"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mist. This much it effected: The darkness merged into a faint daybreak. Then Abbot Hans saw that the snow had vanished from the ground, as if some one had removed a carpet, and the earth began to take on a green covering. Then the ferns shot up their fronds, rolled like a bishop's staff. The heather that grew on the stony hills and the bog-myrtle rooted in the ground moss dressed themselves quickly in new bloom. The moss-tufts thickened and raised themselves, and the spring blossoms shot upward their swelling buds, which already had a ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... Washington Irving visited Scott, they had an amicable dispute as to the scenery: Irving, as became an American, complaining of the absence of forests; Scott declaring his love for 'his honest grey hills,' and saying that if he did not see the heather once a year he thought he should die. Everybody who has refreshed himself with mountain and moor this summer should feel how much we owe, and how much more we are likely to owe in future, to the man who first inoculated us with his own enthusiasm, and who is still ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... barren Ithaca above the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... still to be favouring us, for there, on our right, was a splendid fellow lording it alone on the very crest of the hill within range. I did not stop to consider, but raised my gun to my shoulder and fired instantly. But just as I pulled the trigger, someone sprang up from the heather between me and the stag—sprang up, uttered a cry, and reeled and fell"—the last words were spoken with a gasp, and the Tenor stopped for an instant, and then continued in a hoarse broken whisper to which his companion had to listen intently, leaning forward ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Then let who list delight in vales below, Sky-kissing mountains pleasure are for me: What braver object can man's eyesight see, Than noble, worshipful, and worthy wights, As if they were prepared for sundry fights, Yet all in sweet society agree? Through heather, moss, 'mongst frogs, and bogs, and fogs, 'Mongst craggy cliffs, and thunder-battered hills, Hares, hinds, bucks, roes, are chased by men and dogs, Where two hours hunting fourscore fat deer kills. Lowland, your sports are low as is your seat, The Highland ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... commenced their climb. Neal was strong, active, and accustomed to fatigue, but he began to feel the weight of his sack of cartridge cases before he had climbed five hundred feet. When Hope bade him halt he was glad enough to lie panting on the springy heather. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... saw as I returned home across the moor from the station? The day was nearly over, and the clouds were gathering overhead. The wind was rising and falling as it swept across the moorland. The rich purple of the heather had gone, and was succeeded by dull brown—sometimes almost grey—each little floret of the ling, as Ruskin said, folding itself into a cross as it was dying. Poor little purply-pink petals! They had had their day, they had had their fill of sunshine, they had been breathed on by the soft breezes ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... the old camp-fire, the rough-and-ready choir Join in the chorus too. "You'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road"— 'Tis a song that we all know, To bring back the days in Bonnie Scotland, Where the heather ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... a studio, and brought up among the cloud-swept mountains of Westmorland, amid the purple heather and the sunset in the peat-moss puddles, barrack-life soon became like penal servitude. I was like a caged wild animal. I knew now why the tigers and leopards pace up and down, up and down, behind their ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... else can sell it, but what good is it to him? A lunatic may own a library as big as the Bodleian, but what use is it to him? Does the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most truly possess it? The highest form of possession, even of things, is when they minister to our thought, to our emotion, to our moral and intellectual growth. We possess even them really, according ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... girl once, and her fine, high-bred face was still almost beautiful. It was covered with innumerable tiny wrinkles, but her dark eyes were bright, and her cheeks bore a fixed pink flush, the birth-mark of the land of heather. Her hair, glossy black, with not a thread of gray, was parted in the middle and lay on either side in perfectly even waves. Her figure was slim and stiffly straight, her hands long and slender. She looked every inch a woman of refinement, and also a woman who ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... It was certainly a restful place, a regular wilderness of rocks and heather and junipers, enclosed on two sides. Far in the distance could be seen a little glade. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... whom—though they teased her a little and called her "Grannie"—they all turned in the end for help and advice. Jess was slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all these things. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... them and so escape, as foxes and other vermin frequently do; but they display very great strength and dexterity in drawing up the peg of the trap, and this done, they will carry off the heaviest trap to an amazing distance, over rock or heather. They never attempt to enter their hole with a trap dangling to their foot, but generally lay up in ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... hidin' o' what I hae—no a pretendin' to hae what I haena!—Is' be hame in guid time for yer tay, father.—I can gang a heap better withoot them!" she added, as she threw the bag over her shoulder. "I'll put them on whan I come to the heather," she concluded. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... school were very well attended. Lists of my subjects were sent about widely, and when the day came for my enthusiastic praise of Christopher North (John Wilson), a sweet-faced old lady came up to the desk and placed before me a large bunch of veritable Scotch heather for which she had ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... dead, frosted grace in its winter winding-sheet, and its tender spring charm, when curlews scream over it incessantly. But Joanna had never seen the autumn so short as this year; and she had heard them tell, that in the Fall, when poor Mr. Jardine was killed, the heather remained bright till November. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... his eyne did the glamour of Faerie pass And the Rymour lay on Eildon grass. He lay in the heather on Eildon Hill; He gazed on the dour Scots sky his fill. His staff beside him was brash with rot; The weed grew rank in his unthatch'd cot: "Syne gloaming yestreen, my shepherd kind, What hath happ'd this cot we ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... a doleful dream, I fear there will be sorrow! I dreamed I pu'd the heather green With my ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Beem-Tay was too formal, or the keep at Brig O'Dread too gloomy, she could put up at any of her half-dozen shooting lodges, built in wild, inaccessible, wild-fowly places, and shake the dust of the world from her feet, and tread, just under heaven, upon the heather. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood— Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, and twitter ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... "back-to-nature" idea became more popular and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature becomes more and more aware of an American background. Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. Nature literature ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... hour the child and he Joy'd o'er the vale together; It was a lovely thing to see That child among the heather. The vale is pass'd, the mountains rear Their rugged cliffs in air, He must ascend to view more near ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... big eldest brother has replied, "the eleventh is running already like a hare in the heather. This is number twelve!—little John the Baptist, you know, the latest, who, I think, will ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... path over the mountains. Some way opens when we get close up, like a path through heather, which is not seen till reached. We walk by faith. We foolishly forebode and fancy that we cannot live if something happens, but there is no cul de sac in our paths if God's mountain-way is our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... 'Confound you! enjoy yourself!' How could he enjoy himself with the thought of Sylvia in her room, made ill by his brutality! The vision of her throat working, swallowing her grief, haunted him like a little white, soft spectre all through the long drive out on to the moor, and the picnic in the heather, and the long drive home—haunted him so that when Anna touched or looked at him he had no spirit to answer, no spirit even to try and be with her alone, but almost a dread ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... I am, Stewart? We have the same feelings in the city that you have in the heather; and although I do not, like you, pretend to be allied to former kings, yet one may love one's father and mother, brothers and sisters, without being able to trace back to one's great-great-grand-father. I never disputed your high pretensions; why, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... what people think when your conscience is clear. You do feed your horse, you feed him well, so what's the odds," inquired the Rev. Hugh Grantley, son of granite, child of the heather, looking with ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... and purple distances, the glens of rocky mountains hung in air, "the gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme"! She remembered how on their September honeymoon they had wandered in Ross-shire, how the whole land was dyed crimson by the heather, and how impossible it was to persuade Arthur to walk discreetly rather than, like any cockney tripper, with his arm round his sweetheart. Scotland had not been far behind the Garden of Eden under those ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood—though if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... here, as on Captain Falkenberg's land; the ground was stony and barren, covered with heather and pine needles for miles round. They had felled too freely here; the sawmills had taken over much, leaving next to no young wood. It was a melancholy ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... the air is damp and warm from the S.E., and we smell Spain—true bill—several of us noticed the aromatic smell. Scents at sea carry great distances. "I know a man" who smelt burning wood or heather, 250 nautical miles from land, and said so and was laughed at; but he laughed last, for two or three days after his vessel beat up to some islands, from which towered a vast column of brown and white smoke from burning peat, and ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... unspoilt Nausicaa of the North; descendant of the dark tender-hearted Celtic girl, and the fair deep-hearted Scandinavian Viking, thank God for thy heather and fresh air, and the kine thou tendest, and the wool thou spinnest; and come not to seek thy fortune, child, in wicked London town; nor import, as they tell me thou art doing fast, the ugly fashions ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Germany at least can be classed as "a relic of mediaeval barbarism." A considerable space in the forest was cleared and enclosed with canvas. In the centre of this enclosure was a pavilion open at the sides, made of branches of fir-trees, and decorated with berries, heather, and forest flowers; in short, a sylvan bower provided for the principal company, outside a table furnished with powder and shot supplied a station for less privileged persons, including the chasseurs or huntsmen of the Duke, in green and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... elevation, seven hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur—mere undulating hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Riding. At evening, the sun golden amid long lazy clouds that had spent their showers, she saw wide Wensleydale, its closing hills higher to north and south as the train drew onward, green slopes of meadow and woodland rising to the beat and the heather. At a village station appeared the welcoming face of her friend Helen. A countryman with his homely gig drove them up the hillside, the sweet air singing about them from moorland heights, the long dale spreading in grander prospect as they ascended, then ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... straight to the listener's heart and nestled there. The sweet old tunes that one is never tired of were all Polly's store; and her favorites were Scotch airs, such as, "Yellow-Haired Laddie," "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Down among the Heather," and "Birks of Aberfeldie." The more she sung, the better she did it; and when she wound up with "A Health to King Charlie," the room quite rung with the stirring music made by the big piano ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... that they could scarcely be induced to advance. The country was of a more pleasant aspect, a shower of rain having lately fallen. At this height the trees grow thicker and finer, the stones are hidden by grass and heather, and the air becomes somewhat cooler. After a six miles' march Lieutenant Speke encamped at a place called Adhai. Sweet water was found within a mile's walk;—the first spring from which our traveller drank. Here ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... part of the island had been rock and heather not many generations since. Poor people had broken up the ground, and worn themselves out, one set after another, to keep it in cultivation. Round about Stone Farm lived only cottagers and men owning two horses, who had bought their land with toil and hunger, and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Givers, I look along the years And see the flowers you threw... Anemones And sprigs of gray Sparse heather of the rocks, Or a wild violet Or daisy of a daisied field... ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... "Bees, heather and honey," he murmured, surreptitiously gathering up a handful of the golden rain she had tossed him. "Have you had your breath of freedom, Patricia—are you ready for ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... tree was a mere delightful excitement, not a thing to be grieved over. The country was very wild all round, with tracts of heath and sand. The melodious buzzing of nightjars in hot mid-summer evenings, as they swept softly along the heather, lived constantly in his memory. In the moorland, half a mile away, stood some brick-kilns, strange plastered cones, with blackened tops, from which oozed a pungent smoke; those were too terrible to be visited alone; ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mauve-colored flower, something like an orchid, which Francois told me was a crocus, blooming for the second time this season, and in the gardens of the little gray houses, with their red-tiled roofs, and by the roadside were gorgeous asters of all shades of purple. In the less cultivated places, heather blooms luxuriantly and yellow gorse which attracted Miss Cassandra's trained botanist's eye, and she suddenly quoted the old Scotch saw, with about the same appropriateness as some of the remarks of "Mr. F's Aunt" in Bleak House: "'When gorse is out of season, kissing is out of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... was that resting-place For him who claimed a throne; His canopy, devoid of grace,— The rude, rough beams alone; The heather couch his only bed, Yet well I know had slumber fled From couch of eider down; Through darksome night to dawn of day, Immersed in wakeful thought he lay, Of Scotland ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... of Beauchamp but that he is now in Scotland, chin-deep in heather, killing grouse against time for a bet of some hundreds, which he has persuaded some simpleton to make with him. No man knows better than Beauchamp how to get paid for amusing himself. I had never heard, and don't believe, that Beauchamp is going to take ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... we never get in Belgium is grouse, unless it is brought over specially from England or Scotland. It has always been found impossible to rear grouse in the country. In the neighbourhood of Spa there are great stretches of moorlands reaching almost to the German frontier, covered with heather, which look as if they would be the ideal home of the grouse. Here M. Barry Herrfeldt, of the Chateau du Marteau at Spa, a real good sportsman, has tried his very utmost to rear grouse; first he laid down thousands of eggs and set them under partridges, but ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... and stockings, possessing a rich brown color, were produced with no more valuable dye than soot; in another piece, beautifully dyed, the yellow was obtained from stoney rag, brown from the crops of young heather, and purple from the same, but subjecting the yarn to a greater action of the dye than was necessary to produce brown. There is very little doubt but that beautiful and permanent dyes, from brown to a ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery of Edinburgh, which is ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest gray hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year I think I ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... impulse towards higher things—at least, he told her so as he led her out through the orchard and up the stony path, down which trickled a little stream, to the crag that dominated the house and garden. It was covered with heather and winberries, and just below the summit grew two rowan-trees. So bright was the moon that the colour of the berries was almost perceptible. Sir Henry stood moon-gazing and ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... though not, to be sure, in the England that we knew—but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! 'Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.' But what of that? There—surely there, in Sleswick—had been ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... wold^, veldt; moor, moorland; bush; plateau &c (level) 213; campagna^; alkali flat, llano; mesa, mesilla [U.S.], playa; shaking prairie, trembling prairie; vega [Sp.]. meadow, mead, haugh^, pasturage, park, field, lawn, green, plat, plot, grassplat^, greensward, sward, turf, sod, heather; lea, ley, lay; grounds; maidan^, agostadero^. Adj. champaign^, alluvial; campestral^, campestrial^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the hill, and raced together Over an open stretch of herb and heather Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned With fury against them; and soft sudden cups Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes Chasmed and ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... kind of rural Olympics. Shepherds came there from far and near to try their skill against each other,—young men in their prime mostly, with brown, ruddy faces, and eyes of that bright blue lustre which is only gained by a free, open-air life. The hillside was just turning purple with heather bloom, and along the winding, stony road the yellow asphodels were dancing in the wind. Everywhere there was the scent of bog-myrtle and wild-rose and sweetbrier, and the tinkling sound of becks babbling over glossy rocks; ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... refreshments, at present chiefly haunted by Mrs. Edgar's boys, ready to eat at any time of day; they looked civilly at the Varley Elizabethans, and found Lady Merrifield in the midst o her bothie, made charming with fresh green branches and purple heather, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... There were yew trees, those trees which the Indians use for making their bows, wild white rhododendron and spirea, cottonwood, white pine, hemlock, Douglas spruce, and white fir. Everywhere there was mountain-ash, the berries beloved of bears. And high up on the mountain there was always heather, beautiful to look at but slippery, uncertain footing for horse ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... speak. Then she felt him press her hand quickly. "Good-bye, then, and thank you!" he said in a louder tone, and before she could collect herself, she saw him, with the bearskin over his shoulder, the gun in his hand, and the dog at his side, striding away over the heather. There was a dip in the hills just there, and she saw him clear against the sky; his light, firm step taking him quickly away. She watched till he was out of sight, then came outside and sat down, still looking in ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... to be in a dream. He thought himself in a sepulchre, into which a ray of sunlight in pity scarcely penetrated. He stretched forth his hand, and touched stone; he rose to his seat, and found himself lying on his bournous in a bed of dry heather, very soft and odoriferous. The vision had fled; and as if the statues had been but shadows from the tomb, they had vanished at his waking. He advanced several paces towards the point whence the light came, and to all the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "We will have a holiday, after we are married, and that will be in a fortnight's time. We will go to Devonshire, where the heather is. But, my child, you will be wanting to sing again ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... hint of autumn was in the air that evening. The bracken had begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm ruddiness. As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low wall, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... history. In a way that was then at least equally practical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially the patriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remained even throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed; but the heather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new national cause by one of Edward's own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of a new invasion upon the very border of Scotland. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... silence and sank back into the bracken. My sister got up from the clump of heather in which she was ensconced, crossed to where I was, took my pipe out of my mouth ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... make themselves comfortable. They will not sleep under a roof. They will not clothe themselves: a girdle with a few pockets hanging to it to carry things about in is all they wear: they will sit down on the wet moss or in a gorse bush when there is dry heather within two yards of them. Two years ago, when you were born, I did not understand this. Now I feel that I would not put myself to the trouble of walking two paces for all the comfort ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... and made for the young. The opinions were charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet. But this delighted the boys. There were no reprints then, and to pass the paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the heather arm in arm with Christopher himself. It is a little singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley rarely if ever wrote for it. I remember a translation from Goethe, 'The Ghost-Seer,' which he may have written for it, and a poem ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... profits. The memory of this fallacious Caledonian Morris would revile daily, as he sat in the private office opening his mail, with old Joseph at another table, sullenly awaiting orders, or savagely affixing signatures to he knew not what. And when the man of the heather pushed cynicism so far as to send him the announcement of his second marriage (to Davida, eldest daughter of the Rev. Alexander McCraw), it was really supposed that Morris would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... crowning its hills, rise considerably higher, the loftiest of these, the Yes Tor, near Okehampton, being two thousand and fifty feet high. The moor is composed of vast stretches of bog and stunted heather, with plenty of places where peat is cut, and having its streams filled with trout. Legend tells us that all manner of hill-and water-spirits frequent this desolate yet attractive region, and that in Cranmore Pool and its surrounding bogs, whence the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... kinship and communion with them. She remembered these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... billow's clasp, From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather, The British oak with rooted grasp Her slender handful holds together;— With cliffs of white and bowers of green, And Ocean narrowing to caress her, And hills and threaded streams between,— Our little mother isle, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... over the red-blossomed heather, Their green banners kissing the pure mountain air, Heads erect, eyes to front, stepping proudly together, Sure freedom sits throned in each proud spirit there! Down the hills twining, Their blessed steel shining Like rivers of beauty they flow from each glen, From mountain and valley, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... were smiling through the mists of their tears, and the green grasses thrusting themselves through the withered mat of the pasture like slender fairy swords. April in the hills, with the curlews crying far out on the moorside, past the Red Ground my grandfather wrought, and where again the heather will creep down, rig on rig, for all the stone dykes, deer fences, and tile drains that ever a man put money in. I never knew why it was they called it "Red Ground," for it was mostly black peaty soil, but my grandfather would be saying, "It will be growing corn. Give it wrack, ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... and removed them as they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft cry of ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... very lovely place. Being upon a Mountainside there were parts in it where the rocks came through in great masses, and all immediately about them remained quite wild. Tufts of heather grew upon them, and other hardy mountain plants and flowers, while near them would be lovely roses and lilies and all pleasant garden flowers. This mingling of the wild mountain with the civilized garden was very ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... curse of being twins linked like galley-slaves, were Heather-bells in a childish chorus which piped forth the information "We are the Heather-bells: list to our song," but which was almost ruined by their common desire to get away from each other and lead in ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... account of some serene and peaceful quality in your poems. Here, then, there are sixty-four little pages of restfulness for those whose minds are troubled. You don't plunge into the deep of metaphysics and churn it into a foam, but you perch on your little bough and pipe sweetly of gorse and heather and wide meadows and brightly-flashing insects; you sing softly as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... "Drunk," nodded Kenny, "with heather ale. Only the fairies know how to make it now. And who wouldn't be drunk in the head of him to-night with the Good People dancing on the hills and the dead dancing ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... her cheek against the comfortable, rough, heather-smelling shoulder of her father's coat, while he patted her and smiled, "Good girl! I better ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... as Beri-Beri, have just appeared.* We walked also to a clear mountain torrent which comes thundering down among great boulders and dense tropical vegetation at the foot of the mountains, as clear and cold as if it were a Highland stream dashing through the purple heather. [*Since my visit there have been three fatal outbreaks of this epidemic, three thousand deaths having occurred among the neighboring miners and coolies. So firmly did the disease appear to have established itself, that a large permanent hospital was erected by the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... sight of another human being. Shaggy wild ponies may stop their feeding for a moment as you pass, the white scuts of rabbits will vanish into their burrows, a brown viper perhaps will glide from your path into a clump of heather, and unseen birds will chuckle in the bushes, but it may easily happen that for a long day you will see nothing human. But you will not feel in the least lonely; in summer, at any rate, the sunlight will be gay with butterflies, and the air thick with all those woodland sounds which ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the decks of the passing vessels, and the large steamers seem like toy boats as they pass below you. Near the mosque is a remarkable well of cool water. Shrubs and a few small trees grow on the mountain, and the ground is covered with quantities of heather, wild-flowers and ivy. We picked long spikes of white heather in full bloom, and pansies, polyanthus, the blue iris and many others of our garden flowers. The country all around Constantinople is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... grey-headed father, She's less of a bride than a bairn; She's ta'en like a colt from the heather, With sense ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... through the body by an arquebus, discharged so close to him that his clothes were set on fire. As there was no water within reach the flames could be extinguished at last only by rolling him over, and over, wounded as he was, among the sand and heather. Count Ernest Solms was desperately wounded at the same time. For a moment both gentlemen attempted to effect their escape by mounting on one horse, but both fell to the ground exhausted and were taken prisoners. Ernest Nassau was also captured. His young ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... first dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional attire; she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple bloom of the heather of the moor, and there was a ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... us are whispering keen, The heather and the ling Laugh to the sky as driven by The wild gulls cry ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... way into Italy we passed through Switzerland, with its high mountains, their snowy peaks lost in the clouds, its rushing torrents, and its deep valleys filled with giant ferns and purple heather. Great good was wrought in my soul by these beauties of nature so abundantly scattered abroad. They lifted it to Him Who had been pleased to lavish such masterpieces ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... to the task of putting as broad a stretch of moor between the prison and myself as the remaining hours of darkness would allow. Setting my face to the wind once more, I ran until I fell from exhaustion. Then, after five minutes of panting among the heather, I made another start, until again my knees gave way beneath me. I was young and hard, with muscles of steel, and a frame which had been toughened by twelve years of camp and field. Thus I was able to ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... disappeared into a sheltered hollow, the wind, hushed and non-plussed for a minute, paused to meditate further mischief; then, with regathered rage, it tore across country, and boomed, with sullen roar, into a valley shut in by brackened and heather-covered hills. ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... the stones and heather springing, Brook and brooklet haste below; Hark the rustling! Hark the singing! Hearken to love's plaintive lays; Voices of those heavenly days— What we hope, and what we love! Like a tale of olden time, Echo's voice prolongs the chime. To-whit! To-who! It sounds more near; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... chaparral belt and lower forests are in full bloom in June, those of the upper and alpine region in July, August, and September. In Scotland, after the best of the Lowland bloom is past, the bees are carried in carts to the Highlands, and set free on the heather hills. In France, too, and in Poland, they are carried from pasture to pasture among orchards and fields in the same way, and along the rivers in barges to collect the honey of the delightful vegetation of the banks. In Egypt they are taken far up the Nile, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... have pined eighteen years in dark vaults," said Friedel; "and, when I think that so may he have wasted for the whole of our lives that have been so free and joyous on his own mountain, it irks me to bound on the heather or ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather. Up to 1807 my grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave up the idea—'such,' he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital letters, 'is the Plague of Baiting.' He was a good pedestrian; at the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after breakfast, and had a delightful drive over the moors and fenceless fields, around the hills and tiny emerald lakes bordered with beautiful wild shrubbery, bright with golden rod, wild roses, and field lilies. Here and there among the heather grew creeping mealberry vines, with bright red fruit-like beads, and huckleberry bushes that tempted our pleasure-seekers to alight again and again to gather and eat ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... entice him to greater accuracy of study. There is not a fragment of its living rock, nor a tuft of its heathery herbage, that has not adorable manifestations of God's working thereupon. The harmonies of color among the native lichens are better than Titian's; the interwoven bells of campanula and heather are better than all the arabesques of the Vatican; they need no improvement, arrangement, nor alteration, nothing but love, and every combination of them is different from every other, so that a painter need never repeat himself if he will only be true; yet all these sources of power have ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... before his eyes, if he held it up; but he had his lantern, and anyway he knew his way about blindfold. But even in daylight you might pass by that stable ready, unless you knew it was there. For it was very little, and being roofed with heather it looked only like a bit of the bog that had humped itself up a bit higher than ...
— Candle and Crib • K. F. Purdon
... the heather towards the light, risking quags and pitfalls. Nay, so heartening was the chance to hear a fellow creature's voice, that I broke into a run, skipping over the stunted gorse that cropped up here and there, and dreading every moment to see the light quenched. "Suppose it burns in an ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beautiful bird she sings, For body and mind are hale and healthy. Her eyes they thrill with right goodwill - Her heart is light as a floating feather - As pure and bright as the mountain rill That leaps and laughs in the Highland heather! Go search the world and search the sea, Then come you home and sing with me There's no such gold and no such pearl As a bright ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... species from India, but quite hardy. It is pretty, interesting, and useful. The flowers are produced on erect stems a foot high, and formed in spikes 3in. to 5in. long, which are as soft as down and smell like heather. The colour is a soft rose. These flowers spring from a dense mass of rich foliage; the leaves in summer and early autumn are of a pleasing apple-green colour, smooth, oblong, and nearly spoon-shaped from the narrowing ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... downs, the Midland and Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills have been everywhere invaded—their old rural sanctities are gone. I walked in bewilderment the other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon its crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and dangling sacks for bayonet training, musketry ranges, and the rest, are everywhere. Tennyson, whose wandering ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but encountered them in scattered and scanty companies, at the entrance of all the defiles, on the heights commanding pathways, and wherever men could hide themselves and await the moment for appearing unexpectedly. The Franks heard them, from amid the heather and the brushwood, uttering shrill cries, to give warning one to another or to alarm the enemy. The Franks advanced cautiously, and at last arrived at the entrance of the thick wood which surrounded Morvan's abode. He had not yet set out with the pick of the warriors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the Covenanters in days of peril and alarm; and some of Scotland's martyrs were immolated at the doors of their own huts, the foundation of which may still be traced, overgrown with the green turf or the heather-bell. To a Scottish pastor such scenes are classic, grand even in a higher sense than those of Marathon or Thermopylae—for it was the immutable and holy spirit which was there kindled, and formed into a flame, that finally won for Scotland not only the blessings of civil ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... distracting London was left behind, when he had her to himself amid the Scotch heather and birch, should he find her again—conquer her again—as in the exquisite days after their marriage? He thought of Cliffe with a kind of proud torment, disdaining to be jealous or afraid. Kitty had amused herself—had tested her freedom, his patience, to the utmost. Might she now be content, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Island of Cerigotto and Candia; but that the sloop passed between Cerigotto and Pauri, and was lost on a rock, on the south-west part of that passage, which rock does not appear to be laid down in Heather's Chart, by which the ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... quail, partridge, sage hen, or grouse has flown from the heather into our bag transfixed by a feathered shaft. Both Compton and Young have shot ducks and geese, some on the wing. But we cannot compete with the experiences of Maurice Thompson who, shooting ninety-eight arrows, landed sixteen ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... a moor covered with heather in bloom, the young shepherd lay dreaming in the sun. The serene light, the hum and buzz of tiny creatures, the sweet whispering of the waving grass, the silvery tinkling of the grazing sheep, the mighty beat and rhythm of the earth sang through ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Acre Wood, under Crowborough, chief of them—and vast wastes of undulating heath, rising here and there to great heights crowned with fir trees, as at Gill's Lap. A few enclosed estates interrupt the forest's open freedom, but nothing can tame it. Sombre dark heather gives the prevailing note, but between Old Lodge and Pippinford Park I once came upon a green and luxuriant valley that would not have been out of place in Tyrol; while there is a field near Chuck Hatch where in April one may see more dancing ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... to wish to meet the Fairy Queen! Just think how beautiful she must be! dressed all in green, with gold bells on her bridle, and riding a white horse shod with gold! I think I see her galloping through the woods and out across the hill, over the heather.' ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... heather we wonned together, I and my Willie (O love my love): I need hardly remark it was glorious weather, And flitterbats ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... second day of his journey—in a country barren and stony, yet with a hint of the leafy wildernesses to come in the ridges spiked with pines, the cropping of heather here and there, and the ever- increasing solitude of his way—he was set upon by four foot-pads, who thought to beat the life out of his body as easily as boys that of a dog. He asked nothing better than that they should begin; and he asked so civilly that they very soon ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... far distance, not only by the ruins that line it on both sides, but also by its borders of grass of a darker green and greater luxuriance than the pale, short, sickly verdure of the Campagna; just as you can trace the course of a moorland stream along the heather by the brighter vegetation which its own waters have created. Myriads of flowers gleam in their own atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so that the feet can hardly be set down without crushing scores of them: the Orchis rubra with ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... unopposed. After the preceding enthusiast, the voice of Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up and down. Mr. Cowes' tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen. He makes a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his hearers. He prides ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... eagle's plume That crowned the chieftain's bonnet, The sun still sees the heather bloom, The silver ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... heath, of some 400 acres, somewhat resembles that of Hampstead, and from the higher ground some excellent views are to be obtained, whilst the sandy hollows and surface are plentifully covered with heather, gorse, and brambles. On the northern side, facing the road which leads to Roehampton, are many fine houses—among others, Grantham House, the residence of Lady Grantham; Ashburton House; Exeter House, occupied by the second Marquis of Exeter, who, ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... long and gossiping, full of the scent of the heather and the eccentricities of Donald Macleod; and she wrote them, regularly twice a week, using rainy afternoons for the purpose and every inch of the paper at her disposal. Elfrida put a very few of them into ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... dry and warm. The heavy Atlantic rains which at all seasons are poured out upon that soil, seemed suspended in favour of the insurgent multitudes, amounting to 30,000, or 40,000 at the highest, who, on the different hill summits, posted their nightly sentinels, and threw themselves down on turf and heather to snatch a short repose. The kindling of a beacon, the lowing of cattle, or the hurried arrival of scout or messenger, hardly interfered with slumbers which the fatigues of the day, and, unhappily also, the potations of the night rendered doubly deep. An early ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... list extends from the imposing and sometimes gigantic oaks, elms, beeches, and willows to shrubs and heather growth of ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think, that Professor ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the time o' year Remarkably fine weather, These articles o' dress were laid To air upon the heather. ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... to make demonstrations at a little distance. As the invading party approached, they received a platoon from a wood on the left, but nevertheless went on. When, however, they were all engaged in toiling up the pass, forty men concealed in the heather close by fired with deadly effect, inflicting a mortal wound on Walter Ross, Easterfearn's son while Bailie Ross's son was wounded by a bullet which swept across his breast. The Bailie called to his son to ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... three-quarters of a mile away and sleep for the rest of the day, or, at any rate, until lunch time; and yet he looked another long look at the morning star, thrust his hands down into his trousers pockets and turned up a side path that led through the heather, and spent the rest of the morning walking and thinking—walking slowly, and ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith |
