"Sylvan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their graceful outlines to the blue sky, across a vast canopy of treetops; beneath whose shade the wolf and the wildcat, the badger and the fox, yet roamed at large, and preyed upon the wild deer and the lesser game. It bore the name of Walderne, which signifies a sylvan spot frequented by the wild beasts; the castle lay beneath; the parish church rose on the summit of the ridge above—a simple Norman structure, imposing ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... this youthful paradise around, And all the broad and boundless mainland, lay Cooled by the interminable wood, that frowned O'er mount and vale, where never summer ray Glanced, till the strong tornado broke his way Through the gray giants of the sylvan wild; Yet many a sheltered glade, with blossoms gay, Beneath the showery sky and sunshine mild, Within the shaggy arms of that ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... I praised thee with my praise, E'en as a bird, conceal'd in sylvan ways, May laud the rose, and wish, from hour to hour, That he had petals like the empress-flower, And there could grow, unwing'd, and be a bud, With all his warblings ta'en at singing-flood And turned to vagaries of the wildest scent To undermine ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... sylvan handicraft having been explained to me, in detail, Theodora announced that it was time to return to the house. "Gram does not approve of our taking too long strolls on Sunday," said she. "But so long as we do right, I can see no harm in it. Besides, our new cousin had never ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and pride of man, At the Sophist schools and the learned ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... spread a network or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness. This sort of religious talisman being secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts (like myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes armed into courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. The mountains of the Vosges on the eastern frontier of France, have never attracted much notice from Europe, except in 1813-14, for a few brief months, when they fell within Napoleon's line of defence against the Allies. But they ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... piteous Shrieks and Cries of invisible Beings, echoing from haunted Spring and Dale, as ne'er smote human Ears before nor since: Nymphs and Wood-Gods, or they that had passed for such, breaking up House and retreating to their own Place. I warrant you, there was Trouble among the Sylvan People that Day—Satyrs ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... larger sheets of water so disposed as to have a natural effect. Shapely trees with contrasting foliage grew here and there. Grottos had been ingeniously contrived; and broad terraced walks, now in ruin, though the steps were broken and the balustrades eaten through with rust, gave to this sylvan Thebaid a certain character of its own. The art of man and the picturesqueness of nature had wrought together to produce a charming effect. Human passions surely could not cross that boundary of tall oak-trees which shut out the sounds of the outer world, ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... for the usual cloud of smoke and flame that hung night and day above the blast furnaces was replaced by a brilliant, hard blue sky. The works were shut down. They had reached the end of Blue Grass Avenue at the south line of the park. It was a spot of semi-sylvan wildness that they were fond of. The carefully platted avenues and streets were mere lines in the rough turf. A little runnel of water, half ditch, half sewer, flowed beside the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... exterior usually signifies pleasantness and peace within. While well-fenced and well-tilled farms are always pleasing to the eyesight, and neatly dressed roadsides are generally desirable, it does not follow that no shrubbery or sylvan tangles of trees should be allowed to grow on farms or by the wayside. A bare and rocky hill or knoll suggests images of bleak and barren desolation, cold blasts, and parching sun; while a hill clothed and capped with woods gives the impression of a rich and charming country. Therefore the land ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... partially seen, as from a trap-door opening in the roof, and a voice was heard to utter these words in Anglo-Saxon, "Leap, sirrah; come, no delay; leap, my good Sylvan, show your honour's activity." A strange chuckling hoarse voice, in a language totally unintelligible to Count Robert, was heard to respond, as if disputing the orders which ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the same desire, The vigorous youth and aged sire. Behold the coward and the brave, The haughty prince, the humble slave, Physician, lawyer, and divine, All make oblations at this shrine. Some enter boldly, some by stealth, And leave behind their fruitless wealth. For, while the bashful sylvan maid, As half-ashamed and half-afraid, Approaching finds it hard to part With that which dwelt so near her heart; The courtly dame, unmoved by fear, Profusely pours her offering here. A treasure here of learning ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the loneliness in my heart has become fairly overmastering. I can steel myself against it no longer. I want you with me in my declining years. I cannot leave here. I have become greatly attached to this part of the country, and have no doubt that you will be, also. Sylvan scenes, with a dash of human savagery in the foreground, form the best relief for a too-extended assimilation of books. It has been like balm to me, and will prove ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... The Bowery, New York, is a very high-sounding address. It is one that any European might imagine as a retreat of aristocratic refinement and sylvan beauty; there is nothing in the name to suggest the Seven Dials of London in its old days; and yet the place is its counterpart, the only difference being that the Five Points, as it is called, is two degrees worse than the Seven Dials ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the cotton-spinning machinery inventors was Samuel Crompton, who was born a few miles away from Bolton in a delightfully secluded and sylvan spot, "Firwood Fold," on the 3rd December, 1753. No story of the Cotton plant would be complete without mention of this individual, for wherever fine spinning machinery is practised there is a ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... place (fair Amoret) the hour Is yet scarce come: Here every Sylvan power Delights to be about yon sacred Well, Which they have blest with many a powerful Spell; For never Traveller in dead of Night, Nor strayed Beasts have faln in, but when sight Hath fail'd them, then ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... there had never before been such a breakfast; compared to it, the dejeuner a la fourchette of a Durand or a Foyot was as starvation fare. It was surprising how beautiful the dark places of the night before looked now; daylight metamorphosed the spot into a sylvan fairyland. Mr. Heatherbloom could have lingered there indefinitely. The soft moss wooed him, somewhat aweary with world contact; she filled his eyes. The faint shadowy lines beneath hers which he had noted at the dawn had now vanished; ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... bank of the Zambesi, and then prolonged from the left bank away through thirty or forty miles of hills. The whole scene was extremely beautiful; the banks and islands dotted over the river are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety of colour and form. At the period of our visit several of the trees were spangled over ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... mighty Sire addressed They all obeyed his high behest, And thus begot in countless swarms Brave sons disguised in sylvan forms. Each God, each sage became a sire, Each minstrel of the heavenly choir. Each faun, of children strong and good Whose feet should roam the hill and wood. Snakes, bards, and spirits, serpents bold Had sons too numerous to be told. Bali, the woodland ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... complying with my demand, he snatched his hat and hanger, and, assuming the looks, swagger, and phrase of Pistol, burst out into the following exclamation, "Ha! must I then perform inglorious prank of sylvan ape in mountain forest caught! Death rock me asleep, abridge my doleful days, and lay my head in fury's lap—Have we not Hiren here?" This buffoonery did not answer his expectation, for, by this time, the company was bent on seeing ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... several: but the wanderer rested with the pine, because her voice was constant, soft, and lowly deep; and he welcomed in her a wild memorial of the ocean-cave, his birthplace. There is a fine description of a storm in 'Coningsby,' where a sylvan language is made to swell the diapason of the tempest. 'The wind howled, the branches of the forest stirred, and sent forth sounds like an incantation. Soon might be distinguished the various voices of the mighty ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... our story, to which the preceding chapters should be taken, perhaps, as merely introductory, opens about midsummer, and among that remarkable group of sylvan lakes—nearly a dozen in number—which, commencing on the wild borders of northerly New Hampshire, and shooting off in an irregular line some fifty miles northeasterly into the dark and unbroken forests of Maine, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... no reptiles in the Isle of Man. . . . I kept thinking, "And this is the rugged, bare, rocky isle which I dreaded to come to,—this soft, rich, verdant paradise!" It really seems as if the giants had thrown aloft the bold, precipitous rocks and headlands round the edge of the island, to guard the sylvan solitudes for the fairies, whose stronghold was the Isle of Man. I should not have been surprised at any time to have seen those small people peeping out of the wild foxgloves, which are their favorite hiding-places. So poetical is the air of these regions ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... eclipses the Muses themselves; his words flow like the sylvan stream by moonlight, and his melody is a crossbreed of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... northern bank of the pond, bringing from the city well-to-do, country-loving souls who desired space and sunshine. It was a satisfaction to Thor's father, Archie Masterman, that only the best type of suburban residence was going up among these sylvan glades, and that the property was justifying his foresight ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... white below the rose-red mantle, and fringed with gold thread above her perfect and lightly stepping feet. Shoes she wore shining with brightest wire of findruiney. As she came up the dell, rejoicing in her freedom and the sweetness of that sylvan place and the solitude, she contemplated the bright stream, and sang clear and sweet ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... last, this tribe worship the sun, but with the moon as his wife, and the stars as their children. Besides these they revere Manes, and countless local and sylvan deities. Like Druids, they sacrifice only in a grove, but ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... with all the gravity of countenance he was master of—"Madam," says he, "are we to consider you as one of the Sylvan Deities who preside over these scenes, or connected in any way with the vehicle?"—"Wehicle, indeed, you hunhuman-brutes, instead of assisting a poor distressed female who has been chuck'd from top of that there safety-thing, as they calls it, into such ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... in the winter frost, The glory of her lilies lost. With leafy tears the sad trees wept As a wild wind their branches swept. Mourned bird and deer; and every flower Drooped fainting round the lovely bower. The sylvan deities had fled The spot where all the ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... and other splendid pageantries. The water was made to swarm with swimming and wading sea-gods, who blew trumpets instead of shells, and recited verses in praise of her majesty: finally, a tremendous battle was enacted between the Tritons of the pond and certain sylvan deities of the park, which was long and valiantly disputed, with darts on one side and large squirts on the other, and suddenly terminated, to the delight of all beholders, by the seizure and submersion of old ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... sylvan surroundings of the Trinidad "Sentinel" office—a little clearing in a pine forest—and its attendant fauna, made these signals confusing. An accurate imitation of a woodpecker was also ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... white-headed, forlorn-looking boy; a pack suspended on a staff over his right shoulder; his dress unrivaled in sylvan simplicity since the primitive fig leaves of Eden; the expression of his face presenting a strange union of wonder and apathy: his whole appearance gave you the impression of a runaway apprentice in desperate search of employment. Ignorant alike ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... body and extremities of a beast; the Cyclops, possessed of one enormous eye; or their parallels in Egyptian myths, the men with pectoral eyes,—the creatures "whose heads do beneath their shoulders grow;" and the Fauns, those sylvan deities whose lower extremities bore resemblance to those of a goat. Monsters possessed of two or more heads or double bodies are found in the legends and fairy tales of every nation. Hippocrates, his precursors, Empedocles and Democritus, and Pliny, Aristotle, and Galen, have all described ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... will long for the sleep-song of whispering leaves above your head, and the smell of a couch of balsam boughs. At tables spread with dainty fare you will be hungry for the joy of the hunt, and for the angler's sylvan feast. In proud cities you will weary for the sight of a mountain trail; in great cathedrals you will think of the long, arching aisles of the woodland: and in the noisy solitude of crowded streets you will ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the supper of the colonists took the shape of a sylvan marriage feast, eaten in the open air under the palms and tree ferns, as the sun was sinking down behind the western peaks of Aeria, and the full moon was rising ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... sacrificed, and often, alas, human victims also. The mistletoe thus gathered was divided into small portions and distributed among the people. The tiny sprays were fastened above the doors of the houses, as propitiation to the sylvan deities during ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Cathedral, which we are to study. He is a joyous being to whom it is good merely to be alive. The elfin locks falling about his face make him look like some creature of the woods. We are reminded most of the faun of the Greek mythology. The arrows in his hand suggest some sylvan sport, but in reality they are the emblem of his martyrdom. According to tradition the young saint was bound by his enemies to a tree, and shot ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... some jungle men were called in, for the man of the jungle must naturally know more about snakes than other men. These were probably Katkurrees, an aboriginal race, who live by woodcutting, hunting and other sylvan occupations. They proved to be practical men and at once sucked the wound. An intelligent Havildar of the Customs Department, who chanced to be present, then lanced the wound slightly to let the blood flow, and tied the leg tightly in ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... most confident interpreters of the sylvan dialogues have been commonly found among the philosophers of the east, in a country where the calmness of the air, and the mildness of the seasons, allow the student to pass a great part of the year in groves and bowers. But what may be done in one place by peculiar opportunities, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... all hail, ye vernal blooms Ye bow'ry thickets, and prophetic glooms! Ye forests hail! ye solitary woods! Love-whispering groves and silver-streaming floods! Ye meads, that aromatic sweets exhale! Ye birds, and all ye sylvan beauties hail! Oh how I long with you to spend my days, Invoke the muse, and try the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... when they went to their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a sunrise on the hills, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... good progress, sometimes paddling, sometimes poling (where the channel was narrow) and toward evening when, as I reckoned, we had travelled about sixty miles, we shot suddenly into a charming little lake with sylvan banks ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. "A few strong instincts and a few ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... have often observed that this corner is a haunt and loitering-place for those winds which have no work to do upon the deep dashing ships against our iron-bound shores, nor in the forest tearing up the sylvan giants with half a rood of soil at their vast roots. Here they amuse themselves with lesser freaks of mischief. See, at this moment, how they assail yonder poor woman who is passing just within the verge of the lamplight! One blast struggles for her umbrella and turns ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to Genius and Goodness? Even Lamb bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... This sylvan life of the French troops here is not without its charm, apart from the marmites which come crashing through the trees, and shrapnel bullets which whip through the branches. The ground has dried up during recent days, so that the long boarded paths ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. Her beautiful back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk, and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier position. But her expression was serene, and Ralph, looking up at her through ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the hay-harvest, and silent but for a few clucking fowls and a murmur of voices within the infants' school; thence across a bridge, and up and along a winding valley to the park gates at Damelioc. Beyond these the valley narrowed to a sylvan gorge, and the speckless carriage-road mounted under forest trees alongside a river tumbling in miniature cascades, swirling under mossy footbridges, here and there artfully delayed to form a trout-pool, or as artfully ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... trail sufficiently sandy to muffle the sound of the horses' hoofs and so leave the silence unbroken. There was a faint hum from the insects that haunted the river, but it was drowsy, soft, and only emphasized the perfect sylvan solitude. After a while the trail left the river and gently inclined up to the prairie level. Then the bush broke and became scattered into small bluffs, and a sniff of the bracing air of the plains brushed ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... poetry into their own language: Sannazaro wrote Arcadia in prose and verse: Tasso and Guarini wrote Favole Boschareccie, or sylvan dramas; and all nations of Europe filled volumes with Thyrsis and Damon, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... by adverse circumstances to remain apart. One of the poems, for instance, says that Tristan's love messages were written on chips of wood, which he floated down the little stream which flowed past his sylvan lodge and crossed the garden ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... no tearing saws are in these early days destroying their noble symmetry. But they are doomed. Fires and wanton destruction are yet to come, to leave blackened scars over once lovely areas. Man mutilates the lovely face of Nature's sweetest sylvan retreats. Down the great gorge of the Yosemite, Valois rides past the giant Big Trees of Calaveras. He finds no hidden treasures, no buried deposits. The camps near Lagunitas disclose only some concealed supplies. No arms, valuables, and treasures, torn from the murdered travellers, ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... good-looking, albeit the sun and air had worked a miracle of brown tan and freckles on his exposed surfaces, until the mottling of his oval cheeks looked like a polished bird's egg. Indeed, it struck Mr. Hamlin that he was as intensely a part of that sylvan seclusion as the hidden brook that murmured, the brown velvet shadows that lay like trappings on the white flanks of his horse, the quivering heat, and the stinging spice of bay. Mr. Hamlin had vague ideas of dryads and fauns, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... around him,—the sun had risen above the horizon, and its cheerful radiance sparkled on every leaf and every blade of grass that bore a drop of dew. The morning mists rose hoveringly, paused awhile, and then lightly rolled away, disclosing one picture after another of exquisite sylvan beauty,—every living thing took up anew its burden of work and pleasure for the day, and "Now" was again declared the acceptable time. To enjoy the moment, and to make much of the moment while it lasts, is the very keynote of Nature's happiness, and David Helmsley found himself on ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... she fix'd her love On the cool fountain, or the shady grove; 40 Still, with the shepherd's innocence, her mind To the sweet vale, and flowery mead, inclined; And oft as spring renew'd the plains with flowers, Breathed his soft gales, and led the fragrant hours, With sure return she sought the sylvan scene, 45 The breezy mountains, and the forests green. Her maids around her moved, a duteous band! Each bore a crook, all rural, in her hand: Some simple lay, of flocks and herds, they sung; With joy the mountain and the forest rung. 50 'Be every youth like royal Abbas moved, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... comprehend, also, that she was entirely contented sitting here by the side of this smiling giant eating delicious fruit in a sylvan paradise far within the remote depths of an African jungle—that she was contented ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... felt sorry that he is not all wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made Steering stand too determinedly to suit Crittenton Madeira made him forge ahead determinedly now. "Piney would be apt to suffer less if he were wholly the sylvan, irresponsible creature, the faun, he sometimes seems to be. But, alas, Piney has a man's heart, Miss Madeira. He will have to suffer for that, for he will have to love. That's why 'poor' Piney; because he ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... an uninterrupted scene of sylvan pleasures, I spent the time until the twenty-seventh day of July following, when my brother, to my great felicity, met me, according to ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... the "Fasti" (i. 433), describes the confusion of Priapus when, in the night following a feast of sylvan and Bacchic deities, the braying of the ass of Silenus wakened the company to detect the god in a furtive ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... forbid. The motive and the movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he. Yet now he was, debarred from going to meet her. She might have an impulse to bathe her feet. Her name was Diana . . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... arched walks before referred to, placed high up on the building, on every side. Screened from the weather, these walks looked upon the different courts and gardens, and commanded extensive views of the lovely sylvan scenery around. Hence Cheshunt and Waltham Abbey, Enfield, and other surrounding villages, could be distinguished through the green vistas ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... is another lesson in art and architecture by Bernard Maybeck. Here again is poetry in architecture, of a different order from the noble theme of Maybeck's Fine Arts Palace, but none the less poetry. This is a sylvan idyll, telling of lofty trees, cool shades, and secret bowers of fern and vine and wild flower, in the moist and tangled redwood forests. There is little used but rough-barked tree trunks, but what delicate harmony ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... glowing brand, 'Mid the tender green of the feathery fern And nodding sedge, by the light gale fanned, The Indian pinks in the sunlight burn; And the wide, cool cups of the corn flower brim With the sapphire's splendor of heaven's own blue, In sylvan hollows and dingles dim, Still sweet with a hint ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... mother's tender care. The fierce Achilles wrapp'd our walls in fire, Laid Thebe waste, and slew my warlike sire! By the same arm my seven brave brothers fell, In one sad day beheld the gates of hell. My mother lived to bear the victor's bands, The queen of Hippoplacia's sylvan lands. Yet, while my Hector still survives, I see My father, mother, brethren, all in thee: Alas! my parents, brothers, kindred, all Once more will perish, if my Hector fall. Thy wife, thy infant, in thy danger ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... ensure success in business with the Celestial Empire. He admits, it is true, that he never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but doubted not that it was of the last importance only to be present at it. All such fooling as this is truly delightful. When he goes about his sylvan business with his tongue in his cheek and a quizzical, good-humored look upon his face in this way, and advertises the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove he lost so long ago, he is the true Thoreau, and we ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... scenic effects, the triumphs of the artists, the wit of the bel esprit—all that ingenuity could devise or money could buy was brought into service. It was the life that Watteau painted, with its quaint and grotesque fancies, its sylvan divinities, and its sighing lovers wandering in endless masquerade, or whispering tender nothings on banks of soft verdure, amid the rustle of leaves, the sparkle of fountains, the glitter of lights, and the perfume of innumerable flowers. It was a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... promised happiness, the pair lingered among the sylvan shades of the romantic spot till the waning sunlight bent their ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... prince's hunting establishment in that period. It stood at a distance of eighteen miles from Klosterheim, and presented the sole oasis of culture and artificial beauty throughout the vast extent of those wild tracts of sylvan ground. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... their "eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground; cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores, silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his translation of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the eye of the enthusiast, it would here seem that, with an extended policy, she had planted treasures, for another and a greatly larger class, far more precious to the eyes of hope and admiration than all the glories and beauties in her sylvan and picturesque abodes. Her very sterility and solitude, when thus found to indicate her mineral treasures, rise themselves into attractions; and the perverted heart, striving with diseased hopes, and unnatural passions, gladly welcomes the wilderness, without ever once thinking how ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... the sign-boards of beer-shops and eating-rooms, with especial promises of whitebait and other delicacies in the fishing line. You observe, also, a frequent announcement of "Tea Gardens" in the rear; although, estimating the capacity of the premises by their external compass, the entire sylvan charm and shadowy seclusion of such blissful resorts must be limited within a small back-yard. These places of cheap sustenance and recreation depend for support upon the innumerable pleasure-parties who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of a hundred years ago was Sylvan Harmer, chiefly a stone cutter (he cut the stone for the tower), but also the modeller in clay of some very ingenious and pretty bas-relief designs for funeral urns, notably a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... centre of the open space within the hanging wall of the vines,—perfect sylvan temple,—there lay a mounded grave, covered from head to foot with articles he knew at once to be the gifts of Indians to some great chief gone to the shadowy hunting-grounds. Rich they were, these gifts, in workmanship and carving, though mean and poor in quality, showing that great love had attended ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... I held my dream. (I held my fishing rod as well,) The vision was of dace and bream, A fruitless vision, sooth to tell. But round about the sylvan dell Were other sweet Arcadian shrines, Gone now, is all the rural spell, Arcadia has ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the excellent Dr. Small or some other reverend gentleman to myself—the collegiate to the sylvan, the male to ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... depend on chance shots. With {129} numerous portages, keeping to the south shore of the St. Lawrence because that was best known to the Seneca guides, the canoes passed up Lake St. Louis and Lake St. Francis and glided through the sylvan fairyland of the Thousand Islands, coming out in August on Lake Ontario, "which," says Galinee, "appeared to us like a great sea." Striking south, they appealed to the Seneca Iroquois for guides to the Ohio, but the Senecas were so intent on torturing some prisoners recently ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... his path; his mustang's hoofs sank in deep pits of moss and last year's withered leaves; trailing vines caught his heavy-stirruped feet, or brushed his broad sombrero; the vista before him seemed only to endlessly repeat the same sylvan glade; he was in fancy once more in the primeval Western forest, and encompassed by its vast, dim silences. He did not know that he had in fact only penetrated an ancient park which in former days resounded ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... point—that is to say, to Pittsburg Landing, where Corinth got to it by a road worn through a thickly wooded country seamed with ravines and bayous, rising nobody knows where and running into the river under sylvan arches heavily draped with Spanish moss. In some places they were obstructed by fallen trees. The Corinth road was at certain seasons a branch of the Tennessee River. Its mouth was Pittsburg Landing. Here in 1862 were ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... and fair," Answered the blushing Claire, "Fit for my bridal hair, Bloom 'mongst the barley; Hark! 'tis the hunter's horn, Waking the sylvan morn, And through the yellow corn Comes my ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... conception of the strong man that he must needs become as water at some woman's touch and go dancing and babbling like a sylvan brook. Women were the light of life—he was willing enough to admit it, but one must be able to switch the light on and off at will. All these were reasons for not falling in love—they were not reasons for not marrying. And so, Amber being determined to marry him, there was really ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the Torquati were most conservative among all the great houses. From childhood up—and in years she was scarcely more than a child—all these had been very real to her. Pomona wandered through every orchard beside her beloved Vertumnus; Pan and his sylvan brood sported behind the foliage of every copse. She would as soon have thought of questioning their presence as of doubting her own being. Marcia believed; the average Roman patrician affected to believe and indulged in his polite, Hellenic doubts; the ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... instant, as if she were giving him time. He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for "appreciation"—a colour indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine sculptors, in the ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... admirable young man, giving admirable attention; thrusting out his hat toward prospects of exceptional account and casting his frank blue eyes into her face between-times. Charmingly perfect teeth and a wonderful sweep of yellow hair. A highly civilized faun for her highly sylvan setting. Indifferent, perhaps, to her precious Trio; but there were other young fellows to look ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... obscure, in final medial syllables, unaccented, and closed by n, l, nt, nce, nd, s, ss, st, p or ph or ff, m, or d, as in sylvan, vacancy, mortal, loyal, valiant, guidance, husband, breakfast, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... national poetry and song, the departments in which fancy most readily indulges herself. The Irish, the Welsh, the Gael, or Scottish Highlander, all tribes of Celtic descent, assigned to the Men of Peace, Good Neighbours, or by whatever other names they called these sylvan pigmies, more social habits, and a course of existence far more gay, than the sullen and heavy toils of the more saturnine Duergar. Their elves did not avoid the society of men, though they behaved to those who associated with them with ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... them, before leaving the ground, to execute the competition of archery intended for the morrow. To the best archer a prize was to be awarded, being a bugle-horn, mounted with silver, and a silken baldric richly ornamented with a medallion of St. Hubert, the patron of sylvan sport. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... the veil of foliage— can aught on earth surpass it? A distant sound of cheering from the Eton playing-fields reached us, to announce that some young votary of athletic games had reached his goal. Over all floated the sunshine. Why seek foreign shores for recreation which these sylvan bowers, so richly charged with memories of ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... paradise: it seems to want no charm, "unborrowed from the eye,"—but how has memory sanctified, history illustrated, and poetry illumined the scenes around us; where every rivulet had its attendant nymph, where every wood was protected by its sylvan divinity; where every tower has its tale of heroism, and "not a mountain lifts its head unsung;" and though the faith, the glory, and the power of the antique time ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... the two yellowed engravings on the wall offended her. They had been wedding presents to Edward's father. One represented a stupid German peasant woman holding a baby, and standing in front of a thatched cottage; its companion was a sylvan scene in which certain wooden rustics were supposed to be enjoying themselves. Between the two, and dotted with flyspecks, hung an insurance calendar on which was a huge head of a lady, florid, fluffy-haired, flirtatious. Lise ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the reward of such a genius would have been to be summarily turned out of doors in the snow, to meditate on the difference between day and night and between December and July. It is an age of liberality, indeed, when not to know an oak from a burdock is no disqualification for sylvan minstrelsy. I ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... drops in autumn showers Drip from the leaves upon the sodden ground. None saw her die but Lelaps, the swift hound, That watched her dumbly with a wistful fear, Till at the dawn, the horned wood-men found And bore her gently on a sylvan bier, To lie beside the sea,—with ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... feign, flatter, or abjure? But thou art placed above me; thou art Lord; From thee I can, and must, submiss, endure Cheek or reproof, and glad to scape so quit. Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song; 480 What wonder, then, if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore. Permit me To hear thee when I come (since no man comes), And talk at least, though I despair to attain. Thy Father, who is holy, ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... The sylvan folk seem to know when you are on a peaceful mission, and are less afraid than usual. Did not that marmot to-day guess my errand did not concern him as he saw me approach there from his cover in the bushes? But, when he saw me pause and deliberately seat myself ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... the troops were falling dimly and spectrally into line, and he was mounting his horse to be ready for orders, he remembered Gildersleeve's drunken tale concerning the commandant, and laughed aloud. But turning his face toward brigade headquarters (a sylvan region marked out by the branches of a great oak), he was surprised to see a strange officer, a fair young man in captain's uniform, riding ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... hill, facing the tavern, the shadows of night were slowly withdrawn, ushering in the day of the players' leaving. A single tree, at the very top, isolated from its sylvan neighbors, was bathed in the warm sunshine, receiving the earliest benediction of day. Down, down, came the dark shade, pursued by the light, until the entire slope of the hill was radiant and the sad colored foliage ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... drifted onward. Often he would vehemently pursue some sylvan sport, till thought and feeling were lost in the violence of bodily exertion. Occasionally his evenings were spent at a small public-house, such as stood by the unfrequented wayside, where the welcome, hearty, though bought, seemed ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... those Sylvan poets glean, Who picture life without a flaw; Nature may form a perfect scene, But Fancy must the ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... attire, I descended the stairs and met my guide, who conducted me into a spacious dining-room. The walls were adorned with paintings, principally of fruit and flowers. A large and superb picture of a sylvan dell in the side of a rock, was one exception. Its deep, cool shadows, and the pellucid water, which a wandering sunbeam accidentally revealed, were strikingly realistic. Nearly all of the pictures were upon ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... ever-clanging forge Din in thy dells;—permits the dark-red gleams, From umber'd fires on all thy hills, the beams, Solar and pure, to shroud with columns large Of black sulphureous smoke, that spread their veils Like funeral crape upon the sylvan robe Of thy romantic rocks, pollute thy gales, And stain thy glassy floods;—while o'er the globe To spread thy stores metallic, this rude yell Drowns the wild woodland song, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... clump of dogwood, a patch of sunlight lay on it, shooting down through the misty twilight of broad oak trees, and the surface of the water dimpled and glinted and laughed and flirted at him, before it slipped away into leaf-dimmed sylvan solitudes, in a way that was not to be longer resisted. He gave one more glance of distaste at the white hot road and gave ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... came to the appointed place, he found an entrance to the greenery near by. Within were people on every bench in sight—New York's unhoused lovers, whose wooing is accomplished in the all but sylvan ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... silvern birch, O friend Suspected ever of a dryad strain, Hast crept at last, delighting to regain Thy sylvan house? Now whither shall I wend, Or by what winged post my greeting send, Bird, butterfly, or bee? Shall three moons wane, And yet not found?—Ah, surely it was pain Of old, for mortal youth his heart to lend To any hamadryad! In his hour ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... liberty to follow her example unless she invites you to be seated. She must not have occasion to think of the possibility of any impropriety on your part. You are her servant, protector, and guard of honor. You will of course give her your hand to assist her in rising. When the sylvan repast is served, you will see that the ladies whose cavalier you have the honor to be, lack nothing. The ladies, social queens though they be, should not forget that every favor or act of courtesy and deference, by whoever shown, demands some ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... of sylvan war Disturbed the heights of Uam-Var, And roused the cavern where, 't is told, A giant made his den of old; For ere that steep ascent was won, High in his pathway hung the sun, And many a gallant, stayed perforce, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... three weeks of rest and quietness, doing some desultory fishing and shooting but spending most of my time in a hammock slung under some of the giant Fichten, when my sylvan idyl was disturbed by the red-faced, stub-nosed post boy ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... winking tail-lights at night. On the dark green background of the distant heights an eruption of new red bungalows threatened to spread and destroy the beauty of Charleswood at no remote date. But at present the sylvan charm of the spot was unspoiled. Its meadows and fields seemed to lie happily unconscious of the contagion flaming ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... avenues of trees then as now. Instead of the ornamental water ran a long canal, populous with ducks, which joined a pond called—no one knows why—Rosamund's Pond. This pond was a favorite trysting-place for happy lovers—"the sylvan deities and rural {66} powers of the place, sacred and inviolable to love, often heard lovers' vows repeated by its streams and echoes"—and a convenient water for unhappy lovers to drown themselves in, if we may credit the Tatler. St. James's Palace and Marlborough House on its right ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... associations that led Dickens so often in his walks from Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed—on the day before his fatal seizure—was through these woods, the charm of which cannot ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... voluptuous light Filled the warm Southern night: The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene Moved like a stately queen. So rife with conscious beauty all the while, What could she do but smile At her own perfect loveliness below, Glassed in the tranquil flow Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams? Half lost in waking dreams, As down the loneliest forest-dell I strayed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... shadowing pines surrounded a large sheet of water, dipping their lowest branches into it. Mrs. Hyde stood among them, and the white, stately birds were crowding to her very feet. He reined in his horse to watch her, and though accustomed to her beauty, he marvelled again at it. Like a sylvan goddess she stood, divinely tall, and divinely fair; her whole presence suffused with a heavenly serenity and happiness! Upon the soft earth the hoofs of his horse had not been audible, but when he came within ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... District described the little colonies in the heart of the Bison jungles. Clusters of huts imbedded in tangled masses of foliage, surrounded by an atmosphere reeking with the effluvia of decaying vegetation, where, unheedful of the great outer world beyond their sylvan limits, the Gonds pass year after year of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... Judge uttered these words, the two gentlemen emerged from the wood into the open space, denuded of its sylvan honors, by the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... to please every one. Hans loved its quiet and sylvan beauty. It was just such a place as he would choose to ramble in, book in hand, and dream away many a pleasant hour. Hendrik liked it much, because he had already observed what he termed "extensive spoor" about the spot: in other words, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... moment Charlotte Farnham yielded in pure delight to the spell of the encompassments, fancying she could deny her lineage and look upon this sylvan Southland world through the eyes of those to whom it was the birthland. Then the haunting scene in the New Orleans bank returned to disenchant her; and after striving vainly to put it aside, she reopened her book. But by this time the story had lost its hold ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... miles: the first six through the forest, just sufficiently sylvan to suffer by a comparison with that of Windsor. At the end of two more miles we crossed the valley, in which is situated the town of Moret, to which is attached a history equally curious, as Anquetil observes, with that of the Iron Mask. The following is the extract from the Duke de St. ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes |
