hand Divided right: ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... forth, thou bringer once of bitter sorrow, My precious jewel now, my trusty yew! A mark I'll set thee, which the cry of woe Could never penetrate: to thee it shall not Be impenetrable. And, good bowstring! Which so oft in sport hast serv'd me truly, Forsake me not in this last awful earnest; Yet once hold fast, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... have tried it first to ascertain whether it was of the nature of the yew. Surely savages in this region use bows. There must be wood suited for the purpose, so that if I can find it, I ought to be able to make as good ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... she was behaving so badly, moved me much towards her; especially as I longed to know what she had to tell me. Therefore I allowed her to coax me, and to kiss me, and to lead me away a little, as far as the old yew-tree; for she would not tell me where ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... trees, especially the rimu, a species of yew, here called a pine, were of immense ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Bridge, and visited what had been once a mansion, but was now nearly all fallen to the ground, very little remaining to tell of its former glory. What attracted us most was the site of the garden behind the house, where stood four great yew trees which must have been growing hundreds of years. They were growing in pairs, and in a position which suggested that the road had ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... hoops the year through, in warm summer and iron-clad winter. His shed is always pitched at the edge of a great woodland district. Where the road has worn in deeply the roots of the beeches hang over, twisted in and out like a giant matting, a kind of cave under them. Dark yew trees and holly trees stand here and there; a yew is completely barked on one side, stripped clean. If you look close you will see scores in the wood as if made with a great nail. Those who know Exmoor will recognise these signs in a moment; it is a fraying-post where the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... corners o' that's eyes an' that said: "I'll give you three guesses every night to guess my name, an' if you hain't guessed it afore the month's up, yew shall be mine." ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... writers say, A yew tree where his body lay, But a wild apple hid the grass With its sweet blossom where hers was; And being in good heart, because A better time had come again After the deaths of many men, And that long fighting at the ford, They wrote on tablets of thin board, ...
— In The Seven Woods - Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age • William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
... timeless grave to throw, No cypress, sombre on the snow; Snap not from the bitter yew His leaves that live December through; Break no rosemary, bright with rime And sparkling to the cruel clime; Nor plod the winter land to look For willows in the icy brook To cast them leafless round him: bring No spray ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... Alfred boastfully. "And thou sufferest me, sweet lady, I will bear thee company to the feast, and a score of my lusty yeomen with their good yew-bows and honest spears, they shall attend me. There be no werewolf, I trow, will ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... a gate clicked close at hand. Followed the sound of quick, striding steps, and the next moment a man's figure rounded the tall yew hedge which skirted the foot of the garden and ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... black and funeral yew, That bathes the charnal-house with dew, Methinks I hear a voice begin; (Ye ravens, cease your croaking din, Ye tolling clocks, no time resound O'er the long lake and midnight ground!) It sends a peal of hollow groans, Thus speaking from ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... bright moonlight night, comes reeling through the little white gate, and stumbling over the graves. He shouts and he sings, and is presently followed by others like unto himself, or worse. So, they all laugh at the dark solemn head of the yew tree, and throw stones up at the place where the moon ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... long and narrow, and placed very high in the walls. On the one over the altar was a very old painting, on stained glass, of the Virgin, with a hoop and yellow petticoat, crimson vest, a fly cap, and very thick shoes. The light of this window was still further subdued by a fine old yew-tree, which stood in ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... fine old yew—which had been old a hundred years ago, it seems—I found huddled amongst other headstones one so incrusted with moss, that it was only after scraping the parasite verdure from the stone with my penknife that I was able to discover the letters that had been cut upon it. I found at ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sculptured hedges as far back as the times of the Tudors; it was chiefly the yew hedge that people cut and shaped into odd figures. But it was not till the Dutch gardeners came over in the reign of William III., that it became the practice to give curious shapes to trees and shrubs scattered over gardens, or brought together ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... time, but destined now, In grief, to wither on a Whitehead's brow; 290 The fig, which, large as what in India grows, Itself a grove, gave our first parents clothes; The vine, which, like a blushing new-made bride, Clustering, empurples all the mountain's side; The yew, which, in the place of sculptured stone, Marks out the resting-place of men unknown; The hedge-row elm; the pine, of mountain race; The fir, the Scotch fir, never out of place; The cedar, whose top mates the highest cloud, Whilst his old father Lebanon grows proud 300 Of such a child, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... and reveals a large terra-cotta Bust.) At my request, this young lydy will now perceed to assoom the yew and kimplexion of life itself. Galatear, will you oblige us ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... had once on a time been the storehouse of the vanished Abbey. There the monks had stored the meal which the people dwelling on their lands brought to them instead of rent. Lovel found it a rambling, hither-and-thither old house, with tall hedges of yew all about it. These last were cut into arm-chairs, crowing cocks, and St. Georges in the act of slaying many dragons, all green and terrible. But one great yew had been left untouched by the shears, and under it Lovel found his late ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... after dark, tied my horse to a tree, crept up that nut-walk—you know it?—and round by the east terrace to the porch, and laid my valentine on the door-step, and clanged the bell, and hid behind the yew-fence till the man came out to get it. Then I went home. And last thing at night there was a clatter-clatter at the door at Redford, and I dashed out to catch whoever it was—her brother she sent—but wasn't quite smart enough. If only I'd ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... educated, equally honest, equally rich, equally tall, or equally small, society would seem to them to have reached the highest ideal. The same people admire an old French garden, with its clipped yew-trees, forming artificial walls and towers and pyramids, far more than the giant yews which, like large serpents, clasp the soil with their coiling roofs, and overshadow with their dark green branches the white chalk cliffs of the Thames. But those French gardens, unless ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... Viscount, was dying in 1860, foxes were seen about the house and moving towards the house for some days previously. Just before his death three foxes were playing about and making a noise close to the house, and just in front of the "cloisters," which are yew-trees planted and trained in that shape. The Hon. Mrs. Farrell states as regards the same that the foxes came in pairs into the demesne, and sat under the Viscount's bedroom window, and barked ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... day after Nita Selim's murder, when he had come to interview Lydia Carr and had secured the alibi which had eliminated Dexter Sprague as a suspect—Dundee had driven his car up this hill between the tall yew hedges. But then he had taken the fork which led to the hooded doorway over the kitchen; had descended the kitchen stairs with Lydia, to the servants' sitting room in the basement. Now he continued along the main driveway to the more impressive ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy—what I call weather-beaten and let-alone—a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild-flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse impetuous copious fall—the greenish- tawny, darkly transparent waters, plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk-white foam—a ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the previous evening. He was muffled up in an old pea-jacket; various towels were festooned about his shoulders; his bald head shone in the rising sun. I watched him curiously as he came along the borders of a thick yew hedge at the side of the gardens. Suddenly, at a particular point, he stopped, and drawing something out of his towels, thrust it, at the full length of his arm, into the closely interwoven mass of twig and foliage at ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... father meddle with politics; and he believed that he had got this notion from a member of parliament who once passed a few weeks with him. The Squire was glad of any argument to defend his clipped yew-trees and formal terraces, which had been occasionally ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... chosen cottage, in the low-ceilinged room where I usually sat: outside, the walls were covered with ivy which made it like a lonely lodge in a wood; and when I opened my small outward- opening latticed window there was no sound except the sighing of the wind in the old yew tree growing beside and against the wall, and at intervals the chirruping of a pair of sparrows that flew up from time to time from the road with long straws in their bills. They were building a nest beneath my window—possibly it was the first ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... Cervantes, distinguished himself at the battle of Lepanto; and a third gave rise to the sovereign German house of Tour and Taxis. Taxus is the Latin of Tasso. The Latin word, like the Italian, means both a badger and a yew-tree; and the family in general appear to have taken it in the former sense. The animal is in their coat of arms. But the poet, or his immediate relatives, preferred being more romantically shadowed forth by the yew-tree. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... stone in the garden for his favourite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in country places now as there was in ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Charles Nagle sombrely, "I wish no strangers here. Even now there are too many strangers about." He looked round as if he expected those strangers of whom the priest had spoken to appear suddenly from behind the yew hedges which stretched away, enclosing Catherine Nagle's charming garden, to the left of the plateau on which ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... represented the god of light, and youth, and beauty; not wrought from Parian marble, or smoothest ivory, and in the divinest proportions of the human form, but rude, formal, and roughly hewn from the wood of the yew-tree—some early effigy of the god, made by the simple piety of the first Dorian colonisers of Byzantium. Three forms stood mute by an altar, equally homely and ancient, and adorned with horns, placed a little apart, and considerably below ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Showers it when the three are one Glassing her in union. Earth your haven, Earth your helm, You command a double realm; Labouring here to pay your debt, Till your little sun shall set; Leaving her the future task: Loving her too well to ask. Eglantine that climbs the yew, She her darkest wreathes for those Knowing her the Ever-new, And themselves the kin o' the rose. Life, the chisel, axe and sword, Wield who have her depths explored: Life, the dream, shall be their robe Large as air about the globe; Life, the question, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... went I looked keenly about me for a sapling or small tree that might serve as a ladder, and before long I came upon exactly the kind of thing I wanted. It was a young tree, somewhat resembling a yew, about twenty feet high, with a number of branches springing from its trunk close together and radiating in all directions, the lowest branch being about seven feet from the ground. This tree I at once attacked, and, the wood being soft, while the axe was keen, it fell some ten minutes later. Lopping ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... a' wide scatter'd now, Some to the Indies gane, And ane, alas! to her lang hame; Not here we 'll meet again. The kirkyaird, the kirkyaird, Wi' flowers o' every hue, Shelter'd by the holly's shade, An' the dark sombre yew. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... it. Vitruvius and Pliny use the words "cerostrata" or "celostrata," which means, strictly speaking, "inlaid with horn," and "xilostraton." The woods used by the Greeks were ebony, cypress, cedar, oak, "sinila," yew, willow, lotus (celtis australis), and citron (thuyia cypressoides), a tree which grew on the slopes of the Atlas mountains. The value of large slabs of this last was enormous. Pliny says that Cicero, who was not very wealthy according to ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... 9.13. At Farnham Station I had no difficulty in being directed to Charlington Heath. It was impossible to mistake the scene of the young lady's adventure, for the road runs between the open heath on one side and an old yew hedge upon the other, surrounding a park which is studded with magnificent trees. There was a main gateway of lichen-studded stone, each side pillar surmounted by mouldering heraldic emblems; but besides this central carriage drive I observed several ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he did 12 foot under ground find perfect trees over-covered with earth. Nut trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them; some of whose nuts he showed us. Their shells black with age, and their kernell, upon opening, decayed, but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And a yew tree he showed us (upon which, he says, the very ivy was taken up whole about it), which upon cutting with an addes [adze], we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is. They say, very much, but I do not know how hard a yew ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Nor need Conchobar, or Fergus or Conail be forgotten. Far better can you aid them with Druid power than with the right arm a blow may make powerless in battle. Go with Laeg to Iban-Cind-Trachta. Beside the yew-tree there is a dun. There you can live hidden from all. It is a place kept sacred by the might of the Sidhe. ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... my blue eyes go see? Shall it be pretty Quack-Quack to-day? Or the Peacock upon the Yew Tree? Or the dear little white Lambs at play? Say Baby. For Baby is such a young Petsy, And Baby is such a sweet Dear. And Baby is growing quite old now— She's just ...
— Marigold Garden • Kate Greenaway
... abode, hidden in a mane of green-barked yew-tree. Near is an apple-tree, Big like a hostel; A pretty bush thick as a fist of hazel-nuts, a choice spring and water fit for a Prince to drink. Round it tame swine lie down, Wild swine, grazing deer, A badger's brood, A peaceful troop, a heavy host of denizens of the soil A-trysting ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... under almost every disadvantage, weakened by a recent and terrible conflict, without discipline, comparatively speaking, and uncouthly armed, they all but vanquished the Norman chivalry. Trace their deeds in France, which they twice subdued; and even follow them to Spain, where they twanged the yew and raised the battle-axe, and left behind them a name of glory at Inglis Mendi, a name that shall last till fire consumes the Cantabrian hills. And, oh, in modern times, trace the deeds of these gallant men all over the world, and especially in France and Spain, and admire them, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... roofs that shelter'd me and mine Hold strangers of a Sassenach line; Our hamlet thresholds ne'er can shew The friendly forms of long ago; The rooks upon the old yew-tree Would e'en have stranger notes to me: Stand fast, stand ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the bees at the mouth of the hive, ten paces away, nor the noisy bustle of the drones. It was only when the swarm poured out upon the air with a whir of wings and, darkening for an instant the sunny doorway of the summer-house, sailed over the yew hedge towards the road, that Tristram leapt to his feet and ran at ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... chronicles placed the date of the Creation at a point of time two millions of years before Confucius; this interval they filled up with lines of dynasties. Preceding the Chow dynasty the chronicles give ten epochs—prior to the eighth of these there is no authentic history. Yew-chow She [the "Nest-having"] taught the people to build huts of the boughs of trees. Fire was discovered by Say-jin She [the "Fire producer"]. Fuh-he [B.C. 2862] was the discoverer of iron. With Yaou [B.C. 2356] is the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... They drifted nearer to the bank, and Helena perceived, at the end of a little creek, a magnificent group of yew trees, of which the lower branches were almost in the water. Behind them, and to the side of them, through a gap in the wood, the moonlight found its way, but they themselves stood against the faint light, superbly dark, and impenetrable, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... scrolls which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... called up. A brief command, and they disappear into the darkness, at the double. C and D Companies give them five minutes start, and move on. The road at this point runs past a low mossy wall, surmounted by a venerable yew hedge, clipped at intervals into the semblance of some heraldic monster. Beyond the hedge, in the middle distance, looms a square and stately Georgian ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... tomb behind me, I took a pathway to the left, which conducted me up the hillside. I soon found myself in the deep shade of heavy foliage, where the branches of the yew and willow mingled, interwoven with the tendrils and blossoms of the honeysuckle. I now stood in the most populous part of this city of tombs. Every step awakened a new train of thrilling recollections, for at every step my eye caught the name ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... look, but then neither does the public. You will set one round table on the porch, so that if it threatens rain, as it sometimes does, you know, in England, people will not be afraid to sit down; and the other you will put under the yew-tree near the gate. The tables must be immaculate; no spotted, rumpled cloths and chipped cups at Comfort Cottage, which is to be a strictly first-class tea station. You will put vases of flowers on the tables, and you ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the yew trees are gigantic, And the yellow coast of "Spain," Breasting on the dim ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... biloba—of which we give an illustration, is not only one of our most ornamental deciduous trees, but one of the most interesting. Few persons would at first sight take it to be a Conifer, more especially as it is destitute of resin; nevertheless, to that group it belongs, being closely allied to the Yew, but distinguishable by its long-stalked, fan-shaped leaves, with numerous radiating veins, as in an Adiantum. These leaves, like those of the larch but unlike most Conifers, are deciduous, turning ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various |
