"Mossgrown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house vanished, glowing in the early sunshine, and the carriage with its trail of dust became entombed once more in the gloom of tall trees, along a road that cleft a wilderness of mossgrown rocks, and dewy stems, through which the sun ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech- trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs' white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory - ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the party were on the point of starting, some of them observed that it was a pity to leave so lovely a spot without resting awhile among the flowers. This was immediately agreed to, and they took their seats on a moss-grown rock, a short distance from which a little streamlet descended in a ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... moss-grown steps at the end of the courtyard, and out on to the rampart. A view of infinite beauty lay before her: a vast expanse of green fields through which the river Neckar flows gently, a smiling valley glittering in the morning sunshine ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... of these roofs, of these spires, of these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed, and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the University, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of a great expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond, fled the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban houses, which became more infrequent as ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... nature, touches this Celtic note so exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for the Celtic note in him, and not to recognize his Greek note when it comes. But if one attends well to the difference between the two notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's "moss-grown springs and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... stone—some three feet across at the top. In following a vaguely defined trail through the wood one day in the early spring, a trail at one time evidently considerably used, it led me to this spot. I looked at the stone enclosure, partly moss-grown. I wondered why, although the ground was wet around it, there was no water in or running from what had evidently been at one time a ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... from the genius of Christianity, as well as from the healthy instincts of humanity. In the first ages after Christ, the newborn element of thought was a pure and beautiful spring, bubbling up from the moss-grown ruins of the temple of heathendom. A hopeful, joyous tone is indicated in the symbols of the early faith preserved in the Vatican. It contained the germ of republican freedom and of a benign and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... swings by an open window, and, on the lawn, a group of children, in charge of their nurse, are engaged in the time-honored game of "Ring-around-a-rosy." Winding walks, bordered with shrubbery, disappear among fantastic mounds of rock-work, moss-grown grottoes, and tiny dells of fern; and under a ruined arch, gray with lichen and green with vines, flows a placid streamlet, spanned by a rustic bridge. In the meadow beyond, flocks of sheep are cropping the grass, and an old negro is busily engaged in repairing a ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... aspect. He now wondered how he could have lived anywhere else. The trees did not stand in stately avenues, nor did the antlers of the deer wave above the sombre fern; it was not the domain of a grand seigneur, but of an old, long-descended English squire. Antiquity spoke in the moss-grown palings in the shadowy groves, in the sharp gable-ends and heavy mullions of the house, as it now came in view, at the base of a hill covered with wood—and partially veiled by the shrubs of the neglected pleasure-ground, separated from the park by the invisible ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miles from Venice, as "a revel of pastoral greenness, with briery hedges, numberless wild flowers and the most captivating of sinuous creeks, overarched by an occasional bridge, so old that you greet with respect every moss-grown inch of its drowsy and sagging brickwork. The cathedral, the ineludible cathedral of all Italian settlements, is reached after a short ramble, and you enter it with mingled awe and amusement," he continues. "Some of its mosaics, representing martyrs ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... wood of the upper creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... glance, Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall, Nor ever lead the merry dance, Among the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... husband's child, stood between her and her own honour, her own safety. Once the girl was removed, she would have no further fear, no apprehension, no hideous forebodings concerning the imminent future. She saw it all as she walked along that moss-grown forest-road, her eyes fixed straight before her. The tempter at her side had urged her to commit a dastardly, an unpardonable crime. In that man's hands she was, alas! as wax. He poured into her ear a vivid picture of what ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... scarf; Or when the cowled and dusky-sandaled Eve, In mourning weeds, from out the western gate, Departs with silent pace! That spirit moves In the green valley, where the silver brook, From its full laver, pours the white cascade; And, babbling low amid the tangled woods, Slips down through moss-grown stones with endless laughter. And frequent, on the everlasting hills, Its feet go forth, when it doth wrap itself In all the dark embroidery of the storm, And shouts the stern, strong wind. And here, amid The silent majesty of these deep woods, Its presence shall uplift ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... eastern sky. A stream of amber diffused itself below the paling stars. Rising from a furnace below the horizon it reached across and touched the zenith, painting mid- heaven with a mystery none could understand; then sank downwards and dipped the crests of the trees, the lawn, the moss-grown tiles upon the roof in that sea of everlasting ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... stiles that appear in the stone walls. So dense is the growth of trees in the little ravine that one hears the sound of the waters close at hand without seeing anything but the profusion of foliage overhanging and growing among the rocks. After climbing down among the moist ferns and moss-grown stones, the gushing cascades appear suddenly set in a frame of such lavish beauty that they hold a high place among their rivals in ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... on the purple moor, Where ruddy children frolic round the door, The moss-grown antlers of the aged oak, The shaggy locks that fringe the colt unbroke, The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare Through the long tissue of his hoary hair, As with quick foot he climbs some ruin'd wall, And crops the ivy which prevents its fall, With rural charms the tranquil mind delight, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Earth's self. Invoke The storm-felled forest-trees moss-grown to-day Whose roots are hillocks where the children play; Or ask the silver sapling 'neath what yoke Those stars, his spray-crown's clustering gems, shall wage Their journey still when his boughs ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... earthen jars, while hard by other women, squatting on their haunches, offer oranges, pineapples, figs, and bananas for sale. How these Mexican markets swarm with people and glow with color, backed by moss-grown walls and ruined archways! Long burro trains block the roadway, and others are seen winding down the zigzag paths of the overhanging declivities. Close at hand within these low adobe hovels, pulque is being retailed at a penny a tumbler. It ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... since daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. 'This—is as far as I can go,' she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. 'Even now it's wet with dew.' She rose again and looked strangely into his face. 'Yes, yes, here it is,' she said, 'oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We're both ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... that here and there pert boat-houses rear their prim heads? It is the bayou, even though it be invaded with the ruthless vandalism of the improving idea, and can a boat-house kill the beauty of a moss-grown centurion of an oak with a history as old as the city? Can an iron bridge with tarantula piers detract from the song of a mocking-bird in a fragrant orange grove? We know that farther out, past the Confederate Soldiers' Home,—that rose-embowered, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... wind here; the spring has not begun properly yet, but we go about without our goloshes and fur caps. The tulips will soon be out. I have a nice garden but it is untidy, moss-grown—a dilettante garden. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... into the Atlantic and harbours around which the trees nestle for shelter from the winter storms—the ruined castles with empty "magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn"—own it still for their pleasure, moss-grown with history as vivid as the lichens ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... trousseaux? You should get your gowns to rhyme with your husband's suits. A dream of a dress that would be, with all the shades of Madame Abel cunningly blended. A honeymoon lasts at least a month. The roses would all be out at Long Barton by the time they walked up that moss-grown drive, and stood at the Rectory door, and she murmured in the ear of the Reverend ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the stones at the bottom were plainly to be seen. A loud splash, as the sound of carriage wheels broke the uninterrupted silence, and a commotion in the water gave evidence of the sudden disappearance of several green-backed frogs, sunning themselves on a large, moss-grown rock, projecting above the water's edge; from shady nooks and crevices peeped clusters of early white violets; graceful maidenhair ferns, and hardier members of the fern family, called "Brake," uncurled their graceful, sturdy fronds from the carpet ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... the marks of ruin stamped upon every object around him. The lawn was little better than a common; the pond was thick with weeds and sluggish water-plants, that almost covered its surface; and a light, elegant bridge, that spanned a river which ran before the house, was also moss-grown and dilapidated. The hedges were mixed up with briers, the gates broken, or altogether removed, the fields were rank with the ruinous luxuriance of weeds, and the grass-grown avenues spoke of solitude and ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... reason at all except to create confusion in the innocent minds of amateur growers, was opening its white 'mock orange' blossoms, and a mass of flowering aconites spread out before him like a carpet of woven gold. Here, too, tufts of bluebells peeked forth from behind the moss-grown stems of several ancient oaks and elms, and purple pansies bordered the edge of the grass. A fine old wistaria grown in tree-form, formed a natural arch of entry to this shady retreat, and its flowers were ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... their gifted wands? That young Delight, like any o'erblown flower, Gave, one by one, its sweet leaves to the ground?— Why then, fair Moon, for all thou mark'st no hour, Thou art a sadder dial to old Time Than ever I have found On sunny garden-plot, or moss-grown tow'r, Motto'd with stern ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... with their heads downwards. Their tail is broad. Their nests, about an inch in diameter, and as much in breadth, are very compactly formed, the outer coat of grey lichen, and lined with the fine down plucked from the stalks of the fern and other herbs, and are fixed to the side of a branch or the moss-grown side of a tree so artificially, that they appear, when viewed from below, mere mossy knots, or accidental protuberances. They are bold and pugnacious, two males seldom meeting on the same bush or flower without a battle; and the intrepidity of the female, when defending her young, is not less remarkable. ...
— Charley's Museum - A Story for Young People • Unknown
... great stone gate that led out upon the highway, and was leaning her forehead against a moss-grown post, when she heard a sudden noise. Then the voice of San Pietro Martire broke the stillness of the night, and Daphne, listening, thought she heard a faint sound of bleating. Hermes was calling ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... last and nothing remained but the narrow channel of the brook itself, the smooth stones making a precarious and uncertain footing for the adventurous explorer. How soothing was the ceaseless plash of that little stream, fretting its moss-grown banks and dashing in miniature surge against the stones in its path! What infinite peace reigned in this place, around which the brotherhood of mountains had gathered, to hold it inviolate against all comers! The great rocks were moss-covered, the steep slopes on either ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a deserted garden, thickly surrounded and overgrown by shrubs. Through the immense spreading Portuguese laurels which sheltered it from the east, little or no sunshine found its way to the grey, moss-grown basin and the stone figures supporting it; over which a thin stream of water continually flowed with a melancholy rhythm, in ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... grapes; and revealing, after all, nothing but a puddle of dirty water. You see more successful works—the Professor's little private garden, which he is supposed to cultivate with his own hands; various little wells and watercourses among the rocks, moss-grown and fern-embowered; and so you ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... like a jack-in-abox. Now he is sitting on the leaf that covered him, rubbing his whiskers again, looking back over his trail as if he heard footsteps behind him. Then another nervous dash, a squeak which proclaims at once his escape, and his arrival, and he vanishes under the old moss-grown log where his fellows live, a whole ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... of the letter S, without the slightest subordination to the points of the compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps and logs, like precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... nativity. Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions; oft the teeming Earth Is with a kind of cholic pinch'd and vex'd By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving, Shakes the old beldame Earth, and topples down Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth, Our grandam Earth, having this distemperature, In passion shook." 1 King Henry ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Pevy seemed to be clinging to the side of the hill, and was approached by a narrow stairway of greyish stone, climbing up between moss-grown walls. I first passed through the modest little churchyard, with its humble tombs half hidden in the grass, and read ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... afterwards. Now he tore down the stairs three at a time. All the room doors were open as he had left them, and somehow those open doors frightened him more than anything else. He ran along the corridors, down more stairs, past more open doors and out through the back kitchen, along the moss-grown walk by the brick wall and so round by the three yew trees and the mounting block to the stable-yard. And there was no one there. Neither coachman nor groom nor stable-boys. And there was no one in the stables, or the coach-house, or the ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... into the ditch, climbed half up the mound, and began to cut away at one of the rods, leaning his left arm on the moss-grown stole. The bark was easily cut through, and he soon made a notch, but then the wood seemed to grow harder, and the chips he got out were very small. The harder the wood, the more determined Bevis became, and he cut and worked away with ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... strength, that some railway potentate, having taken a fancy for the ancient college of Glasgow, as a bauble to hang about his wife's neck, (no accounting for tastes,) has offered, (or will offer,) such a price, that the good old academic lady in this her moss-grown antiquity, seriously thinks of taking him at his word, packing up her traps, and being off. When a spirit of galavanting comes across an aged lady, it is always difficult to know where it will stop: so, in fact, you know, she may choose to steam for Texas. But ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... bonnet of satin and velvet. Susan was attired in a jupe sweeping and immensely full—to be in style!—and jacquette with sleeves of the pagoda form. The party seemed in high spirits, as from his dormer window Mauville, adjusting his attire, peered through the lattice over the edge of the moss-grown roof and leaf-clogged gutters and surveyed their preparations for departure. How well the rich color of her gown became the young girl! He had told himself white was her best adornment, but his opinion veered on the moment now, and he thought he had never seen her to better advantage, with ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... steps rudely fashioned of large unshapen blocks of stone, conducted to the entrance of the hermitage, and the dim light within its hoary, moss-grown, sloping walls is admitted through irregularly formed apertures, pierced through the dense body of the rock, and command magnificent views of the subjacent scenery." [Footnote: Bigsby (R.), "Historical and Topographical Description of Repton ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Man.—See the moss-grown daisied bank Peering in the stream below; Here we'll sit in dewy dank, Turn thee, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... mistake, then. She opened the gate, and by a narrow, moss-grown path through the bushes, came to the door. All was still. It was impossible to ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Washington's own monument which stands in Richmond, and many of his other works. My own early childhood was spent there, among the old-time gardens, and avenues of lordly cypresses and of bitter orange trees, and the moss-grown fountains, and long walks fragrant with half-wild roses and sweet flowers that no one thinks of planting now. Beyond, a wild waste of field and broken land led up to Santa Maria Maggiore; and the grand old bells sent their far voices ringing in deep harmony to our windows; and on the Eve ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... slowly away. A slight breeze rustled amongst the cypresses and the olive trees, and the air grew clearer. The sun was low in the heavens, and long shadows lay across the brilliant patches of flowers, half wild, half cultivated, and on the moss-grown walks. ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Climbing the moss-grown stone, he descended into a dark ravine to the spring. The sun was set by this time, and the sombre shades of twilight began to spread over the scene. His eager eyes pierced the gathering gloom and discovered that the food left had been attacked by animals ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... about the church, some lying flat on the ground, others elevated on low pillars, or on cross slabs of stone, and almost all looking dark, moss-grown, and very antique. But on reading some of the inscriptions, I was surprised to find them very recent; for, in fact, twenty years of this climate suffices to give as much or more antiquity of aspect, whether to gravestone or edifice, than a hundred years ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... laid it upon her breast. Thus reminded, she smiled down into the eyes of the dog and caressed it, pressing its head closer against her bosom. The man stood a few paces away, watching these two beautiful creatures as they sat in the hazy autumn sunlight, with their background of weeds and moss-grown paling. He felt baffled and perplexed, for he knew that he stood apart, excluded from their companionship by something he could not define. So intolerable did this feeling become that he resolved to break through it, and made a hasty movement to sit down beside ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... a kind of idea that English girls were just a mite moss-grown. Old-fashioned and sweet, you know, but scared to move round without a footman or a maiden aunt. I guess I'm a bit ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... the long wreaths of ivy, that, green as the tender buds of spring, tap lightly against the casement, as they are swayed by the impulses of the summer breeze. Beyond, is an old-fashioned garden—a pleasance, as it would be called—and truly is it one; with its trim walks, its terraces, and moss-grown urns, around which luxuriant creepers are entwined—its impervious hedges—its close-shorn lawn, decked with appropriate statues, and its yew-trees, clipped into fantastic shapes; while the ivy-covered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... glorious summer's day, exactly three weeks after leaving London, I stood beside the newly filled grave of my mother in the moss-grown old churchyard ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... grave". Liquors "beginning to look scarce". Subdued and sheepish-looking bacchanals. Nothing extenuated, nor aught set down in malice. Boating on river. Aquatic plants. Bridge swept away in torrent. Loss of canoe. Branch from moss-grown fir-tree "a cornice wreathed with purple-starred tapestry". A New Year's present from the river. A two-inch spotted trout. No fresh meat for a month. "Dark and ominous rumors". Dark ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... mouldering skulls and bones strewn round him, In joyous fury urging the keen steel Against the surface of his grinding wheel. The place was a wild hollow, circled round With barren hills, and on the bottom ground Stood the Green Chapel, moss-grown, solitary;— In sooth, it seemed the devil's mortuary! The Green Knight's back was turned, and he stirred not Till Gawayne hailed him sharply; then he shot One glance—as when, o'erhead, a living wire Startles the night with flashes of green fire;— Then ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... ago wandered my thoughts: to the moss-grown beech in which I cut my name and that of a little girl with yellow curls, of blessed memory, with the first jack-knife I ever owned; to the story-book with the little fir tree that pined because it was small, and because the hare jumped over it, and would not be content though the wind and the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the abyss the more insecure the causeway; and the terrible rope-bridges of South America, or the still more conjectural throw of a line of woven roots, would meet the travelers wherever the cleft was so wide as to render timbering an inconvenient trouble. Occasionally, on one of these damp and moss-grown ladders, a peon's foot would slip, and down he would go, the load strapped on his back catching him as he was passing through the aperture: then, using his hands to hold on by, he would compose, on the spur of the moment, a new and original language or telegraphy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... in all that company whom the announcement did not cause to start; led by old Sylvester, they hastily rose, and conducted by Mopsey, followed to the scene. Blind Sorrel was lying by the moss-grown ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... proud canals that once Rayana grac'd, Their course neglected and their waters gone, Among the level'd sands are dimly trac'd, Like moss-grown letters on ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... The leaves of the elm trees whispered overhead. He was moving through an avenue that led towards big iron gates beside a little porter's lodge. He saw the hollies, and smelt the laurustinus. There lay the triangle of uncut grass at the cross-roads, the long, grey, wooden palings built upon moss-grown bricks; and against the sky he just caught a glimpse of the feathery, velvet cedar crests, crests that once held nails of golden meteors for his Net ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of not less than ten acres might still be observed the fragments of the great abbey: these were, towards their limit, in general moss-grown and mouldering memorials that told where once rose the offices and spread the terraced gardens of the old proprietors; here might still be traced the dwelling of the lord abbot; and there, still more distinctly, because built ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... solitary glen we found, The moss-grown rock, the pines around! And there we read, with sweet-entangled arms, Catullus and his love's alarms. Da basia mille, so the poem ran; And, lip to lip, our hearts began With ne'er a word translate the words complete:— Did Lesbia find them half so sweet? A hundred kisses, said ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... world of activity was shown to her. Her hands were tied by her mother's policy, and she sat moping and chafing like a chained captive, waiting till Mr. Van Dam should come and deliver her from as vile durance as was ever suffered in the moss-grown castles of the old world. The hope of his coming was all that sustained her. Her sad situation was the result of acting on a false view of life from beginning to end. Any true parent would have shuddered at the thought of a daughter marrying such ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... a few hundred yards inland, up the valley, and discover in a retired, sheltered situation, the ancient village church, with its square grey tower surmounted by moss-grown turrets, with its venerable Saxon stone cross in the churchyard—where the turf graves rise humbly by twos and threes, and where the old coffin-shaped stone stands midway at the entrance gates, still used, as ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... idea of the shape it once had been, for regardless of the respect that is due to antiquity the keepers had carted away loads of the solid masonry to build their houses, leaving the place but a beautiful moss-grown chaos. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... were those of one who, late suffering from sea-sickness, pent up in the state-room of a storm-tossed ship, with all its vile odours around him, has been suddenly transferred to terra firma, and laid upon some solid bank, grassy or moss-grown, with tall trees waving above, and the perfume of flowers floating ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... old haunts, with wild, haggard look, muttering incoherent language. The people of the village began to whisper that he was going mad. At Milton Park they heard of it, and Artis and Henderson hurried to Helpstone to look after their friend. They found him sitting on a moss-grown stone, at the end of the village nearest the heath. Gently they took him by the arm, and, leading him back to the hut, told Mrs. Clare that it would be best to start at once to Northborough, the Earl being dissatisfied that the removal had not taken place. ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... canst lie at my feet, and polish thy teeth against the moss-grown tombs, for Satan has abandoned me, and a power unknown compels me to obey his will. Lo! the dead seek to rise from ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... an awful sound through the dark undergrowth. A gloomy wood by night has terrors for the bravest, and it was only the certainty that she was leaving girl-life—chaperons, waltz-tunes, and bitter sneering, for ever—that gave courage to proceed. A bit of moss-grown wall, a singularly shaped holly-bush, a white stone, took fantastic and supernatural appearances, and once she stopped, paralyzed with fear, before the grotesque shadow that a dead tree threw over an unexpected glade. A strange bird rose from the bare branches, and at that moment ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... enough, Mariano," said the former. "To the right, amongst the trees, you will find an old moss-grown bench, upon which I have often sat in happier days than these. There ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... joys to past. For nothing is allowed to drop out of our common life. The smallest works of nature have become part and parcel of our joy. In these delightful woods everything is alive and eloquent of ourselves. An old moss-grown oak, near the woodsman's house on the roadside, reminds us how we sat there, wearied, under its shade, while Gaston taught me about the mosses at our feet and told me their story, till, gradually ascending from science to science, we touched the ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... revenue of the principality should die a natural than a violent death. In truth, Sir, the attempt was no less an affront upon the understanding of that respectable people than it was an attack on their property. They chose rather that their ancient, moss-grown castles should moulder into decay, under the silent touches of time, and the slow formality of an oblivious and drowsy exchequer, than that they should be battered down all at once by the lively efforts ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of gardens and villas, which, previous to the revolution of Kara Georg, was occupied principally by Turks. Passing down a shady lane my attention was arrested by a rotten moss-grown garden door, at the sight of which memory leaped backwards for four or five years. Here I had spent a happy forenoon with Colonel H——, and the physician of the former Pasha, an old Hanoverian, who, as surgeon to a British regiment ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... branches stretch A broader browner shade, Where'er the rude and moss-grown beech O'ercanopies the glade, Beside some water's rushy brink 15 With me the Muse shall sit, and think (At ease reclin'd in rustic state) How vain the ardour of the crowd, How low, how little are the proud, How indigent the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... The crumbling moss-grown stones of the fences over which poison vines were clambering and the myriads of wild carrot, chicory, and ox-eye daisies added to the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... about the place. Some loitered on the lawn by the flower-beds and the fountain; some visited the stables and the home-farm, with its cow-houses and dairy and piggeries; some the neglected greenhouses, and some the equally neglected old- fashioned alleys, with their clipped yews and their moss-grown statues. No one belonging to the house was anywhere visible to receive them, until the great bell at length summoned them to the plentiful meal spread in the ruined hall. "The hospitality of some people has no roof to it," Godfrey said, when he heard of the preparations. "Ten people will give ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... hills, the rocks, the streams were far more beautiful than he had ever thought them, but they mocked him with their beauty. He longed to get out of the vehicle, and feel the springy turf, the yielding heather, beneath his feet; to lave his hands in the sparkling brook, to lie on the moss-grown rock, and bask in the blessed sun. Perhaps he should never see them any more—these simple everyday beauties, of which he had scarcely taken any account when they were freely offered for his enjoyment. He looked back on ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... length, the eye is satisfied with gazing on the prospect in its entirety, one after another, the moss-grown fortresses and other hoary relics of ancient Erse architecture claim our reverent attention; for the Hebridean chieftains, an amphibious race, almost invariably chose the extreme verge of ocean-precipice for the site of their fortresses, thus securing facilities for friendly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... maids, with fearful glance, Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall; Nor ever lead the merry dance, Among the groves of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... self. The American whispered to her that a picnic without her would be a desolation and he had half a mind to stop another week at his aunt's—but Gertrude was not enjoying herself. From behind the gorse bushes, from between the moss-grown boulders, from beneath the dark foliage of the Scotch firs, there peeped ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... dilapidated, frayed, faded, wilted, shabby, secondhand, threadbare; worn, worn to a thread, worn to a shadow, worn to the stump, worn to rags; reduced, reduced to a skeleton; far gone; tacky [U.S.]. decayed &c v.; moth-eaten, worm-eaten; mildewed, rusty, moldy, spotted, seedy, time-worn, moss-grown; discolored; effete, wasted, crumbling, moldering, rotten, cankered, blighted, tainted; depraved &c (vicious) 945; decrepid^, decrepit; broke, busted, broken, out of commission, hors de combat [Fr.], out of action, broken down; done, done for, done up; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden building, with ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... he was far from being a moss-grown reactionary. Everything was not for the best. Despotic bureaucracy... abuses... corruption... and so on. Capable men were wanted. Enlightened intelligences. Devoted hearts. But absolute power should be preserved—the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... where fairy tales die hard, it is sometimes no easy task to discriminate between what is solid historical fact, what is fact, moss-grown and flower-covered, like an old, old tomb, and what is mere fantasy, the innocent fancy of a nation in its childhood, turned at last into stone—a lasting stalactite—from the countless droppings of belief bestowed ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... every morning he comes down here, and I take him for a walk. He was very puzzled and grave at first when he saw her, but now he has grown used to her look, and he plays merrily about among the moss-grown rocks beside the river, while she lies in the slung couch, to which nurse and I carry her on a little stretcher, watching him. 'There was a bright hour this morning. We are in the midst of a spell of dry and beautiful weather, such as often visits this rainy country in the early ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin with its ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... fanes, Moss-grown and ivied o'er Bearing long centuries' darkened stains On belfry and turrets hoar— A hundred years and more hast thou Thy shadow o'er us cast; And we claim thee in our country's youth As a land-mark ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... dusty vineyard-walls Issuing on that green place The early peasant still recalls The pensive stranger's face, And stoops to clear thy moss-grown date Ere he plods on again;— Or whether, by maligner fate, Among ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Who storms the moss-grown walls of eld And beats some falsehood down Shall pass the pallid gates of death Sans ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... imitations of several of the most celebrated buildings in Old London. Each has been carefully reproduced from engravings and drawings in Mr. Gardner's priceless collection. The street begins with an excellent imitation of Bishopsgate, one of the City gates, with moss-grown walls, and statues of Bishop William the Norman, and of Alfred the Great and Aldred. On one side of the street will be found such quaint and picturesque buildings as the "Rose" Inn and "Cock" Tavern, the "Three Squirrels," Izaak Walton's House, ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... across the river to the moss-grown walls which had once been fortifications still visible on the side of the hill, and to the frowning donjon, the blackened towers, the ruined bastions, of what had been once the Rocca, with the amber light and rosy clouds of the unseen sun ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... of her for his Gretchen, sitting on a moss-grown trunk, with marguerites in her hand; he sent for their breakfast far into the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth into early peaches and costly sweetmeats; he wandered with her hither and thither, and told her tales out of the poets and ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... exactions that made the plantation thrive. Outside, in the yard, in the "big house," elsewhere under the sky, a plea of distress might moisten his eyes and soften his heart to his own financial disadvantage, but under the moss-grown shingles of the office all was business, hard, uncompromising. It was told in the neighborhood that once, in this inquisition of affairs, he demanded the last cent possessed by a widowed woman, but that, while she was on her way ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... of arduous climbing brought the adventurers to a most romantic spot, where a small stream of deliciously pure and cold fresh water gushed out from under a huge overhanging moss-grown rock, the banks of the rivulet being clothed with ferns of the most lovely and delicate varieties, while the surrounding sward was gay with flowers of strange forms and most exquisitely delicate and beautiful combinations of colouring. A huge tree, bearing large blossoms of vivid scarlet instead ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... was unutterably still and solitary. A robin was perched on the topmost bar of the old wooden gate, singing his joyous carol. As I approached, he hopped from the gate to the low moss-grown wall, and went on singing as I passed him. I was in the humour to apostrophise skylark or donkey, or to be sentimental about anything in creation, just then; so I told my robin what a pretty creature he was, and that I would ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... made,—except poetry. That product, you would say, was out of the question. Nevertheless, the species poet, although extinct, did once exist on that soil. The evidence is conclusive that palaeozoic verse-makers wandered over those hills in bygone ages. Their moss-grown remains, still visible here and there, are as unmistakable as the footprints of the huge wading birds in the red sandstone of Middletown and Chatham. Ou la poesie va-t'elle se nicher? How came the Muses to settle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... they walked slowly up and down the moss-grown terrace—alone in this wonderful tropic night—while he told her the little tragedy of his life. He told the story simply, with characteristic gaps in the sequence, which she was left to fill up ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Cartier. When it lifted the tide had borne his ships across the straits to Labrador at Castle Island, Chateau Bay. Labrador was a ruder region than Newfoundland. Far as eye could scan were only domed rocks like petrified billows, dank valleys moss-grown and scrubby, hillsides bare as slate; "This land should not be called earth," remarked Cartier. "It is flint! Faith, I think this is the region God gave Cain!" If this were Cain's realm, his descendants were "men of might"; for when the Montaignais, tall and straight ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... been bright and glorious pageants here, Where now grey stones and moss-grown columns lie— There have been words, which earth grew pale to hear, Breath'd from the cavern's misty chambers nigh: There have been voices through the sunny sky, And the pine woods, their choral hymn-notes sending, And reeds and lyres, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... these on the margin of the creek, and apply his torch to them, took but a moment; and in an instant a bright, white flame flashed and lit up the little sheltered alcove. Another, and the almost overcome girl was placed on a seat of soft, dry shavings, against the moss-grown rock, under the rude roof, out of the reach of the snow or wind; and another fire was lit of the dry shingle blocks, at her feet, from which her saturated shoes were removed, and to which ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... moss-grown stones, which bore almost undecipherable inscriptions, she wondered if those they covered had led happy, contented lives, or if they were afflicted with unquiet thoughts, unsatisfied longings, and dull despair, as she was. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... inspires, My silent harp its master's hand requires, Shakes off the dust, and makes these rocks resound, For fortune placed me in unfertile ground; Far from the joys that with my soul agree, From wit, from learning—far, oh far, from thee! Here moss-grown trees expand the smallest leaf, Here half an acre's corn is half a sheaf. Here hills with naked heads the tempest meet, Rocks at their side, and torrents at their feet; Or lazy lakes, unconscious of a flood, Whose dull brown Naiads ever ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... thick branches stretch A broader, browner shade; Where'er the rude moss-grown beech O'er canopies the glade, With me the muse shall sit and think, At ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... justice in the fact that Alexandre Dumas fils and Victorien Sardou, the two giants of modern drama, should have divided between them the inheritance of Louis XIV., its greatest patron. One of the gates is closed and moss-grown. Its owner lies in Père-la-Chaise. At the other I ring, and am soon walking up the famous avenue bordered by colossal sphinxes presented to Sardou by the late Khedive. The big stone brutes, connected in one’s mind with heat and sandy wastes, look oddly out of place here in this green wilderness—a ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... looked as though it belonged to the past and the ghosts of the past. To cross the moat bridge was to step backward from the twentieth century into the seventeenth. The moss-grown moat walls enclosed an old-world garden, most jealously guarded by high yew hedges trimmed into fantastic shapes of birds and animals; a garden of parterres and lawns, where tritons blew stone horns, and naked nymphs bathed in marble fountains; with an ancient sundial ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... lively hopes of finding one of their nests. Two or three of the birds were scolding earnestly right about my feet, as it were, and their cries redoubled, or so I imagined, when I approached a certain large, moss-grown stump. This I looked over carefully on all sides, putting my fingers into every possible hole and crevice, till it became evident that nothing was to be gained by further search. (What a long chapter we could write, any of us who are ornithologists, ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... to Hillside, he found the garage locked and the lights extinguished. Standing under a moss-grown wall which sheltered him from the house, from his case he selected a long black cigar, lighted it with care and, having his hands thrust in the pockets of his light overcoat and the cigar protruding aggressively from the left corner of his mouth, he moved along to an angle of ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... must have been a building of some pretension, "50 feet long, 45 feet wide, and 24 feet between joints"; and undoubtedly a source of great pride to builders and congregation. No trace of it at present remains, save the old graveyard at the side, "an irregular lot, sparsely covered with ancient moss-grown stones, in all positions, straggling, broken and neglected, and overrun with tall grass and weeds." But in May, as the writer stood within the crumbling wall, the ground was thick with violets and "innocents," the grass sprung green and soft and thick, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... bushes. There is a mark only now where the footpath was; it passed close to the hedge, but its place is traceable only as a groove in the sorrel and seed-tops. Though it has quite filled the path, the grass there cannot send its tops so high; it has left a winding crease. By the hedge here stands a moss-grown willow, and its slender branches extend over the sward. Beyond it is an oak, just apart from the bushes; then the ground gently rises, and an ancient pollard ash, hollow and black inside, guards an open gateway like a low tower. The different tone of green ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... walls of old Cartagena, the morning beams began to glow in roseate hues on the red-tiled roofs of this ancient metropolis of New Granada, and glance in shafts of fire from her glittering domes and towers. Swiftly they climbed the moss-grown sides of church and convent, and glided over the dull white walls of prison and monastery alike. Pouring through half-turned shutters, they plashed upon floors in floods of gold. Tapping noiselessly on closed portals, they seemed to bid tardy sleepers ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... halted at the foot of a perpendicular wall of moss-grown rock, and set the example, after disturbing the grass and ferns at the foot, of sitting down, and ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... making the pathway of the brook luminous below. Entering among the thickets, I find the soil strewn with old leaves of preceding seasons, through which may be seen a black or dark mould; the roots of trees stretch frequently across the path; often a moss-grown brown log lies athwart, and when you set your foot down, it sinks into the decaying substance,—into the heart of oak or pine. The leafy boughs and twigs of the underbrush enlace themselves before you, so that you must stoop your head to pass under, or thrust yourself through amain, while they sweep ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... fresh. The September sun shone into the valley; smoke rose from the cottages. The ladies-mantle, on whose fluted cups bright pearls trembled; the silver-weed, with its yellow flowers and silver glittering leaves, shone in the morning sun beside the footpath, which wound along the moss-grown feet of the backs of the mountains. It conducted to a spring of the clearest water, which after it had filled its basin, allowed its playful vein to run murmuring down to ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... for me to say? There wa'n't any more suspicion in them gentle blue eyes of his than in a baby's. Forty years in Pemaquid! Must be some moss-grown, peaceful spot, where a man can grow up so innocent and simple, and yet have the stuff in him Uncle Jimmy must have had. So I tows him back to 42d-st., points him towards the new lib'ry again, and turns him loose; him in his old blue suit and faded cap, with Cap'n ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... path through the wood and went straight on, not listening to the lad's chatter nor making any myself. The shade was welcome enough; there were pretty places for those that had eyes to see them—waterfalls splashing down from the moss-grown rocks above; little pools, dark and wonderfully blue; here and there a bit of green, which might have been the lawn of a country house. But of dwelling or of people I saw nothing, and to what the boy fancied that he saw ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... carefully in to the shore, landing on a sloping rock which was moss-grown above the mark of the last flood. Ruth fastened the tow-rope to the staff of a slender sapling. Wonota got out to help Helen gather some of the more delicately fronded ferns. Ruth turned her back upon them and began climbing ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... did not the place seem full of memories, for has not the life of two villages ebbed and flowed beneath that ancient roof? You heard the hum of droning bees and followed the airy wings of butterflies fluttering over the grave-stones in the old churchyard, and underneath almost every moss-grown tablet some humble romance lies buried ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... brown lines, and the eight stone steps at the bottom of the court-yard which led up to the gate of the garden were disjointed and hidden beneath tall plants, like the tomb of a knight buried by his widow in the days of the Crusades. Above a foundation of moss-grown, crumbling stones was a trellis of rotten wood, half fallen from decay; over them clambered and intertwined at will a mass of clustering creepers. On each side of the latticed gate stretched the crooked arms of two stunted apple-trees. Three parallel walks, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... have felt, but that there is one within his chambers, who might have suffered in his suffering. Nor do I wish to root up your ancient family. If I prize not your boast of family honours and pedigree, I would not willingly destroy them; more than I would pull down a moss-grown tower, or hew to the ground an ancient oak, save for the straightening of the common path, and advantage of the public. I have, therefore, no resentment against the humbled House of Peveril—nay, I have regard ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... away from her watching-place; crept away among the trees without any one's observing her; till she had put some distance between her and the party, and found a further shelter from them in a big moss-grown rock and large tree. There was a bed of moss, soft and brown, on the other side of the rock; and there Daisy fell down on her knees and began to remember "Thou therefore endure hardship, as a good ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... he knew that the chances were that he would tear the rotten moss-grown stubb up by the roots; if he swung about too much the branches would give way at their intersection with the low stem; if he should force his feet into the crumbling sides he would only kick down more stones and soil, and undermine ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... the countenance of the wintry year, so also has his past life projected itself into the present, assuming its features as a mask. And when the ghosts, from whom, figuratively, the young pair are hiding, rise from their moss-grown graves; and the lover would disregard their remonstrant procession as only "faint march-music in the air": he becomes suddenly conscious that the past has withdrawn its gifts, and that the mere mask of love remains ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... de Bourbon added to the flanking wings of the Petit Chateau and cleaned up the debris which was fast becoming moss-grown, weed encumbered and altogether disgraceful. The moats were cleaned out of their miasmatic growth and certain of the grass-carpeted parterres resown and given a ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... docks was a tangle of railroad yards and tracks, and miles upon miles of sheds, piled to the top with stores of every sort you could imagine. A whole encampment-city covered the surrounding hills, crowned by an old, creaking, moss-grown windmill—the Middle Ages looking in ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... to trees were like the birds, they scarcely needed ears. And so by the high road of evolution you arrive at man and the enigma of his ear. It is a shrunken and shrivelled remnant, a moss-grown ruin, a derelict ship. It is to a pattern ear what the old shoe which you find in a country lane, shed from the foot of some "unemployed," is to one of Waukenphast's "five-miles-an-hour-easy" boots. We ought to temper our contempt for ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... Rural England with its moss-grown farmhouses, its gray steeples, its white cottages clustering under their shadow, its tiny fields, its green hedgerows, garrisoned by the mighty elms, charmed Mary Anderson beyond expression, contrasting so strongly with the vast prairies, the primeval forests, the mighty rivers ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... trace the families of emperors and kings, of heroes and conquerors, from the era of their decline and fall to their ultimate extinction. Some 'Old Mortality' might find as congenial employment in this field of sepulchral research as did the original in clearing up the decayed and moss-grown tombs of the Covenanters. The genealogist makes it his business rather to flatter the great by blazoning the antiquity of their pedigrees, than to teach the world a moral lesson on the instability of earthly grandeur, by chronicling their reverses. Yet the churchyard has its ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... which had a hoarse rusty sound, as if it had not been rung very often of late; and after he had waited for some minutes, and rung a second time, a countrified-looking woman emerged from the house, and came slowly along the wide moss-grown gravel-walk towards him. She stared at him with the broad open stare of rusticity, and did not make any attempt to open the gate, but stood with a great key in her hand, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... tradition, she escaped through this same doorway on the night of her sister's nuptials, and eloped with her lover, Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Manners, who had long been haunting the neighboring forest as an outlaw. We strolled through the ancient garden, all ivied and moss-grown, admired the stone balustrade, which, time-stained and mouldy, is still the student's favorite bit of architecture, and at last made our way back to the farm-house,—I am sure I do not remember how, for we were as deficient in a guide as on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... was strewn with the dusky yellow leaves of white-pines,—the cast-off garments of last year; part of the way with green grass, close-cropped and very fresh for the season. Sometimes the trees met across it; sometimes it was bordered on one side by an old rail-fence of moss-grown cedar, with bushes sprouting beneath it, and thrusting their branches through it; sometimes by a stone wall of unknown antiquity, older than the wood it closed in. A stone wall, when shrubbery has grown around it, and thrust its roots beneath it, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... she replied, but without looking up. Eliphalet led the way. He came to the summer house, glanced around it with apparent satisfaction, and put his foot on the moss-grown step. Virginia did a surprising thing. She leaped quickly into the doorway before him, and stood facing him, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... curled up in a big leather chair and gave himself up to his pipe and his dreams. The dingy bar-room gave place to a little sunny glen in the Highlands of Scotland, in which nestled a little cluster of stone-built cottages, moss-grown and rose-covered. Far down in the bottom of the Glen a tiny loch gleamed like a jewel. Up on the hillside above the valley an avenue of ragged pines led to a large manor house, old, quaint, but dignified, and in the doorway a maiden stood, grave of ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... nothing but the brambles. Examining the place more minutely, he found the bushes curiously divided in the centre. Feeling beneath them, his hand came in contact with cold iron. It was a ring, attached to a circular piece of wood, rusty and moss-grown, so that in appearance there was little to distinguish it from the undergrowth. He found ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... a rather rotten and insecure one, was obtained, and after some difficulty placed against the wall. It would not, however, reach to the windows, as first intended, therefore Walter mounted upon the slippery, moss-grown tiles of a wing of the house, and after a few moments' exploration discovered a skylight which proved to be over the head ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... under the rose-crowned aqueduct, and strike into the green avenue that darkens beyond; listening to the distant water bubbling up from the deepest recesses, and to the fitful whistle of blackbird and thrush, as they flit athwart the moss-grown gravel, and perch momentarily on the heads of mutilated termini and statues; whilst the clipt trees vibrate under the wings of others extricating themselves on a piratical cruise against a whole flotilla of butterflies, which is rising and falling over ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... preliminary to leather shoes and walking. Besides, the land had to cease its nauseous rolling before we could feel fit for riding goat-like horses over giddy trails. So we took a short ride to break in, and crawled through thick jungle to make the acquaintance of a venerable moss-grown idol, where had foregathered a German trader and a Norwegian captain to estimate the weight of said idol, and to speculate upon depreciation in value caused by sawing him in half. They treated the old fellow sacrilegiously, digging their ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... sweet as the violet flower That waves by the moss-grown stane, An' her lips were rich as the rowans red That hang in forest lane; An' her broo was a dreamy hill o' licht, That struck ane dumb to see; But I fear'd, by signs that canna be named, That my love ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... off at the run towards the sobbing, in the black, wet, night air ahead, and, tripping as I ran, looked down and saw in the filtering starlight that the forest grass had given place to an ancient roadway, paved with moss-grown flag-stones, such as they still used ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... through an avenue of some extent, which led straight to the front of the house, the aspect of which delighted me. It was very old and massively built, and had quite a baronial look, I thought. There was a wide stone terrace with ponderous moss-grown stone balustrades round three sides of it, and at each angle a broad flight of steps leading down to a second terrace, with sloping green banks that melted into the turf of the lawn. The house stood on the summit of a hill, and from ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... fortnight, and during that time we only lived to have dreams and write them down. The Story Girl had originated the idea one evening in the rustling, rain-wet ways of the spruce wood, where we were picking gum after a day of showers. When we had picked enough, we sat down on the moss-grown stones at the end of a long arcade, where it opened out on the harvest-golden valley below us, our jaws exercising themselves vigorously on the spoil of our climbings. We were never allowed to chew gum in school or in company, but in wood and field, orchard and hayloft, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... rich-cushioned pews, Where he who bears the poor man's fate Might hear Salvation's news. I've walked within the church-yard's walls, With holy dread and fear, And on its marble tablets read "None but the rich lie here." I've wandered till I came upon A heap of moss-grown stones, And some one whispered in mine ear, "Here rest the poor man's bones." My spirit wandered on, until It left the scenes of earth; Until I stood with those who'd passed Through death, the second birth. And I inquired, with holy awe, "Who are they within this fold, Who ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... and Gothic churches, and cloisters grey, and the arrowy Rhone, and castellated bridges—everything was in a more original moss-grown, picturesque condition then than it now is—I enjoyed them all with an intensity, a freshness or love, which passeth all belief. I had attended Professor Dodd's lectures more than once, and illuminated manuscripts, and had bought me in Marseilles Berty's ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... to make her color slightly and hurry him away to a locality less fraught with emotions. In a few moments they entered the park, and the old Hall rose before them. It was a great Tudor house of mullioned windows, traceries, and battlements; of stately towers, moss-grown balustrades, and statues darkening with the fog that was already hiding the angles and wings of its huge bulk. A peacock spread its ostentatious tail on the broad stone steps before the portal; a flight of rooks from the leafless elms rose above ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... yesterday, in any one of the old mediaeval houses; Mathilde and her hand-maidens would find no more—not so much—to distract and disturb them now in this still and tranquil town, with its sad gray streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces, Bayeux was already old. She was ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... house in the country, where, in perfect quietude, one could make acquaintance with birds and study their habits and manners without interruption. From the veranda of a large, low-ceilinged sitting-room one looked out upon a garden of the olden type, full of moss-grown apple-trees, golden daffodils, lupines and sweet herbs, that pleasant mixture of the kitchen and flower garden which always seems so enjoyable. It was an ideal home for birds, no cat was ever visible, and from the numbers of the feathered folk one could believe ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... the moon as yet was only faintly yellow, every arch and cloister was clearly visible. Paul gazed down at them, as he had done all his life, with reverent eyes. There was something almost awesome in the graceful yet bold outline, and in the great age of those rugged, moss-grown pillars and arches, so ecclesiastical in their shape and suggestiveness,—as indeed they might well be, for they were practically the ruins of the old monastery chapel. But, as he looked, the expression in his eyes suddenly changed. A dark ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was a pleasant surprise. It looked as peaceful and peaceable as possible when I passed through it; there was neither sight nor sound to reveal the present state of things among the people. From the grand castle of Lismore the road wound along between low range walls, ivy-covered and moss-grown, that fenced in extensive woods, clothing bold hills and deep valleys with wild verdure. The wildness of these woods and their thick growth of underbrush reminded me of far ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... more or less, On the sinuous line of a letter S, Twining its little houses through The twists of the street, as our hamlets do, For no good reason, so far as I know, Save that chance has arranged it so. It's a quaint old ramshackle moss-grown place, Keeping its staid accustomed pace; Not moved at all by the rush and flurry, The mad tempestuous windy hurry Of the big world tossing in rage and riot, While the village holds ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... and on the banks of the Dordogne. The fourth side of the enceinte stands on a solid rock, above the little river that loses itself in the flatlands bordering the Gironde, so that it can scarce be called a tributary of that wide water. A moss-grown path round the walls will give a quick walker ten minutes' exercise to make the round from one tower of ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... had the hermit uttered this petition than he disappeared; and the hermitage also disappeared at the same instant. And Muso Kokushi found himself kneeling alone in the high grass, beside an ancient and moss-grown tomb of the form called go-rin-ishi, [3] which seemed to be the tomb ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... that a great truth is coming. Sometimes it seems as if we should have it among us in a day. Many steps of the Temple have been ascended, steps of purest alabaster, and of shining jasper, also of rough-brick, and slippery moss-grown stone. We shall reach what we long for, since we trust and do not fear, for our God knows not fear, only reverence, and his plan ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... scattering so far below the heart of the city. The narrow strip of land between the great river and the swamp was cut up into walled enclosures, as a rule,—abandoned warehouses and cotton-presses, moss-grown one-storied frame structures, standing in the midst of desolate fields and decrepit fences. Only among the peaceful shades of the Ursuline convent and the warlike flanking towers at the barracks was there aught that spoke of anything but demoralization and decay. Back from the levee ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... from heat or show'r, Its roots a moss-grown seat became; Its leaves would strew the maiden's bow'r, Its bark was ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... let loose at recess, could have embraced their freedom with more obvious delight. They drank from the running streams, for honey they explored the hollow tree-trunks, they sharpened their claws on moss-grown rocks, and among the fallen oak leaves scratched violently for acorns. So satisfied was Herrick with what he had seen, with the success of his experiment, and so genuine and unselfish was he in the thought of ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... and, when she asked for a nearer view, I put down my work and led her through the carved gates into the ancient glory which was not only the garden of my house, but the garden of my soul. We passed a moss-grown shrine where a quaint old image looked out across the lake rimmed with flaming azaleas, and on its waters a family of long-legged cranes consulted with each other. Our way led over a bridge with a humped-up back and along a little path for one, then across a bank of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... with an unceasing, fountain-like gush, and streamed down the walls outside. There were oozings of water from the old moss-grown roof, which continued dropping on the self-same spots with a monotonous sad splash. They even soaked through into the floor inside, which was of hardened earth studded with pebbles ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... wing, who had the merit of having maintained his post for a century, while his comrade cherub, who had stood sentinel on the corresponding pedestal, lay a broken trunk among the hemlock, burdock, and nettles, which grew in gigantic luxuriance around the walls of the mausoleum. A moss-grown and broken inscription informed the reader, that in the Year 1650 Captain Andrew Bertram, first of Singleside, descended of the very ancient and honourable house of Ellangowan, had caused this monument to be erected for himself ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... conjure to his mind's eye the scenes, and prominent to his fancy, distinct to his memory, will be the bridge. He will think of Florence as intersected by the Arno, and with the very name of that river reappears the peerless grace of the Ponte Santa Trinita with its moss-grown escutcheons and aerial curves; the Pont Neuf, at Paris, with its soldiers and priests, its boot-blacks and grisettes, the gay streets on one side and the studious quarter on the other, typifies and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... grave should be Upon the bare top of a sunny hill, Among the moorlands of her own fair land, Amid a ring of old and moss-grown stones In gorse and heather all embosomed. There should be no tall stone, no marble tomb Above her gentle corse;—the ponderous pile Would press too rudely on those fairy limbs. The turf should lightly he, that marked her home. A sacred spot it would be—every bird That came to watch her ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... through the thicket, imagining Carlat and Count Hannibal hot on his heels. He dared not pause even to listen. The underwood tripped him, the lissom branches of the alders whipped his face and blinded him; once he fell headlong over a moss-grown stone, and picked himself up groaning. But the hare hard-pushed takes no account of the briars, nor does the fox heed the mud through which it draws itself into covert. And for the time he was naught but a hunted beast. With elbows pinned to his sides, or with hands extended to ward ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... round in a serpentine course. They climbed over fallen and moss-grown logs; they slushed through shallow water; they crawled on their hands and knees under embankments and rocks, and at last, at Handsome's order, they stepped into a boat of some kind which the latter pushed away from the ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... which a great white waterfall gleams like a snow-drift before it leaps into the black pool below, it must be well worth a long journey. I have not seen anything which has pleased me more. There is a fine flight of moss-grown stone steps down to the water, a pretty bridge, two superb stone torii, some handsome stone lanterns, and then a grand flight of steep stone steps up a hill-side dark with cryptomeria leads to a small Shinto shrine. Not far off there is a sacred ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... I should be far from rejecting them," said Planchet; "but possessing only this little cemetery, full of flowers, so moss-grown, shady, and quiet, I am contented with it, and I think of those who live in town, in the Rue des Lombards, for instance, and who have to listen to the rumbling of a couple of thousand vehicles every day, and to the soulless tramp, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the back of the communion-table, or ranged, as they are in a baker's shop, upon shelves against the wall. It is a pleasant sight, but apt to be somewhat puzzling. Perhaps he saunters into a country church-yard, and there finds amongst the rank grass and moss-grown and neglected memorials of the silent multitude, one trim and well-tended monument, uninvaded by cryptogamia, free from all stain of the weather, and the surrounding grassy sward neatly mown and fenced in, it may ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... at the young man's face, and knew his heart had been touched. He closed the Book. "Let us pray," he said, and rising, knelt by the side of a moss-grown log. But Scotty did not kneel; he sat erect, staring with desperate eyes into the fire, and striving with all the force of his will to harden his heart. To his relief the old man made no remark upon his strange conduct when he arose from his knees, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... she repeated, wondering. Then, as the crowd parted before the motor, she caught sight of a piece of orchard ground which only that morning had been still hidden behind the high moss-grown palings which had screened it for a generation. Now the palings had been removed sufficiently to allow a broad passage through, and the crowd outside was but an overflow from the crowd within. Lady Coryston perceived a platform with several black-coated persons in white ties, a small elderly lady, ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the short run had exhausted him. His bruised throat was throbbing painfully, and he experienced some difficulty in breathing. He leaned up against the moss-grown wall, looking back into the darkness ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer |
