"Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the light shining through the darkness to keep his feet from stumbling; he does not trouble himself about what lies far before him, he attends only to his footsteps one by one. He feels he can pass safely over the "moor", the "fen", the "crag", and the "torrent", by trusting to the guidance of the light. With the dawning of the day will come the reunion with his loved ones from whom ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... them down bydene. ROBIN started to that Knight, And cut a two his bond; And took him in his hand a bow, And bade him by him stand. "Leave thy horse thee behind, And learn for to run! Thou shalt with me to green wood Through mire, moss, and fen! Thou shalt with me to green wood Without any leasing, Till that I have got us grace Of EDWARD, our ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... hastening across the country which lies between Cambridge and the Wash. Their road lay through a vast and desolate fen, saturated with all the moisture of thirteen counties, and overhung during the greater part of the year by a low grey mist, high above which rose, visible many miles, the magnificent tower of Ely. In that dreary region, covered by vast flights of wild fowl, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were they sitting, All the gods and lords of time, Whence they watched as fen-fires flitting Years and names of men sublime, When their counsels found it fitting One should stand where none might climb— None of man begotten, none Born of men beneath the sun Till the race of time be run, Save ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... beast nor bird is abroad, but the owl and the howling fox. She on a leafless tree; he in a cloud on the hill. Dark, panting, trembling, sad, the traveller has lost his way. Through shrubs, through thorns he goes, along the gurgling mill. He fears the rock and the fen. He fears the ghost of night. The old tree groans to the blast; the falling branch resounds. The wind drives the weathered burs, clung together, along the grass. It is the light tread of a ghost! He trembles amidst the night. Dark, dusky, howling night, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... a British tribe which takes a prominent part in the insurrection under Boadicea: and after the defeat of that heroic queen he continues the struggle in the fen-country. Ultimately Beric is defeated and carried captive to Rome, where he succeeds in saving a Christian maid by slaying a lion in the arena, and is rewarded by being made the personal protector of Nero. Finally, he escapes and returns to Britain, where he becomes ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... in hidden glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... I found by thee unawed, On that thrice hallow'd eve abroad. When goblins haunt from flood and fen, The steps of men. COLLINS'S ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... answer: "He would yield no passage through his dominions to the Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a reluctant heart Theodoric ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen - from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' foot-prints, crocodiles' ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... tradition relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden and his Flemings were not allowed ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Castle. In every direction the country is spread out green and flat, and, except for the towers and spires of the churches, it is practically featureless. To the north the horizon is brought closer by the rounded outlines of the wolds; everywhere else you seem to be looking into infinity, as in the Fen Country. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... words? Ah my sweet knight, You have the better of us that weave and weep While the blithe battle blows upon your eyes Like rain and wind; yet I remember too When this last year the fight at Corrichie Reddened the rushes with stained fen-water, I rode with my good men and took delight, Feeling the sweet clear wind upon my eyes And rainy soft smells blown upon my face In riding: then the great fight jarred and joined, And the sound stung me right through heart and all; For I was here, see, gazing off the hills, In ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... my blood, you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in—before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... a different world which has its own life, its settled inhabitants and its passing travelers, its voices, its noises, and above all its mystery. Nothing is more disturbing, nothing, more disquieting, more terrifying occasionally, than a fen. Why should this terror hang over these low plains covered with water? Is it the vague rustling of the rushes, the strange Will-o'-the-wisps, the profound silence which envelops them on calm nights, or is it the strange mists, which hang over ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... is thy face; * * * all that grows, has grace. All are appropriate. Bog and moss and fen Are only poor to undiscerning men. Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the ruby moor; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But will repay ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen. And wasted fields and slaughtered ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... wasting their lives in unprofitable wildernesses, what shall we say to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic in the dust? My own conscience, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before midnight they plunged into a narrow, miry road that traversed wastes and low coppices; the plash of the horses' feet showed the tract to be marshy and full of pools. Her ladyship looked out across the dreary fen and exclaimed,— ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... stream from a festering fen Is met and scattered by a mountain brook Leaping along its beautiful, bright course, So now the force Of these new Followers of the camp has come Straight from God's Source To cleanse the world and cleanse the minds of men. Good women, of great courage and large hearts, Women whose slogan ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Of honour tied her tongue from self-defence. A marshy ground commodiously was near, Thither she ran, and held her breath for fear; Lest if a word she spoke of any thing, That word might be the secret of the king. Thus full of counsel to the fen she went, Griped all the way, and longing for a vent; 190 Arrived, by pure necessity compell'd, On her majestic marrow-bones she kneel'd: Then to the water's brink she laid her head, And as a bittour[79] ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... lion, rushing from his den, Amidst the plain of some wide-water'd fen, (Where numerous oxen, as at ease they feed, At large expatiate o'er the ranker mead) Leaps on the herds before the herdsman's eyes; The trembling herdsman far to distance flies; Some lordly bull (the rest dispersed and fled) He singles ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... at St. James's the other day more people were invited than there was room for, and some half-dozen were forced to sit at a side table. He said to Lord Brownlow, 'Well, when you are flooded (he thinks Lincolnshire is all fen) you will come to us at Windsor.' To the Freemasons he was rather good. The Duke of Sussex wanted him to receive their address in a solemn audience, which he refused, and when they did come he said, 'Gentlemen, if my love for you ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... arable land and pasture land were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. [62] The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but heath, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... scattered over a considerable amount of ground, but the work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields. The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers; the only "society" was that of the neighboring ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... musing, 'twas not one but ten —- Rank on rank of ghostly soldiers marching o'er the fen, Marching in the misty air they showed in dreams to me, And behind me was the shouting and the ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... to soil her virgin purity. Yea, there where very desolation dwells, By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades, She may pass on with unblenched majesty, Be it not done in pride, or in presumption. Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost, That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. Do ye believe me yet, or shall I call Antiquity from the old schools of Greece To testify ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact with ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Loss of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a dastardly lord. So that another God might tread that portal of heaven ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... stream in front of him were perhaps fen feet high and sloped sharply to the water's edge, fairly free from tangle. Presently, McTavish localized the sound of bells as coming from the opposite bank, and expected to watch the equipage, preceded or accompanied by trapper or hunter, speed past, following the direction ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... right of the mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the wings broken, one in three places, one leg almost dissevered, and several shots in the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour, League after grassy league from Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen. Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men, Like a tall ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moon and did not speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for she seemed in some way to make him despise himself. Looking ahead—he saw the one light in the darkness, the window of their ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... lowly fen, Soared up in stately flight; But, striking 'gainst the gilded vane, He fell in sorry plight: And as, with wounded wing, he lay Down in the marsh below, He thus addressed the glittering thing, The cause of ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... From them that till the black and crumbling plain, Where the sweet waters of Aegyptus glide, To those that on the Northern marches ride, And the Ceteians, and the blameless men That round the rising-place of Morn abide, And all the dwellers in the Asian fen. ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... raising high to heaven her hands, she cry'd,— "Be this your home for ever!—Gracious heard, "Her prayer was granted. Now they joy to plunge, "Beneath the waters; now they deep immerge "Their bodies in the hollow fen; now raise "Their heads, and skim the surface of the pool, "Often they rest upon the margin's brink, "And oft light-springing, in the cool lake plunge. "Now still their rude contentious tongues they use, "Still squabbling, lost to shame beneath ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... last dear drops of the blood in the hearts that love you, Filling those hearts till the love is more than the heart can hold? Therefore the song breaks forth from the depths of the hidden fountain Singing your least frail flower, your raiment of seas and skies, Singing your pasture and cornfield, fen and valley and mountain, England, desire of my heart, England, delight of mine eyes! Take my song too, my country: many a son and debtor Pays you in praise and homage out of your gifts' full store; Life of my life, my England, many will praise ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... St. Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian seaboard. Once it serpentined ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of the time's fen-politics Hide thee, And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art, — till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, The ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,—over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,—we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself. Nor will posterity like Browning's manners,—the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and de te fabula of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... north of Pickering, known as Newton Dale, with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related to its great precursor that carved this enormous trench out of the limestone ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... by, Upon the plow hanging. His coat was of a clout That cary[8] was called; His hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only cold—say dear again"— But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... me a copy of Cipriano de Valera's New Testament for a peseta. The villages of Spain that Borrow visited could even at that time compare favourably morally and educationally, with the villages of his own county of Norfolk at the same period. The morals of the agricultural labourers of the English fen country eighty years ago were a scandal, and the peasantry read nothing; more than half of them could not read. They had not, moreover, the humanising passion for song and dance that Andalusia knew. But this is not to deny that the Bible Society under Borrow's instrumentality did ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... my bosom then, Still as a stagnant fen! Hateful to me were men, The sun-light hateful. In the vast forest here, Clad in my warlike gear, Fell I upon my ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... music of the monastery choir that floated out to them over the tranquil water. The monks of Ely, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of King Canute, tell us that he had a strong affection for the fen country and for their church, and gave the following story in that connection. It is at once ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... in the Oldtown fen, Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den, Or swam in the wooded Artichoke, Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock, Nothing on record is left to show; Only the fact that he lived, we know, And left the cast of a "double head" In the scaly mask which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... Medicine Men Who consult the Australian bear, And 'tis he, with his lights on the fen, Who helps Jack o' Lanthorn to snare The peasants of Devon, who swear Under Commonwealth, Stuart, or Guelph, That they never had half such a scare - It is just the ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... unwilling: "The man is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... Beard (TVAESKAEG, Double-beard, "TWA-SHAG") was not born; and the Monks of Ely had not yet (by about a hundred years) begun that singing, (Without note or comment, in the old, BOOK OF ELY date before the Conquest) is preserved this stave;—giving picture, if we consider it, of the Fen Country all a lake (as it was for half the year, till drained, six centuries after), with Ely Monastery rising like an island in the distance; and the music of its nones or vespers sounding soft and far over the solitude, eight hundred years ago ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... and low o'er field and fen, Like gloom above the souls of men; And through the forest solitudes The fitful night-wind rustles by, Breathing ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... county; both the wet half and the dry half, both the Fen district and the Wold district, are treeless; and the Wolds are only a line of molehills, of great utility, but no special beauty. But it is the greatest producing county in England, and the produce, purely agricultural, is the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... unequal tasks to run, Thus Nature disciplines her son: Meeter, she says, for me to stray, And waste the solitary day, In plucking from yon fen the reed, And watch it floating down the Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Marking its cadence rise and fail, As from the field, beneath her pail, She trips it down ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... gettin' shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as sunshine, winter's ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... no such blood as theirs for the shedding, In the veins of Cavaliers was its heading. You have no such stately men In your abolition den, To march through foe and fen, nothing dreading. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the Ely Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' 'a ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp are ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... these, who dearly love to walk for hours in pursuit of game in the autumn, on the chance of bagging an occasional brace of partridges or a wild pheasant (for everything here is wild), or, in winter, when lake and fen are frostbound, by the river and its withybeds after snipe and wildfowl—for the Cotswold stream has ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of an ancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. One hears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little blue sphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu." ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... are the two magnificent gold torcs found in the side of one of the raths at Tara, and these belong to a type that has been found in England and France, of which the best known examples are those found at Yeovil, Somerset,[28] and Grunty Fen, Cambridge.[29] A torc of this type was also found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy. This find has led to a good deal of speculative opinions varying as to whether the model of the torc was ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. The rural peace of that ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... in the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... to you a fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And what was ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... invaders. He was known as Pestilence, and his footsteps were so soft that neither scout nor picket could bar his entrance. His paths were subterranean,—through the tepid swamp water, the shallow graves of the dead; and aerial,—through the stench of rotting animals, the nightly miasms of bog and fen. His victims were not pierced, or crushed, or mangled, but their deaths were not less terrible, because more lingering. They seemed to wither and shrivel away; their eyes became at first very bright, and afterward lustreless; ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Saint Guthlac was an abbot of Croyland, and many conflicts did he have with the devils of the fen country, whose presence could generally be ascertained by the hissing which took place when they settled with their fiery hoofs and claws on the ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... embarked on board of a privateer which was employed by the Jacobites as a regular packet boat between France and England. This vessel conveyed him to a desolate spot in Romney Marsh. About half a mile from the landing place a smuggler named Hunt lived on a dreary and unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses had repeatedly ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upas dripped its poison on the ground Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool, But brought no taint and threatened ill to none. Far off adown the mountain's craggy side From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding Like sport of giant children, and the rocks Whereon it smote re-echoed innocently. Then in a pause of silence Lucifer Struck music ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... boys began playing, but they made so much noise, crying "Fen!" and "Ebbs!" and "Knuckle down!" that Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, went to the bungalow door ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... block, and raise her features, then, Bloodless and ghastly, for the scorn of men! Begone forever. Go where terrors spread Their sea and forest mouths to crush you dead. Oh, how the clouds shall crimson from each glen, A roar with blaze, and flame search out each fen, If back to us, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... afar the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced by a broken bridge. He descended into the ravine, forded a narrow stream by the last gleam of rapid water, and clambering out on the other side was met by the night which fen like a bandage over his eyes. The wind sweeping in the darkness the broadside of the sierra worried his ears by a continuous roaring noise as of a maddened sea. He suspected that he had lost the road. Even in daylight, with its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of outcropping stone, it was difficult ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Guelderland outspreads Her green wide water-meads Laced by the silver of the parted Rhine; Where round the horizon low The waving millsails go, And poplar avenues stretch their pillar'd line; That morn a clinging mist uncurl'd Its folds o'er South-Fen town, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... dans la chambre, toute mon me en feu, j'entendis bientt un heurt en quelque sorte plus fort qu'auparavant. Srement, dis-je, srement c'est quelque chose la persienne de ma fentre. Voyons donc ce qu'il y a et explorons ce mystre—que mon coeur se calme un moment et explore ce mystre; c'est le vent et ...
— Le Corbeau • Edgar Allan Poe
... is yet not sweet enough, I'll bid a gentler, subtler strain awake, And sing of fights with Jackson on the Gulf And Perry's hard-fought battle on the Lake! Of fights in fen and moor and hoary brake, On Lookout Mountain and the rolling main— Through searing blasts of bleak December's flake, And drenching torrents of fair April's rain: Their valiant deeds are springing ever ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... would be emptying the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence always in view—for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen—wellnigh two hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it—one might be the pioneer of progress. What ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... that most melancholy of processions, a curate's furniture en route, filed slowly through the village, and out along the highroad, that led through bog and fen, and by lake borders to the town of N——. First came three loads of black turf, carefully piled and roped; then two loads of hay; a cow with a yearling calf; and lastly, the house furniture, mostly of rough deal. The articles, that would be hardly good enough for one ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... General increase in trade and poulation The Thames St. Katherine's Docks Tewkesburg Bridge Gloucester Bridge Dean Bridge, Edinburgh Glasgow Bridge Telford's works of drainage in the Fens The North Level The Nene Outfall Effects of Fen drainage ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... cushion, a reliable earth-stopper and an anise-seed bag, a man must indeed be thoroughly blase who cannot enjoy a scamper across country, over the Pennsylvania wold, the New Jersey mere, the Connecticut moor, the Indiana glade, the Missouri brake, the Michigan mead, the American tarn, the fen, the gulch, the buffalo wallow, the cranberry marsh, the glen, the draw, the canyon, the ravine, the forks, the ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Not here, Not among modern kinds of men; But in the stony fields, where clear Through the thin trees the skies appear; In delicate spare soil and fen, And ...
— Later Poems • Alice Meynell
... saw Ulfkytel's men breaking and taking to the marshes, where the Danes cared not to follow them. More than one I could see sinking under the weight of arms in the fen slime among the green tussocks of grass that he had slipped from, and I saw that the flying ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... wi' sic a braw fellow, In poortith I might make a fen'; What care I in riches to wallow, If I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... gave; Came Susiskanes, warrior wild, And Pegastagon, Egypt's child: Thee, brave Arsames! from afar Did holy Memphis launch to war; And Ariomardus, high in fame, From Thebes the immemorial came, And oarsmen skilled from Nilus' fen, A countless crowd of warlike men: And next, the dainty Lydians went— Soft rulers of a continent— Mitragathes and Arcteus bold In twin command their ranks controlled, And Sardis town, that teems with gold, Sent forth its squadrons ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... accompanied by Beadle of A Battery, still dressed in overcoat and pyjamas. The stream of retreating traffic on the road between Bethancourt and Caillouel was thicker than ever; the centre of Caillouel was as packed as a Fen village during a hiring fair; the divisional horse-master, the C.R.E., and the D.A.Q.M.G. were among the officers trying to sort out the muddle; and in front of the Mairie, like a policeman on point duty, stood a perspiring staff captain. "That'll mean the Military ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... they're able, Or drainin' a fen, They'll muck out a stable As well as the men. Their praises I'm hymnin', For where would ha' bin, If it weren't for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake, Where to fill mine urns I use, Daily with Atlantic dews; While beside the reedy flood Wild duck leads her paddling brood. For this morn, as Phoebus gay Chased through heaven the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... sooth, Whether to give thee joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... a year be over ox and horse shall go free in Essex, and man and woman shall draw the team and the plough; and north away in the east countries dwell men in poor halls of wattled reeds and mud, and the north-east wind from off the fen whistles through them; and poor they be to the letter; and there him whom the lord spareth, the bailiff squeezeth, and him whom the bailiff forgetteth, the Easterling Chapman sheareth; yet be these stout men and ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... the Earl now proceeded toward the more important city which he had determined to besiege. Zutphen, or South-Fen, an antique town of wealth and elegance, was the capital of the old Landgraves of Zutphen. It is situate on the right bank of the Yssel, that branch of the Rhine which flows between Gelderland and Overyssel into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in number, close bordering the water, embracing about an acre each, and situated in a low fen, draining several valleys. The excavated soil was thrown up in dykes, made tight by being beaten all over, while in a soft state, with the heavy, flat ends of Palm stalks. Lving side by side, by three ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... they—But the marplot Time stands by, With a knowing wink in his funny old eye. He grasps by the top an immense fool's cap, Which he calls a philosophaster-trap: And rightly enough, for while these little men Croak loud as a concert of frogs in a fen, He first singles out one, and then another, Down goes the cap—lo! a moment's pother, A spirit like that which a rushlight utters As just at the last it kicks and gutters: When the cruel smotherer is raised again Only snuff, and but ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... away on and on till she came to a fen, and there she gathered a lot of rushes and made them into a kind of a sort of a cloak with a hood, to cover her from head to foot, and to hide her fine clothes. And then she went on and on till she came ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower 5 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tomb-stones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday—the dead of the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... sedges of the fen Open their hearts and blossom to the sky; The wild thyme on the mountain's knees Unrolls its purple market to the bees; Unharvested of men The Traveller's Joy can only smile and die. Joy, joy alone the throbbing whitethroats bring, Joy to themselves and heaven! They were ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the wailings of the frogs. "What shall we do, should he have progeny?" Said they to Destiny; 'One sun we scarcely can endure, And half-a-dozen, we are sure, Will dry the very sea. Adieu to marsh and fen! Our race will perish then, Or be obliged to fix Their dwelling in the Styx!' For such an humble animal, The frog, I take ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... board of her, and to transfer it to the steam-vessels. They then began to sail up the Nun branch of the Niger. This part of the river is most unhealthy; it is one entire swamp, covered with mangrove, cabbage, and palm trees. "The fen-damp rose in the morning cold and clammy to the feeling, and appeared like the smoke of a damp wood fire." The bodies of the natives are covered with ulcers and cutaneous eruptions; they spend a short and miserable life in profligacy. After they had gone up about thirty miles, the banks had an ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... bequeath my farm of West Woldland to my eldest nephew, Grimes Goodenough; my farm of Holland Fen to my dear nephew, John Wright, and my farm of Clover-hill to my youngest ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Frederick Hamilton's men Were hungry for the fray, And it was a son of the bog and fen Would guide them ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... strong while soul and mind matured. When nothing more adventurous befell, he chopped down trees for the cloister hearths. But oftener the clash of arms echoed in the quiet halls, or the peaceful brethren crossed themselves as they watched him break an unruly horse in the cloister fen. Saxo tells us that he swam easily in full armor, and in more than one campaign in later years saved drowning comrades who ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... edge of the Fen Country, where the Conqueror found the toughest opposition to his completed sovereignty in England, the patch of raised ground just outside modern Cambridge was a suitable spot for the erection of a castle, and from here he conducted his operations against the English, who held out under Hereward ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... beer, and smoke disgusting short pipes; and when we established the Coverley Club in Trinity, they set up an opposition, and called themselves the Navvies. And they used to make piratical expeditions down to Lynn in eight oars, to attack bargemen, and fen girls, and shoot ducks, and sleep under turf-stacks, and come home when they had drank all the public-house taps dry. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... closed, and which are run entirely for the benefit of seafaring men. It would be easy to make inquiries at some of these and discover what vessels were leaving by the next tide, and a bargain could be struck immediately, go far as Fen wick was concerned, he inclined towards a sailing ship bound for the Argentine. His spirits rose slightly at the prospect before him; his step was fairly light and buoyant as he proceeded in the direction of his bedroom. There was no light in the room, so that he ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was puckered ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Ocnus of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three: And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields, and slaughtered men, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the house which our suffering heroine occupied, to New-York, was not very great, yet the snow fen so fast, and the cold so intense, that, being unable from her situation to walk quick, she found herself almost sinking with cold and fatigue before she reached the town; her garments, which were merely suitable to the ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... French water-craft of peculiar Italian rig—the lateen sail. These sails spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea. Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, Le Fen Follet (Jack-o'-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper's sea phrases,—for which he had an unfailing instinct,—that meant something "even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo." It is said many down-east fishermen ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... their cabins, The fields of their corn, Unwarned and unweaponed, The victims were torn,— By the whirlwind of murder Swooped up and swept on To the low, reedy fen-lands, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high. We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or basil, and found that most of them had three longitudinal nerves in each leaf, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... j'entends, moi aussi. Tu veux me jouer centre elle. La Grangeur—pah! Consoles-toi avec elle, mon vieux. Je ne veux plus de toi. Tu m'as donne de tes sales rentes Groenlandoises, et je n'ai pas pu les vendre. Ah, vieux farceur, tu vas voir ce que fen vais faire." ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... sitting at his meat, In a farm-house they call Spelunca, sited By the sea-side, among the Fundane hills, Within a natural cave; part of the grot, About the entry, fen, and overwhelm'd Some of the waiters; others ran away: Only Sejanus with his knees, hands, face, O'erhanging Caesar, did oppose himself To the remaining ruins, and was found In that so labouring posture by the soldiers That came to succour him. With which adventure, He hath so fix'd ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... winds A voice came murmuring, 'We must work and wait'; And every echo in the far-off fen Took up the utterance: 'We must work and wait.' Her spirit felt it, 'We must work ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... far as the edge of the sea to get mussels and lobsters to sell. And out there on the cold lonely marshes we would see wild geese flying, and curlews and redshanks and many other kinds of seabirds that live among the samfire and the long grass of the great salt fen. And as we crept up the river in the evening, when the tide had turned, we would see the lights on Kingsbridge twinkle in the dusk, reminding us of ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... his face set homeward this same hour, Why lingers he? Ill news, 't is said, flies fast, And good news creeps; then his must needs be good That lets the tortoise pass him on the road. Ride, Dawkins, ride! by flashing tarn and fen And haunted hollow! Look not where in chains On Hounslow heath the malefactor hangs, A lasting terror! Give thy roan jade spur, And spare her not! All Devon waits for thee, Thou, for the moment, most important man! A sevennight later, when the rider sent ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... great size, but built of stone, picturesque, and of considerable antiquity; and it stood, as we have already said, on the opposite side of the road to the church, looking towards the west end, where its handsome tower stands, with lofty well-proportioned spire, a conspicuous object to all the fen country for miles around. It was about a mile from the ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... the Romans landed, is supposed to have been little other than 'a collection of huts set down on a dry spot in the midst of the marshes;' a forest nearly bounded this spot, at no great distance from the Thames; and a lake or fen existed, outside London, at or near the site now occupied by Finsbury Square. The area of London, at this early period, is supposed to have been bounded by—to use their modern designation—Tower Hill on the east, Dowgate ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee; she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... the comforts which surround me; it is I who am the author of my own happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... and the expressions used are universal. Boys usually have one shooter made from agate which they call a "real." To change the position of the shooter is called "roundings," and to object to this or to any other play is expressed by the word "fen." The common game of marbles is to make a rectangular ring and to shoot from a line and endeavour to knock the marbles or "mibs" of one's opponents out of the square. A similar game is to place all the mibs in a line in an oval and ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... hm. An adverbial dative singular without an inflectional ending is found with hm, dg, morgen, and :fen. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... soft days, comrades. The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood was ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... what instinct only his Creator and ours knows—had found his way to her grave over two hundred miles of fen, field, and forest. Not finding her there, he had tracked me to the room where she had last played with him. When carried to other parts of the house, he cried piteously all day and all night. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... wird Schwefel zu schwefliger Sure[4] verbrannt (SO{2}SO{2}) oder es[5] werden in geeigneten Rostfen natrlich vorkommende Metallsulfide, z. B. Schwefelkies (FeS{2}), Zinkblende (ZnS), Bleiglanz (PbS) in der Glhhitze bei Luftzutritt oxydiert, wobei sich der Schwefel der Sulfide ganz oder teilweise in schwefligsaures Gas verwandelt, ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... and succour all them who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity!" And still less able are we to realize the countless answers to our feeble prayers already winging their way to every portion of the inhabited globe; o'er moor and fen, o'er lake and sea and prairie, in the crowded town and in the vast wilderness. Was it in blessed England, where the sun has long past the meridian; while here in the far North-West, there are but the first faint tints of ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... which is low down in the fen country, he found a sullen girl. She met him at the bridge of the Galland fen and her grey eyes flashed fire. She was a tall maid, very fair to look upon, and the blue tunic which she wore over her russet gown was cunningly embroidered. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in the pages of Scott for a more charming picture ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... himself into New England, now become the retreat of the more zealous among the Puritanical party; and it was an order of council which obliged them to disembark and remain in England. The earl of Bedford, who possessed a large estate in the fen country near the Isle of Ely, having undertaken to drain these morasses, was obliged to apply to the king; and by the powers of the prerogative, he got commissioners appointed, who conducted that work, and divided the new-acquired land among the several proprietors. He met with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... July 1. Today Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice- President and others will take effective means to protect ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum go, ain't it—me singing that hymn in a place like this? Sung ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... Delta, where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Gods! Fulvia," he replied, "I am but a sorry epicure, and I love the boar better in his reedy fen, or his wild thicket on the Umbrian hills, with his eye glaring red in rage, and his tusks white with foam, than girt with condiments and spices ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... nursed in Tiber's fen, Did all the world with hideous shape affray; That fill'd with costly spoil his gaping den, And trod down all the rest to dust and clay: His battering horns pull'd out by civil hands, And iron teeth lie scatter'd on the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... cowed by the approaching storm. I saw their boats with many a light, Floating the livelong yesternight, Shifting like flashes darted forth By the red streamers of the north; I marked at morn how close they ride, Thick moored by the lone islet's side, Like wild ducks couching in the fen When stoops the hawk upon the glen. Since this rude race dare not abide The peril on the mainland side, Shall not thy noble father's care Some safe retreat ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... and tends to hang out with other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly 'fen', but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the stuff occasionally ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Pearson? Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing any thing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... had developed in her own way, as wild and wayward as the gulls which swooped around the rocks where she was sitting. Nature revealed her heart to her in long solitary walks by sea and fen. But of the world of men and women Sisily knew nothing whatever. The secrets of the huddle of civilization are not to be gathered from books or solitude. Sisily was completely unsophisticated in the ways of the world, and her deep passionate temperament was full of latent ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... pretty mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Norman days, were connected with this ancient fabric, receiving education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... and black, &c. Drink; thick, thin, sour, &c. Water unclean, milk, oil, vinegar, wine, spices &c. Flesh Parts: heads, feet, entrails, fat, bacon, blood, &c. Kinds: Beef, pork, venison, hares, goats, pigeons, peacocks, fen-fowl, &c. Herbs, Fish, &c. Of fish; all shellfish, hard and slimy fish, &c. Of herbs; pulse, cabbage, melons, garlic, onions, &c. All roots, raw fruits, hard and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... for us that live as the fen-fires live, As stars that shoot and shudder with life and die, Can death make dark that lustre of life, or give The grievous gift of trust in oblivion's lie. Days dear and far death touches, and draws them nigh, And bids the grief that broods on their graves forgive ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... FEN. Low tracts inundated by the tides, capable, when in a dry state, of bearing the weight of cattle grazing upon them; differing therein from bog or quagmire. When well drained, they form some of the best ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... A Winkelried it was Who slew the dragoon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... sees the gradually encroaching bog and marsh in his land, and realises that with drainage he could reclaim this as good farm land. On the other hand some of the locals would rather see the fen remain, along with their various occupations, and the wonderful and fragile wet-land natural history. When digging begins there are a number of nasty incidents—torching of houses, malicious woundings of horses and cows, gunshot wounds ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... end of a long glade. He fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and their chief efforts were bent toward directing the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... some bird of night flies past them, and they hear the whooping of the owl, and see him skimming like a ghost over the waste. Then more fen fires arise, showing that other treacherous quagmires are at hand; but Crouch skirts them safely. Now the bull-frog croaks in the marsh, and a deep booming tells of a bittern passing by. They see the mighty bird above them, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... it—was never saved up for Sunday; he used it in his business. But James Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer, and with the word "Amen" sank back ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... thousand forms, by pining Fancy view'd, Dissolve. Above the sparkling flood When Phoebus rears his awful brow, From lengthening lawn and valley low The troops of fen-born mists retire. Along the plain The joyous swain Eyes the gay villages again, And gold-illumined spire; While, on the billowy ether borne, Floats the loose lay's jovial measure; And light along the fairy Pleasure, Her green robes glittering to the morn, Wantons on silken wing. ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... had more acres of fen than any man on this coast: but what are fens to love? What are ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln, Nottingham, Norfolk, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... thing that quick on earth wendeth. So liv'd on all happy the host of the kinsmen In game and in glee, until one wight began, 100 A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil, And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight, The mighty mark-strider, the holder of moorland, The fen and the fastness. The stead of the fifel That wight all unhappy a while of time warded, Sithence that the Shaper him had for-written. On the kindred of Cain the Lord living ever Awreaked the murder ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... authorizing the speaker to deliver his fire from any point other than that where his marble lies, equally distant from the objective point; "clearings," in like manner, authorizing the preparation of a reasonably unobstructed line of fire; and "fen ebs," "fen clearings," and "fen everythings," to be pronounced before the other player speaks, and which, by virtue of the prohibitory syllable "fen" (defendre, Fr.), prevent respectively ebs, clearings, and everything,—that is to say, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... see the good woman's eyes fill with tears: but she wiped them away, and took advantage of the additional persuasion they gave to her natural whine to say, "If, Sir, you know of any young gentleman who likes fen-shooting, and wants a nice, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
