"Midsummer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with suppressed breath and trembling limbs, she discovered something white lying on the bed of moss, so still and white, that it might have been mistaken in the dimness for a snow-drift, were it not a midsummer eve. All the old superstitions implanted in her infant mind by Miss Thusa's terrific legends, seized upon her imagination. Any thing white and still, reminded her of the never-to-be-forgotten moment when she gazed upon ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... looked down upon the scene with an unclouded face, and found a mirror in every icicle and in every gem of hoar-frost with which the objects of nature were loaded, there was, however, no perceptible heat in his rays. They fell on the white earth with all the brightness of midsummer, but they fell powerless as moonbeams in the ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... length, and under several heads, the debts of the state, amounting to 30,981,712l., which the company were anxious to take upon themselves, upon consideration of five per cent per annum, secured to them until Midsummer 1727; after which time, the whole was to become redeemable at the pleasure of the legislature, and the interest to be reduced to four per cent. The proposal was received with great favour; but the Bank of England had many friends in the House of Commons, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to the drawing-room she lighted the fire, which was ready laid, and of wood. Although it was nearly midsummer, the air was chilly, and the rain beat against the thin walls of ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... work about the mill. We ran the mill night and day, crushed all the quartz that could be got and worked over a large pile of tailings that had accumulated below the mill, which paid a small profit. The summer's success was very moderate. About midsummer Mr. Ayres bought out my interest in the enterprise, with the understanding that I would remain till fall and assist him. He wanted to give the business a further trial. I determined to return to Chicago and try to take advantage of the tide of prosperity then ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... waters sometimes fades to a speck, and sometimes flames out clear and far across the heaving waves, according to the position of the glasses and shades around it. The sun pours out heat as profusely and as long at midwinter as on midsummer-day, and all the difference between the frost and darkness and glowing brightness and flowering life, is simply owing to the earth's place in its orbit and the angle at which the unalterable rays fall upon it. The changes are in the terrestrial sphere; the heavenly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... that the sum which they were ready to vote would fall short of the indispensable outlay; nevertheless, when the report of the committee was laid before them they cut it down to half. They agreed to give four shillings in the pound for one year, and to pay it all at Midsummer. "They entreated her majesty to stay the demanding of more" until another session of parliament. Should circumstances then require it, they promised that they {p.307} would add whatever might be necessary; but, for the present, "if any invasion should be in the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... stories and seen a great many plays, in which the hero wakes up in the end, and we realize that we have been watching a dream. I remembered "Midsummer Night's Dream," and also "Looking Backward." An old, old device of art; and yet always effective, one of the most effective! But this was the first time I had ever been taken into the dreams of a lunatic. Yes, it was interesting, there was no denying it; ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... McMurdo, Palmer, and offshore anchorages in Antarctica note: few ports or harbors exist on the southern side of the Southern Ocean; ice conditions limit use of most of them to short periods in midsummer; even then some cannot be entered without icebreaker escort; most antarctic ports are operated by government research stations and, except in an emergency, are not open to commercial or private vessels; vessels in any port south of 60 degrees south are subject to inspection by Antarctic ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Congress had shown no sense of urgency, and it was not until November 15, 1777, when the British were in Philadelphia and Congress was in exile at York, that Articles of Confederation were adopted. By the following midsummer many of the States had ratified these articles, but Maryland, the last to assent, did not accept the new union until 1781, so that Congress continued to act for the States without constitutional sanction during the ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... stands; the other is the Delaware) is wild and beautiful, and the glory of the autumn woods what an eye that hath not seen can by no manner of means conceive. I have for the last week had my room full of the most delicious flowers that could only be seen with us at midsummer, and here, in these last days of autumn, they are as abundant and fragrant, and the sun is as intensely hot and brilliant, as it should be, but never is, with us, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... sympathetic faculty of its inhabitants. Nowhere is a large and unselfish charity more lavishly exercised than among the Rocky Mountain men and women. Free as the breezes that sweep those towering summits, warm as the sun of midsummer, bright as the icy peaks which lift themselves into the sky, the spirit of loving kindness for the unfortunate animates the bosoms of the sons and daughters of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... creation of the earth, and watched it through all the processes by which it was prepared for the reception of the human race, they would doubtless have been quite as critical as they are now, and quite as unreasonable. Suppose a man should visit his pear-trees in midsummer, and on tasting the fruit upon them, should condemn them and order them to be cut down and removed—how should we characterize his folly? He has criticized half-finished fruit, and made a fatal mistake. It is just as unreasonable to ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... to the opera, I have never seen Weber or Meyerbeer's works given so perfectly and conscientiously as at Dresden. Patteson's chief delight was the Midsummer Night's Dream, with Mendelssohn's music. He had a tuneful baritone voice and a correct ear for music. We hired a piano for our sitting-room; and, though I failed to induce him to cultivate his voice, and join me in taking ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of interest which occurred about the same time that Chopin made his debut. On March 18 Mendelssohn played Beethoven's G major Concerto with great success at one of the Conservatoire concerts, [FOOTNOTE: It was the first performance of this work in Paris.] the younger master's overture to the "Midsummer Night's Dream" had been heard and well received at the same institution in the preceding month, and somewhat later his "Reformation Symphony" was rehearsed, but laid aside. In the middle of March Paganini, who had lately arrived, gave the first of a series of concerts, with what success it is unnecessary ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... at midsummer only makes my loneliness more keen. The butterflies flit through the meadows like wandering souls of last year's flowers that died and were buried by the snow. The harvest moon, red-gold and wonderful, will rise slowly up out of the ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... say to stark Siegfried, and to my sister, that no man in this world is better minded to them than I be. Bid them both hither to the Rhine. If they come, I and my wife will cease not to be beholden to them. Or midsummer is here, he and his knights will find among us many to do them worship. Greet King Siegmund also from me, and say that I and my friends are his true servants; and entreat my sister that, without fail, she ride hither to her friends. No hightide were ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... close-body—close-body, indeed, it was; for the buttons, which were in size about equal to an old-fashioned China saucer, were buttoned to the very throat, thereby setting off his shape to peculiar advantage; his breeches were buckskin, and much soiled; his stockings blue yarn, although it was midsummer; and his shoes were provided with buckles of dimensions proportionate to the aforesaid buttons; his age might have been seventy, but his walk was quick, and the movements of his whole system showed great activity both ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... Midsummer arrived: Philip could report to Mr. Bolton only progress, and this was not a cheerful message for him to send to Philadelphia in reply to inquiries that he thought became more and more anxious. Philip himself was a prey to the constant ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... ordinary times, and was even said, when his wife, who had been long ill, died, to have clapped his hands and exclaimed, "Hip, hip, hurrah!" adding only as an afterthought, "The Lord's will be done." But midsummer was his great opportunity. Then took place the rouping of the seats in the parish church. The scene was the kirk itself, and the seats being put up to auction were knocked down to the highest bidder. This sometimes led to the breaking of the peace. Every ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... man, time may exalt the image as well as confuse the likeness. The haze of years may magnify all the nobler outlines, while it conceals all that would enfeeble their dignity. To me, his eloquence now resembles those midsummer night dreams, in which all is contrast, and all is magical. Shapes, diminutive and grotesque for a moment, and then suddenly expanding into majesty and beauty; solitudes startling the eye with hopeless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... table, not even from opposite sides of the earth, but from two opposite points on the earth's orbit, which are therefore at a distance of one hundred and eighty-six million miles. Imagine that on Midsummer Day, when standing on the earth here, I measure with a piece of card the angle between the star and the sun. Six months later, on Midwinter Day, when the earth is at the opposite point of its orbit, I again measure the angle between the same star and the sun, and we can ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... wild over the author of 'Arivana' and your presence is demanded everywhere, you want to run away from all the glory and triumph, and hide yourself in a little, dark hole which is only bearable in midsummer. Such an idea is ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it, since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his midsummer's music had reached its highest point, and was now in its declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and holds us does not hold us always, nor very long; it departs from all things, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do not know it. Nature, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... be at times. He had neither sold nor bought stock, but had moused around, with the skill of an old habitue, for information concerning the eligibility of the two men who were seeking his daughter's hand. In the midsummer dullness and holiday stagnation the impending operation in the Catskills was the only one that promised anything whatever. He became more fully satisfied that Arnault's firm was prospering. They had been persistent "bears" on a market that had long been declining, and had reaped ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... By midsummer the lines on both sides of the western front were an elaborate series of field fortifications. The shallow trenches of the preceding fall were practically things of the past. And these fortifications extended from the Vosges to the North Sea. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder, he stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "long blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back to ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... good. There has fallen a great famine in Norway. In Thrandheim the folk are dying for lack of corn and fish, and in Halogaland the snow has lain over the valleys nigh until midsummer, so that all the livestock have been bound in stall and fed upon birch buds. Men lay the famine to the account of Gunnhild's sons, who are over greedy of money and deal hardly with the husbandmen. There is little peace in the land, for the kings are for ever quarrelling over their jointures; but ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... stepdaughter paused a little, as if collecting her thoughts. "I shall not be here," she said finally. "I have decided to go down to Raffold for midsummer week, and I don't suppose I shall hurry back. It won't matter, will it? I often think that you entertain best alone. And I am so tired ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... partners might go down to the house for breakfast. They had gone and she had just finished placing on the counters and in other likely spots about the store sheets of sticky fly paper. Flies are a nuisance in South Harniss in midsummer and Captain Shad detested them. Just as the last sheet was laid in place, a young fellow and a girl came in. Mary-'Gusta recognized them both. The girl was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy summer resident, a Mr. Keith from Chicago. The Keiths ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... French, raided his pack-horse caravans on the march. Often, too, side by side with the red brothers of his adoption, he fought in the intertribal wars. His was the first educative and civilizing influence in the Indian towns. He endeavored to cure the Indians of their favorite midsummer madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock and poultry and improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not necessary to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man and he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summer ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... can never realize the effect which the poet designs, and with which the reader is impressed. So is it with supernatural and fanciful creations, especially of the more delicate and subtle kind. The Ariel of the "Tempest," the fairies of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the Oceanides of the "Prometheus," are not to be represented by human shapes. We cannot say that they are not dramatic, but they are not theatrical. We can sympathize with the poet, but not with the actor. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... o'clock in the morning two days later, a train of three coaches, two sleepers and a parlor car, pulled out of Fairberry northwest bound. It was a clear midsummer day, not oppressively warm. The atmosphere had been freshened by a generous shower of rain a few hours ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... where the midsummer breeze swayed the silken curtains, drifted a hum from the long file of bee-hives in the garden. Farther away sounded the comfortable gossip of hens as they breasted their soft feathers into the dust-baths behind the stables. A ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... scale, till one's head spins round with their inexplicable dissertations. What is the use of these interminable technicalities to the world at large? Do they enlighten the rheumatic as to how many coats they may put on, for the Midsummer days of this variable climate? Do their barometers tell us when to take an umbrella, or when to leave it at home? No. Who, we further ask, knows how hot it is when the mercury stands at 120 deg., or how cold it is when opposite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... dear I really am a going to tell you about my Legacy if you're inclined to favour me with your attention, and I did fully intend to have come straight to it only one thing does so bring up another. It was the month of June and the day before Midsummer Day when my girl Winifred Madgers—she was what is termed a Plymouth Sister, and the Plymouth Brother that made away with her was quite right, for a tidier young woman for a wife never came into a house ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... the men anything besides as a gratuity at settling time?-No; we give nothing in the way of drink money. They get what is called a midsummer bottle: that is an old custom, and it still continues ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... glorious monument to human credulity and memorial to an impossible, wholly apocryphal genius, known as the works of William Shakespeare. The extent of my writing during this incarnation was ten autographs for collectors, and one attempt at a comic opera called "A Midsummer's Nightmare," which was never produced, because no one would write the music for it, and which was ultimately destroyed with three of my quatrains and all of Bacon's evidence against my authorship of "Hamlet," in the fire at the Globe Theatre in ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... sometimes overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative, and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun went higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the cries of the water-birds, the buzz of insects over the bright ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... now perfectly tame, and nothing was easier than to kill them in scores. The great difficulty was in removing the spoils across the rocks, as it was sometimes necessary to do so for a distance of several miles. Means were found, in the end, to use the boats on this service, though even then, at midsummer, the northern shore of the island was frequently so closely beset by the ice as completely to block up the passage. This, too, occurred at times when the larger bay was nearly free, and the cove, which went by the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Vienna. The difference between the old Titian, author of these works, and the young Titian, painter of the "Assumption," and of the "Bacchus and Ariadne," is the difference between the Shakspeare of the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" and the Shakspeare of the "Tempest." Titian and Shakspeare begin and end so much in the same way by no mere accident. They were both products of the Renaissance, they underwent similar changes, and each was the highest and completest ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... Bluegrass, the midsummer of that year, Chadwick Buford gentleman. A youth of eighteen, with the self-possession of a man, and a pair of level, clear eyes, that looked the world in the face as proudly as ever but with no defiance and no secret ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... The light clouds above the elms puffed idly in the heavy air. It was a hot bright day, murmurous with bees and the idle, half notes of midsummer birds. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... themselves beneath a roadside pine which had sprinkled the ground with redolent brown needles. He wiped his hot forehead. The undulating green fields throbbed before his excited eyes, as in midsummer when they glimmer from the heat rays. He burrowed his tightened fists to the cooler soil below the ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... had gone a few miles on their way—"you broke off short, Archer," said the Commodore, "in the middle of your dissertation on the natural history and habits of the woodcock, turning a propos des bottes to the cruelty of killing them in midsummer. In all which, by the way, I quite agree with you. But I don't want to lose the rest of your lucubrations on this most interesting topic. What do you think becomes of the birds in August, after the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... doses of quinine, proved very intractable and held him in its grip for months. He was unable to work and fell into a sort of mental coma. In a letter of November 13 he describes himself as eating Peruvian bark like bread; and six weeks later he was still suffering from the effects of his unlucky midsummer plunge into the miasmatic air of Mannheim. In other ways, too, the new situation proved a disappointment. Social demands involved him in expenditures far in excess of his modest calculations, while the intervals of relief from physical incapacity were filled with a hundred distractions which ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... He wasn't exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To the stodgy, suety world of course it's little else than sheer moonshine, midsummer madness. Naturally, in its own charming and stodgy way the world kept flickering cold water in his direction. Naturally it hissed.... I shall find the book. You shall have ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... to drive her to take up arms again. London had always been favorable to Stephen, and two months of negotiation were necessary before David and Robert could prevail on the citizens to receive her. At midsummer, however, they consented to admit her, and she came to Westminster; but as soon as a deputation of citizens were in her presence, she showed her pride and hostile spirit. They asked for charters; she replied by ordering them ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the Catawbas, Governor Dobbs commissioned Captain Hugh Waddell to erect the fort promised the Catawbas at the spot chosen by the commissioners near the mouth of the South Fork of the Catawba River. This fort, for which four thousand pounds had been appropriated, was for the most part completed by midsummer, 1757. But owing, it appears, both to the machinations of the French and to the intermeddling of the South Carolina traders, who desired to retain the trade of the Catawbas for that province, Oroloswa, the Catawba King Heygler, sent a "talk" ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... thinking what shall I do with myself when I leave school at Midsummer; it will be so very hard ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... a strong man in pain, And I knew he was fretting for Robert again! Our Robert, our first-born: the comfort and stay Of our age, when we two should grow feeble and gray; What a baby he was! with his bright locks, and eyes Just as blue as a bit o' the midsummer skies! And in youth—why, it made one's heart lightsome and glad Like a glimpse o' the sun, just ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... cold, icy, snowy, Sundays in mid-winter when one hugs the cheerless radiator and, shivering in chilly discomfort, wishes that Sundays were months instead of days apart. There are stifling, sticky, sweltering. Sundays in midsummer when one prays, if he can pray at all, for the night to come. And there are blustering, rainy, sleety, dismal, Sundays in the fall when the dead hours go in funeral procession by and the world seems a gloomy tomb. But a Sunday in blossoming time! That is different! ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... by the tourist steamers are limited to a few weeks during the midsummer, when the sun is supposed to be visible at midnight in the arctic regions, but steamers run regularly all the year way around the Cape to Archangel, Vadsoe, and Horningsvaag, the arctic ports of Russia. The fjords ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... o'clock as we entered the lane where the carriage was drawn up. Rain, about the profoundest I had ever witnessed, was falling. Though near to midsummer, the night had been unusually dark to begin with, and from the increasing rain had become much more so. We could see nothing; and at first we feared that some mistake had occurred as to the station of the carriage—in which case we might have sought for it vainly through the intricate ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... broke out, "I have had about enough of this. Your son? God knows where he is for me! What the devil have I to do with your son? My daughter is out, for the matter of that; I might ask you where she is, and what would you say to that? But this is all midsummer madness. Name your business ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with whom they were confidential to the utmost degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed of writing music, nor had even turned out that ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... when he went away from the Rectory, did not at once return to his own house, but went off for a walk alone. It was now nearly midsummer, and there was broad daylight till ten o'clock. It was after nine when he left the Doctor's, but still there was time for a walk which he knew well through the fields, which would take him round by Bowick Wood, and home ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... till the new regulations came in force last midsummer, since when the guards in charge of express trains go the ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... in the summer season, great benefit will be derived from making early marches; starting with the dawn, and making a "nooning" during the heat of the day, as oxen suffer much from the heat of the sun in midsummer. These noon halts should, if possible, be so arranged as to be near grass and water, where the animals can improve their time in grazing. When it gets cool they may be hitched to the wagons again, and the journey continued in the afternoon. Sixteen or ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... sovereign, and many a time during her remaining nine years of life was she to seek delight again in the renderings of plays by himself and his fellow-actors at her palaces on the banks of the Thames. When Shakespeare was penning his new play of A Midsummer Night's Dream next year, he could not forbear to make a passing obeisance of gallantry (in that vein for which the old spinster queen was always thirsting) to "a fair vestal throned by the West," who passed her life ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the day for painting Holy Families, etc. But we cannot get tired of what has been done in Oratorios more than we can get tired of Raffaelle. Mendelssohn is really original and beautiful in romantic music: witness his Midsummer ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... increased by an unexpected present of five pounds at the end of the half year from Miss Pearson, and the promise of the like for the next; increasing as her usefulness increased; and she was also allowed to bring Angela to school with her. The balance of accounts at Midsummer had been satisfactory, and Felix had proudly pronounced her to be a brick of a housekeeper. And thus altogether Wilmet did not feel that the weight of care was so heavy and hopeless as when it first ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... during his lonely winters, when every villa or chateau of every friend of his for miles around is closed, and my vagabond village of Pont du Sable rarely sees a Parisian, the cure longs for midsummer. It is his gayest season, since hardly a day passes but some friend kidnaps him from his presbytery that lies snug and silent back of the crumbling wall which hides both his house and his wild garden from the ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... gay; for winter is here the season of flowers, and the heaths will cover the country with a vast Turkey carpet. Already the green is appearing where all was brown yesterday. To-day is Good Friday; and if Christmas seemed odd at Midsummer, Easter in autumn seems positively unnatural. Our Jewish party made their exodus to-day, by the little coasting steamer, to Algoa Bay. I rather condoled with the pretty little woman about her long rough journey, with ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... chased one another with mad fury across the midsummer sky, now obscuring the cold face of the moon, now allowing her pale, silvery rays to light up this gigantic panorama of desolation and terror and misery. To right and left along the roads and lanes, across grassland and cornfields, canals, ditches ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... buccaneers had been taken ashore under a heavy guard and locked up in the public watchhouse, Mr. Curtis and Bob, with Job and Jeremy, went ashore to stretch their legs. It was a fine, fall day, warm as midsummer to Jeremy's way of thinking. The docks were fascinatingly full of merchandise. Great hogsheads of molasses and rum from Jamaica, set ashore from newly arrived ships, shouldered for room with baled cotton and boxes of tobacco ready to be loaded. There was a smell of spices ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... the beach. The weather was beautiful; the wind steady, low, and gentle; the island, a picture; the sea, a picture; the sky, a picture. In that country there are two rainy seasons in the year. One sets in at about our English Midsummer; the other, about a fortnight after our English Michaelmas. It was the beginning of August at that time; the first of these rainy seasons was well over; and everything was in its most beautiful growth, and had its loveliest look ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... provision for interest till August the first, one thousand seven hundred and sixteen; only, after the duty of one shilling per bushel on salt should be cleared from the money it was then charged with, and which was not so cleared till Midsummer one thousand seven hundred and twelve last, then that fund was to be applied to pay the interest till August the first, one thousand seven hundred and sixteen, which interest amounted to about seventy-seven thousand seven ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... Then came another and another, all with songs of death. Finally, officers and regiments began to come. No one knew why they fled, or what had happened. As the ill tidings grew thicker, Washington spurred sharper and rode faster through the deep sand, and under the blazing midsummer sun. At last he met Lee and the main body all in full retreat. He rode straight at Lee, savage with anger, not pleasant to look at, one may guess, and asked fiercely and with a deep oath, tradition says, ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... northern people to rise early on Midsummer morning, to see the dew on the grassy edge of the dusty pathway, to notice the fresh shoots among the darker green of the oak and fir in the coppice, and to look over the gate at the shorn meadow, without recollecting ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... million dollars for ten millions of stock, where only five millions were to be had. In a few days more, these subscribers were selling at double what they paid. April 21st, a ten per cent. dividend was voted for midsummer. In a day or two, another five million subscription was opened at four hundred per cent. to begin with. The whole, and half as much more, was taken in a few hours. In the end of May, South Sea stock was worth five hundred to one. On the 28th, it was five hundred and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... as though he were looking at a strange thing. Round the corner of the villa remote from the winter-garden, was a long stone terrace upon which many windows opened. Screened from the wind, the sun here was of almost midsummer strength. There was no sound. The great house seemed asleep. There was nothing but the droning of a few insects. Even the birds were songless. The walls were covered with drooping clematis and roses, roses that twined over the balustrades. Below them was a tangle of mimosa ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... those desolate rooms and gazed about. The salon was just as she had left it; the table covered with books and magazines, her little chair drawn up to it, the long windows open to the terrace, and the faint chant of nuns, "made for midsummer nights," in San Felice, on the air. "Here we came fifteen years ago," continued Mr. Browning; "here Ba wrote her poems for Italy; here Pen was born; here we used to walk up and down this terrace on summer ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... little-boy class into the middle-sized form; and even there got a fair place for him. It was discovered, that although dull at classical learning, at mathematics he was uncommonly quick. To the contentment of all he passed third in algebra, and got a French prize-book at the public Midsummer examination. You should have seen his mother's face when Telemaque (that delicious romance) was presented to him by the Doctor in the face of the whole school and the parents and company, with an inscription ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that on certain feast days and above all on Midsummer night, the folk would pluck up a heart, and gather together as gaily clad as might be where the Flood was the narrowest (save at one place, whereof more hereafter), and there on each side would trundle the fire-wheel, and do other Midsummer ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps deg. come on, deg.62 Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, 65 And stocks in fragrant blow; Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... our midsummer, these various phases of wind and water may often be included in a single day. On three mornings out of four the wind blows northwest down our bay, then dies to a calm before noon. After an hour or two of perfect stillness, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the atrocities practised in the Arian behalf by the Vandal kings of Africa, who, among other cruelties, had attempted to silence some bishops by cutting out their tongues. To carry out Justinian's intention of the recovery of Africa, his general Belisarius sailed at midsummer, A.D. 533, and in November he had completed the reconquest ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... when you have a scene like this before you?" said Helen, with a sigh of pleasure, as she looked from the balcony which overhangs the Rhine at the hotel of the "Three Kings" at Coblentz. Ehrenbreitstein towered opposite, the broad river glittered below, and a midsummer moon lent ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... "On a midsummer's day, in the morning, Robin Hood, being accompanied with Little John and William Scarlock, did walk forth betimes, and wished that in the way they might meet with some adventures that might be worthy of their valour; ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... And violated silence, loud and fleet, Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp, The hansom wheels and plunges. Hark, O hark, Sweet, how the old mare's bit and chain Ring back a rough refrain Upon the marked and cheerful tramp Of her four shoes! Here is the Park, And O the languid midsummer wafts adust, The tired midsummer blooms! O the mysterious distances, the glooms Romantic, the august And solemn shapes! At night this City of Trees Tunis to a tryst of vague and strange And monstrous Majesties, Let loose from some dim underworld to ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... went on to the north-west, and in lat. 63 deg. fell in with a barrier of ice, which he coasted for thirteen days without finding an opening. The very sight of an iceberg was new to all his crew; and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer, becoming ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... or interested in them. It had grown to a membership of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers, musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group of men, and hospitality was their avocation. Yet the thing which set this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High Jinks. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... she reached Crandlemar, she should be better able to collect her thoughts and see what would be the next best thing to do. She longed to see Lord Cedric and the Duke and Duchess. She even fell to imagining how the grand, old place would look in midsummer. It seemed like she had been gone months. Would Cedric be changed, she wondered? Would he be ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... supposed, when that I sent my letter to my brother John, that the Queen's brother should have proceeded at Midsummer, and therefore I beseeched her to send me some money, for it will be some cost to me, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... aisles,—and in that moment the man saw a huge black bear standing in the trail, not ten feet distant. In that moment the eyes of the man and the eyes of the beast met each other fairly. Then the blackness fell once more; and a thin peal of midsummer thunder rolled ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... was inspired. Honor bright, I tell you that all the sweet and beautiful things in the Bible would not make one play of Shakespeare; all the philosophy in the world would not make one scene in Hamlet; all the beauties of the Bible would not make one scene in the Midsummer Night's Dream; all the beautiful things about woman in the Bible would not begin to create such a character as Perditu or ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Claudia lay weeping. She, too, was broken- hearted. Her daughter, her ambitions, all those things which formed her life had vanished as suddenly as the dew dries upon the green grass in midsummer. ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... all times two persons at least: the mover of the figures and the audience, the puppeteer and the puppetee, the letter-writer and the letter-reader. The play presented is, therefore, a play within a play: like the Mousetrap in Hamlet, like Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the romantic drama of Gayferos and Melisandra which Don Quixote witnessed with a select company of acquaintance at an inn. The temperament of this presented spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always reflected ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... a number of volcanic mountains are found, and black cinder cones are scattered in profusion. Through the forest lands are many beautiful prairies and glades that in midsummer are decked with gorgeous wild flowers. The rains of the region give source to few perennial streams, but intermittent streams have carved deep gorges in the plateau, so that it is divided into many blocks. The upper surface, although forest-clad and covered ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... What signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted manure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the hollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized our abominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows of foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetable garden, where they were set in the fall to make ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... got to be," said Mr. Lincoln, "midsummer, 1862. Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game. I now determined ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... magnificent trees. Here Poe spent much of his time, and one evening in this friendly home he recited "The Raven" with such artistic effect that his auditors induced him to give it as a public reading at the Exchange Hotel. Unfortunately, it was in midsummer, and both literary Richmond and gay Richmond were at seashore and mountain, and there were few to listen to the poem read as only its author could read it. Later in the same hall he gave, with gratifying success, his lecture on "The ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... desperate need of relief; struck back the damp hair from his face. The heat was insufferable. In the west black-gray clouds rolled up like blankets, shutting out heaven and air; low thunder growled; at five o'clock of a midsummer afternoon it was almost dark; a storm was coming fast, and coolness would come with it, but in the meantime it was hard for a man who felt heat intensely just to get breath. His eyes stared at the open door of the room, down the corridor which led to the room, which ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... the less:—such, for instance, as the way Anthea had of drooping her shadowy lashes at sudden and unexpected moments; the wistful droop of her warm, red lips, and the sweet, round column of her throat. These, and much beside, Bellew noticed for himself as they walked on together through this midsummer evening.... And so, betimes, Bellew got him to bed, and, though the hour was ridiculously early, yet he fell into a profound slumber, and dreamed of—nothing at all. But, far away upon the road, forgotten, and out of mind,—with futile writhing and grimaces, the Haunting Shadow of the Might Have ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... passed, and it was the eve of St. John, or Midsummer Day. This was the greatest holiday of the year, when the young girls met in the woods to dance and play. They went to fetch Snowflake, and said to Marie: 'Let her ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... over the fire (for a fire is good company in the mountains, even of a midsummer evening) with that freedom and abandon which the isolation, the hour, and the circumstances begot. Kerry had told his name, his birthplace, the habits and temperament of his parents, his present hopes ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... on the piazza to watch with those who were watching with the child. I made up my mind that I certainly should not retire until the physician departed; and in my present mood I felt that my midsummer night's dream would be to me more interesting than that of Will Shakespeare. Hour after hour passed almost unnoted. The night became serene and beautiful. The moon, like a confident beauty, at last threw aside her veil of clouds, and smiled as if assured of welcome. Raindrops gemmed every ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I think I liked him ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... walls had been stripped and the floors taken up. The drawing-room was a dungheap, Pani Joselawa, the innkeeper's wife, had put up hencoops there and in the adjoining rooms; axes and saws were lying about everywhere. The farmhands, who according to agreement were kept on till midsummer, strolled idly from corner to corner; one of the teamdrivers had taken desperately to drink; the housekeeper was ill with fever, and the pantryboy, as well as one of the farm-boys, were in prison for stealing latches ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... consented to let her try at a portrait of me. No, I have no troubles. I have friends, the choicest of the nation; I have health, a field for labour, fairish success with it; a mind alive, such as it is. I feel like that midsummer morning of our last drive out together, the sun high, clearish, clouded enough to be cool. And still I envy Emmy on her sofa, mastering Latin, biting at Greek. What a wise recommendation that was of Mr. Redworth's! He works well in the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been here—every day full of sunshine and the fragrance of flowers from the garden that ran along the terraces from the house to the river bank, and was a riot of midsummer colour and scent. The boy's face had gained clear freshness and his eyes, fixed on Miss Stone's face, glowed. "I ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... by snow or ice. The slant sunlight met their faces, and the mists were lifting in a curtain, with a riffle of wind that ran through the grasses like the ripple of waves to the touch of unseen feet. The slope lay literally a field of gold, spikes and umbels of gold—the gold of yellow midsummer light dyed in the asters and sunflowers and great flowered gaillardias and golden rod, with an odor of dried grasses or mint ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... sun rise at midsummer, we shall see it rise at Christmas or some other fine winter's day; for you know we are no lie-a-beds and we enjoy the cold. I take care to make this second observation in the same place as the first, and if ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in their hunting. The story may have some foundation, though it rests only on the authority of Charlevoix. No contemporary writer mentions it; and Vaudreuil says that the malady was caused by the long confinement of the English in their fort. Indeed, a crowd of men, penned up through the heats of midsummer in a palisaded camp, ill-ordered and unclean as the camps of the raw provincials usually were, and infested with pestiferous swarms of flies and mosquitoes, could hardly have remained in health. Whatever its cause, the disease, which seems to have been a malignant dysentery, made more havoc than ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... But when those who had been away returned and all settled down for the winter, they found the "American" as they called him, in his old place. He had not been away at all; he had worked as hard as ever through midsummer heat and autumn rain; he was frailer in figure, his clothes were more worn, his face was thinner and his eyes far too hollow and bright, but he did not look either discouraged ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... The little spirits float there as the breath of air floats around the material reality; one is forced to believe in their existence. With a genius powerful as that which inspired Bulwer, glorious as that which infused into Shakespeare the fragrance we find breathed over the "Midsummer-night's Dream," did Weyse's tones fill Wilhelm; the deep melodies of the organ in the old cathedral had indeed attracted him to the quiet little town! The powerful tones of the heart summoned him! Through them even every day ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... of great anxiety to me. I rose early, and the first thing was to ascertain the direction of the wind. In midsummer this was apt to be southerly, and so it proved on that occasion. Neb was sent to the point, as a look-out; he returned about ten, and reported a fleet of sloops, in sight. These vessels were still a long distance down the river, but they were advancing at a tolerable ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... by the midsummer moon misguided, Scarce seen in the twilight garden if gloom insist, Seems vainly to seek for a star whose gleam has derided Light love ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... on the part of the Italian troops, however, so far not a great deal had been accomplished. It was time that the Italian lines were well in Austrian territory. But in midsummer, 1916, they were still not much farther advanced than soon after the outbreak of hostilities between Italy and Austria. The Austrians so far had resisted all Italian attempts to take Goritz, an important town ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun. Nature revenged herself, in her own sweet and gracious manner; fresh leaves sprang out, and at nearly Christmas the foliage was as brilliant as when the outrage ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... in Midsummer, the emersion of our hands into the cool and closing grass is surely not the least among our animal delights. I was just seated, and the first sensation of rest vibrated in me gently, as though it were music to the limbs, when I discovered by a hollow in the herbage that another was near. The ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... remained a doubt whether Captain Montgomery had actually gone in her; and Ellen had many weeks of anxious watching, first for herself and then for news of him, in case he were still in France. None ever came. Anxiety gradually faded into uncertainty; and by midsummer, no doubt of the truth remained in any mind. If Captain Montgomery had been alive, he would certainly have written, if not before, on learning the fate of the vessel in which he had told his friends to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... did not reply; she walked slowly into her morning-room and stood at the window looking perplexed and serious, thinking nothing about her niece's lessons, and looking at, without seeing, the midsummer beauty of her garden. A few minutes later the door opened, and she turned to the young girl, who with a song on her lips danced merrily into ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... this palace, for we see future things; I see its white wall shine in the huge glare of midsummer, and the lizards lying along it motionless in the sun, and men asleep in the noonday, and the butterflies floating by, and birds of radiant plumage chasing marvellous moths; far off the forest and great orchids glorying there, and iridescent insects dancing round in the ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... fools—excepting you an' me, of course," yawned the Judge, one day in midsummer. "What you want to do is to take a couple of years at Iowa City and then come back here and jump right into the political arena and toot your horn. They'll elect you twice as quick if you come back here with a high collar and a plug-hat, even these grangers. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... an idle god, I guess, Since all the fair midsummer of my dreams He loiters listlessly by woody streams, Soaking the lush glooms up with laziness; Or drowsing while the maiden-winds caress Him prankishly, and powder him with gleams Of sifted sunshine. And he ever seems Drugged with a joy unutterable— unless His low pipes whistle hints of ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... seen the sun rise at midsummer; we will also watch its rising at Christmas or some other fine day in winter. For be it known that we are not at all idle, and that we make a joke of braving the cold. I take care to make this second observation ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... who shews us His midsummer light, Spreads the same halo O'er Winter's dark night; And Fame never dazzles To lure and trepan; Oh! believe me, believe ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... finally brought into the plan the Negroes for seventy or eighty miles around Charleston. The second Monday in July, 1822, or Sunday, July 14, was the time originally set for the attack. July was chosen because in midsummer many of the white people were away at different resorts; and Sunday received favorable consideration because on that day the slaves from the outlying plantations were frequently permitted to come to the city. Lists of the recruits were kept. Peter Poyas is said to have gathered ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... in the later weeks of a hot, still midsummer that Hugh escaped from Cambridge to the Lakes. He did not realise, until he found himself driving in the cool of the evening beside Windermere, how parched and dry his very mind had become in the long heats of the sun-dried flats. Sometimes the road wound down to the very edge of the water, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... flood the ancient Nile, To free a tyrant's captives? How to those— New patriarchs of the new-found under world— Who stand like Jacob, on the virgin lawns, And count their flocks' increase? To them that day Shall dawn in glory, and solstitial blaze Of full midsummer sun: to them that morn Gay flowers beneath their feet, gay birds aloft Shall tell of naught but summer; but to them, Ere yet, unwarned by carol or by chime, They spring into the saddle, thrills may come From that great heart of Christendom which beats Round all the worlds; ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... Carl, tossing his hands tempestuously towards the ceiling, 'mere midsummer madness. Poor fellow! Stretton! Stretton! Listen to me! What is it? Don't ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... Pythagorean lore concerning the fate of the soul after death,[136] above cited from Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage in ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... and Herbert Spencer, following out this idea, remarks that "the fairy lore, which in times past was matter of grave belief and held sway over people's conduct, has since been transformed into ornament for The Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, and endless small tales and poems; and still affords subjects for children's story books, amuses boys and girls, and becomes ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... of a midsummer day beat mercilessly upon the earth. Travelers on the dusty roads, toilers in the fields, and others exposed to the rays of the sun, thought yearningly of cooling winds and running streams. They would have looked with envy upon the scene being enacted in one of the small streams of ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... the world, we never tired of that walk through the avenue and park and Bois de Boulogne to the Mare d'Auteuil; strolling there leisurely on an early spring afternoon, just in time to spend a midsummer hour or two on its bank, and watch the old water-rat and the dytiscus and the tadpoles and newts, and see the frogs jump; and then walking home at dusk in the school-room of my old home; and then back to war, well-lighted "Magna sed Apta" by moonlight through the avenue on New Year's Eve, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... the vale of the Arno "from the top of Fiesole," or any of the neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it appears, at any time after midsummer, a huge valley of dust, planted with low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish maple on which the vines are trained. The simplicity of nature, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground, no ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... might have become a master of the art of vituperation. Lacking these qualities, he never rose far above mediocrity. But his fury was so determined and his prejudice so invincible that his writings have something of the power of conviction which fanaticism wields. In midsummer, 1862, Pollard published a book entitled The First Year of the War, which was commended by his allies in Charleston as showing no "tendency toward unfairness of statement" and as expressing views "mainly in ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... possible, Dorian always spent Sunday at home. If he was on his dry farm in the hills, he drove down on Saturday evenings. One Saturday in midsummer, he arrived home late and tired. He put up his team, came in, washed, and was ready for the good supper which his mother always had for him. The mother busied herself about the kitchen and ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... goes to school in winter; but in midsummer she pays frequent visits to "Flora's Looking-Glass," and thinks of the kind old lady who taught her so much ...
— The Nursery, No. 107, November, 1875, Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... midsummer. The fields were all russet and amber with an abundance of corn. The little gardens had seldom yielded so rich a produce. The cattle and the flocks were in excellent health. There had never been a season of greater promise and prosperity for the little traffic that the village and its ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... pale-blue bathing-dress, looked like one of those fairy-like creatures in Shakspere's "Midsummer Night's Dream," innocent ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... him as a seated figure in soot-smudged shirt sleeves, and with his upturned, clean-shaven face staring at a faint flickering that danced over the sky. The sky was what is called a mackerel sky—rows and rows of faint down-plumes of cloud, just tinted with the midsummer sunset. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... like to speak my piece," answered Miss Celia, obeying a sudden impulse; and, stepping forward with her hat in her hand, she made a pretty courtesy before she recited Mary Howitt's sweet little ballad, "Mabel on Midsummer Day." ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... awoke next morning, her first thought was, "Happy are the maidens who have sweet dreams!" for she thought she had only been wandering in a midsummer's night's dream; so, when she saw her lily in the broken pitcher where she had placed it, great was her delight. But a change had come over it during the night. It was no longer a common lily,—its petals were large pearls, and the green ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls. Then, turning round, I sought my sister's face. But the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned towards myself. Nothing met my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold, or for heart to conceive, any symbols more ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... "Woodland nymphs, phantom pixies floating on the wind, zephyrs in the guise of fairies, dreams come true,—my dear Olga, you are a sorceress. You change clods into moonbeams, you turn human beings into vapours, you cast the mantle of enchantment over the midsummer night, and we see Oberon, Titania and all the rest of them disporting on the breeze. And to think that only this afternoon I saw all of those gawky girls working in the fields, their legs the colour ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... little heart rendered her quite unreasonable for the time being. She was, in short, past reason. By-and-by she crept into the old bower where Rosamund and Irene had spent a midsummer night—a night altogether very different from the present one, for the bower was not waterproof, and the cold sleet came in and fell upon the half-dressed child. She sank down on the seat, which was already drenched; ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at morning to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in midsummer, find their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Carolina prepared to put into effect its remedy of state intervention, the West and the lower South united, as in 1828, against the East. The gubernatorial contest in Kentucky, which came in August, showed that Clay had not regained his former hold on that State. From midsummer to November every effort was made to break the power of Jackson, but to no avail. Without the planter support of the older South the President proved stronger than he had been four years before with it; the plain people were now more of ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... dame and damsel glittered at the feast Variously gay: for he that tells the tale Likened them, saying, as when an hour of cold Falls on the mountain in midsummer snows, And all the purple slopes of mountain flowers Pass under white, till the warm hour returns With veer of wind, and all are flowers again; So dame and damsel cast the simple white, And glowing in all colours, the ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The material, however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a profusion of pink flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson bow was also tied at her neck; she complacently remarked that "pink and crimson harmonize beautifully;" and others of the party arriving at that moment, I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... It was Midsummer Eve. The long light of the North was pale and clear, and the western sky shone luminous through the fir-wood that bordered the road. Under such dim lights colours deepen, and the great bushes of broom, that were each one mass of golden ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... John Colquhoun of Killermont and his wife breakfasted with us,—a neat custom that, and saves wine and wassail. Then to Court, and arranged for our departure for Blair-Adam, it being near midsummer when the club meets. Anne with me, and Sir Adam Ferguson. The day was execrable. Our meeting at Blair-Adam was cordial, but our numbers diminished; the good and very clever Lord Chief Baron[376] is returned to his own country, with more regrets than in Scotland ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... in progressive degrees of virulence with the advance to warmer latitudes, and with the descent from the high table-lands to the coast levels. On the Transvaal high veldt, for example, a mild form is developed which, in midsummer, to a small extent, affects and kills sheep. It is called blaauwtong, and does not affect horses. Descending further, this danger to sheep increases and begins earlier. Below 5,000 feet altitude in the Transvaal the summer season is dangerous to sheep, ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Biddy, Biddy," and shaking a little pan of corn, that she never noticed the children taking the road toward the White Woods. If she had done so she would have stopped them, for the White Woods was considered a very dangerous place. It was called white because it was always white even in midsummer. The trees and bushes, and all the undergrowth, every flower and blade of grass, were white with snow and frost all the year round, and all the learned men of the country had studied into the reason of it, and had come to the conclusion that the ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... of silent rooms, and to be alone with her own thoughts, which were not of the happiest. Her sister's relations with De Malfort troubled her, innocent as they doubtless were: innocent as that close friendship of Henrietta of England with her cousin of France, when they two spent the fair midsummer nights roaming in palace gardens, close as lovers, but only fast friends. Malicious tongues had babbled even of that innocent friendship; and there were those who said that if Monsieur behaved liked a brute to his lovely young wife, it was because ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... and try again. It has been one continuous line of failures, but every year we have learned some things, or at least learned how not to do it. This spring we were fortunate in having an expert from the South who came to my nursery and stayed there until midsummer, and we saw our own work compared with his. We all had great respect for him and he is able, too. I don't think he had much respect for us when he got here but he had a whole lot when he went away for he made a miserable failure ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... been stark mad last night. To have raged as he did with such a wound upon him, and to have ridden ten miles afterwards! O, it was midsummer frenzy that sustained him. Here in the courtyard he reeled unconscious from the saddle; they found him drenched with blood from head to foot; and he has been unconscious ever since. I am afraid..." ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... out on the floor. All his fine manners dropped off him. He was no longer at the town-hall ball; he was at home in the barn at the midsummer dance. He came forward, his knees bent, his head drawn down between his shoulders. Without stopping to ask, he threw his arms round a lady's waist and drew her with him. And then he began to ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... VI, XXII, XXIV, Scott's Ivanhoe Scott's Marmion Scott's Lady of the Lake Scott's The Abbot Scott's Woodstock. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar Shakespeare's Twelfth Night Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream Shakespeare's As You Like It Shakespeare's Macbeth Shakespeare's Hamlet, Sir Roger de Coverley Papers (The Spectator), Southey's Life of Nelson Tennyson's The Princess, Webster's (Daniel) Bunker ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... passing perspiring by with scrooged eyelids and purpling skin. From street and sidewalk, transparent hot waves swam up and danced themselves into nothing; while from the river bank, a half-mile away, came a sound hotter than even the locust's midsummer rasp: the drone of a planing-mill. A chance boy, lying prone in the grass of the Court-house yard, was annoyed by the relentless chant and lifted his head to mock it: "AWR-EER-AWR-EER! SHUT UP, CAN'T YOU?" The effort was exhausting: he relapsed ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... It was a sultry midsummer day, and the white walls of the city of Tripoli glared under the fierce rays of a tropical sun. A light breeze stirred the surface of the water, and made life on the ships bearable. Before this breeze the American squadron ran down towards the town. All preparations ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... gold," he answered, "that never grew rusty. My people were full of wonder when they stood before me, and the tribes had envy as they passed. It is a hundred moons and one red midsummer moon since the Great Company put them on my shoulders. They were light to carry, but it was as if I bore an army. No other chief was like me. That is all over. When the tribes pass they will laugh, and my people will scorn me if I do not come out to meet them ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... burned all the splendid missals and manuscripts, and smeared their shoes with the sacred oil, with which kings and prelates had been anointed. It seemed that each of these malicious creatures must have been endowed with the strength of a hundred giants. How else, in the few brief hours of a midsummer night, could such a monstrous desecration have been accomplished by a troop which, according to all accounts, was not more than one hundred in number. There was a multitude of spectators, as upon all such occasions, but the actual spoilers ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... born. It was in the quiet days that followed Priscilla's birth, that the Bradleys began to look certain unpleasant facts squarely in the face. They were running steadily deeper and deeper into debt. There were no sensational expenditures, but there were odd bills left unpaid, from midsummer, ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... Nymphalin's domain (for she was a queen fairy) made a point of asserting her right to this illustrious descent; and accordingly she quartered the Mab arms with her own,—three acorns vert, with a grasshopper rampant. It was as merry a little court as could possibly be conceived, and on a fine midsummer night it would have been worth while attending the queen's balls; that is to say, if you could have got a ticket, a favour not obtained without ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Onega: there was no way of getting to sea from there, and after a short halt he resumed his journey southward along the banks of the river Onega, hardly knowing whither or wherefore he went. The hardships of his existence at midsummer were fewer than at midwinter, but the dangers were greater: the absence of a definite goal, of a distinct hope which had supported him before, unnerved him physically. He had reached the point when he dreaded fatigue more than risk. In spite of his familiarity with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various |
