"Brier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the hottest days the garden was in sufficient shadow by the time the morning's work was done. There was a little grass-plot, large enough for a basket-chair and a rug. There was a hedge of Penzance sweet-brier opposite the backdoor and the window at which Langholm wrote, and yet this hedge broke down in the very nick and place to give the lucky writer a long glimpse across a green valley, with dim woods upon the opposite ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... were here, These hills and dales among, Where vocal groves are gayly mocked By Echo's airy tongue: Where jocund nature smiles In all her boon attire, And roams the deeply-tangled wilds Of hawthorn and sweet-brier. Oh, would that she were here— The gentle maid I sing, Whose voice is cheerful as the ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... with sea breeze is delicious," she said, as the wind whirled the aromatic smoke of his cigarette up into her face. "Don't move, Mr. Siward; I like it; there is to me always a faint odour of sweet-brier in the melange. Did you ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... at the end of the house beside the brier bush, where George was to sit on summer afternoons before he died, and a flash passed between Domsie and the lad's mother. Then she knew that it was well, and fixed her eyes on the letter, but Whinnie, his thumbs in his armholes, watched ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... lingered. Old Dick Neeland, ruddy, white-haired, straight as a pine, stood up in his old slippers and quilted smoking coat, his brier pipe ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... main branch of Owl Creek, and called by that name. From the same rising ground, ravines, wet only after a rain, extend east and southeast to Lick Creek. From the same position extend the head ravines of Brier Creek,[1] a deep ravine with little water, which flows almost due north and empties into Snake Creek a little below the mouth of Owl Creek. The three principal creeks, Lick, Snake, and Owl, flow through swampy valleys, bordered by ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... Shakspeare brings forward a fairy at a wood near Athens. The fairy, in answer to Puck's question whither it wandered, replied that it went over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier, over park, over pale, through flood, through fire. It wandered everywhere, swifter than the moon's sphere; it served the fairy queen to dew her orbs upon the green. Puck told the fairy that the king would keep revels there that night, and advised that the queen should ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... plantation[20] we had noticed as we came up on the boat, and where there was a cotton-gin Mr. Forbes wanted me to see. The greater part of the way our road was shaded by woods on the water-side, live-oaks with their ornamental moss, gum-trees and pines with quantities of cat-brier and trumpet honeysuckle in full bloom. The cotton-fields were unshaded, of course, and very large, containing from one to three hundred acres. We passed some freshly planted, but most of them were covered with the old bushes, dry and dead, at which I was much surprised until I found that it ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... painful. Dangling brier vines drew blood from arms and face, and sharp thorns repeatedly lacerated hands and knees. At each move forward he had to pause and remove the dead branches and twigs from his path lest their cracking should betray him to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... have a word with Stummer before I go," added Larry, and hurried to the ward in which the sturdy German volunteer had been placed. He found the member of Ben's company propped up on some grass pillows, smoking his favorite brier-root pipe. ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... motioned her to bend over very low. Then, taking her hand, he guided her along an ascending gulley, knee-deep in fern and brake and brier, to a sort of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... malediction, and disappeared down the hill in the known direction of a distant cabin. When it came night and the hemlocks began to sob they had not returned. The little man sat close to his companion, the campfire, and encouraged it with logs. He puffed fiercely at a heavy built brier, and regarded a thousand shadows which were about to assault him. Suddenly he heard the approach of the unknown, crackling the twigs and rustling the dead leaves. The little man arose slowly to his feet, his clothes refused to fit his back, his pipe dropped from his mouth, his knees ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... confederate dame, who brags That she condemn'd me to the fire, Shall rend her petticoats to rags, And wound her legs with every brier. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... one to whom Heaven gave beauty when it grafted roses on a brier. You are the reflection of Heaven in a pond; and he that leaps at you is sunk. You are all white—a sheet of spotless paper—when you first are born; but you are to be scrawled and blotted by every goose's quill. I know you; for I loved a woman, and loved her so long that I found ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... odor, that the meal was ready. The boys were nothing loath to fall to on the sea banquet the old salt spread before them, and so busy were they despatching the sailor's cooking, that it was not till after they concluded the meal and Bluewater Bill had his old brier pipe going that they came down to the discussion of what each of the boys had uppermost in his mind—namely, the history of Bluewater Bill's discovery of the lost treasure ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... guests had lain in long-ago summer nights, with big bow-pots of elder-flowers set on the hearth to ward off fever and evil spells. The terrace, where in old days dames in ruffs had sniffed the sweet-brier and southern-wood of the borders below, and ladies, bright with rouge and powder and brocade, had walked in the swing of their hooped skirts the terrace now echoed to the sound of brown boots, and the tap-tap of high-heeled ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... a retired, and not an unlovely spot. A brick wall, splashed with ochre and gray lichens, enclosed six generations of dead Burwells and their next of kin. A locked gate kept out trespassers. Long streamers of brier and wild berry bushes, purple and ashy with the mantling sap drawn upward by the March sunshine, were matted over the older graves; a spreading "honey-shuck" tree arose near the middle of the badly kept square, and smaller trees flourished ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his little dame, Over the mountain-side or mead, Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, Snug and safe is this nest of ours, Hidden among the ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... haunt of the bass, which was still kept up after thirty years, even as the memory of its lonely tenant lived on the lake where another generation of woodsmen had replaced his. But what was the old black brier-wood pipe doing on the head-rail between the two graves? I looked about me with an involuntary start as I noticed that the ashes of the last smoke were still in the bowl, expecting I hardly knew what in the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... and immaculate taste Has a paradise form'd from a wilderness waste; With his walks rectilineous, all shelter'd with trees, That shut out the sunshine and baffle the breeze, And a field, where the daughters of Erin{12}may roam In a fence of sweet-brier, and think they're ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... hundred miles of barren hills, swampy kevirs, brier-covered wastes, and salty deserts, with here and there some kanot-fed oases. To the south lay the lifeless desert of Luth, the "Persian Sahara," the humidity of which is the lowest yet recorded on the face of the globe, and compared with which "the Gobi of China and ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... God gave growth should be the owner of the farm. This advice was accepted; for God, both thought, was a safer arbiter than man. One of the brothers, Arne, chose a fern (Ormgrass), and the other, Ulf, a sweet-brier. A week later, they went with the wise man and two other neighbors to the remote pasture at the edge of the glacier where, by common consent, they had made their appeal to the judgment of heaven. Arne's fern stood waving in dewy freshness in the morning breeze; but Ulf's sweet-brier lay prostrate ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... stood out like brass, and whose eyes burned like fire. He sprang upon the boy king and stabbed him in the back. The affrighted horse dashed away, dragging the bleeding body by the stirrup,—on, on, on, over rut and rock, bush and brier. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... on this same hot evening the sergeant in charge of the little signal-party at the Picacho came strolling forth from his tent puffing at a battered brier-root pipe. Southward and a few hundred feet below his perch the Yuma road came twisting through the pass, and then disappeared in the gathering darkness across the desert plain that stretched between them and the distant Santa Maria. Over ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... Swains. Till he resign'd his Flock, opprest with cares, Weaken'd by num'rous Woes, and grey with Years. Yet still, like AEtna's Mount, he kept his Fire, And look'd like beauteous Roses on a Brier. He smil'd, like Phoebus in a Stormy Morn, And sung, like Philomel against ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... to the bridge by the mill, long since deserted and now a thing of ruin and decay. A man in knickerbockers stood leaning against the rail, idly gazing down at the trickling stream below. The brier pipe that formed the circuit between hand and lips sent up soft blue coils to float away ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... corn, Apple seed and apple thorn, Wire, brier, limber lock, Three geese in a flock; Along came Tod, With his long rod, And scared them all to Migly-wod. One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.— Make ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... battered nearly out of all shape. He had no coat, no waistcoat, no braces, and nothing round his neck. Round his waist there was a strap or belt, from the front of which hung a small pouch, and, behind, a knife in a case. And stuck into a loop in the belt, made for the purpose, there was a small brier-wood pipe. As he dashed his hat off, wiped his brow, and threw himself into a rocking-chair, he certainly was rough to look at, but by all who understood Australian life he would have been taken to be a gentleman. ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... of a pistol, but did not pause for the report. He scrambled over rock and stone, through brush and brier, rolled down banks like a hedgehog, scrambled up others like a catamount. In every direction he heard some one or other of the gang hemming him in. At length he reached the rocky ridge along the river; one of the ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... into the grotto, from which the luminous quality had faded. After a short time she recovered from her transport, and looking around her found the appearance of nothing changed. The stream rushed on, the trees were the same, and in the hollow of the grotto the wild brier grew in its accustomed place, and the clinging moss and the ivy trails ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... in these two years,—not much taller, and more agile than robust,—was lopping vigorously with his great pruning-knife, Amabel nursing a bundle of drooping rose branches, Charlotte, her bonnet in a garland of wild sweet-brier, holding the matting and continually getting entangled in ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... birch I came, Where I whittled my school-boy name: The nimble squirrel once more ran skippingly over the rail, The blackbirds down among The alders noisily sung, And under the blackberry-brier whistled the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... this way, dear James. . . . You behold seated opposite to you on the right of the fireplace, and smoking the beast of a brier pipe with the modesty of true genius, a Scientific Man—a Savant, shall I say?—of European reputation. It isn't quite European just yet: but it's going to be, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... trouble and to have been conveyed into the body of the patient through the evil spells of an enemy. He frequently pretends to suck out such an object by the application of the lips alone, without any scarification whatever. Scratching is a painful process and is performed with a brier, a flint arrowhead, a rattlesnake's tooth, or even with a piece of glass, according to the nature of the ailment, while in preparing the young men for the ball play the shaman uses an instrument somewhat resembling a comb, having seven teeth made from the sharpened splinters of the leg ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... one thing am I afraid," answered Brother Rabbit, in a low voice. "I am afraid you will turn me loose in the brier patch. Please do not throw me ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... master himself was a capital sportsman, and I was as proud of him as he was of me. When I had become sufficiently perfect to be his companion, we used to range together untired "over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier," he doing his part and I mine, and bringing home between us such quantities of game as no one else could boast. This was my real business, but it was no less my pleasure. I entered into it thoroughly. To ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue, And brier-roses, dwelt among." ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow, And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod, Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak, The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er I went With dark eyes full of love's content. The birds are glad; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... nearly dead, cut down and questioned as before: but still asserted his ignorance. The same inhuman part was acted on him a third time, but with no better success; for the brave fellow still continued faithful to his master, who squatted and trembled in his place of torment, his brier bush, and saw and heard ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... swamp surrounded by a luxuriant growth of asters of every hue, and white and pink spirea and golden rod, and blue iris, and the delicate, rose-colored arethusa, and the blue fringed gentian abounded on every hand; also shrubs of the bayberry, wild rose and sweet brier, with many ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... him that is a true-born gentleman, And stands upon the honour of his birth, If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, From off this brier pluck ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... and merits consideration. In this working-day world of ours there is so much unavoidable pain, and so much annoyance which we cannot overlook, that sensible people cushion corners and shrink aside from brier-pricks. We do ourselves actual physical harm when we lose temper; the tart speech takes virtue out of us. A woman would better fatigue herself by righting an untidy chamber than scold a servant for ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... each candle with a piece of paper tied to it purporting to show the animal or inanimate object from which the candle came. All the dogs and horses—Renown, Bleistein, Yagenka, Algonquin, Sailor Boy, Brier, Hector, etc., as well as Tom Quartz, the cat, the extraordinarily named hens—such as Baron Speckle and Fierce, and finally even the boats and that pomegranate which Edith gave Kermit and which has always been known as Santiago, ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... western part of Michigan. They are the brightest and purest mirrors the virgin sky has ever used to adorn herself. On the banks of these lakes, grow in rich profusion, the rose, the violet, the lily and the sweet brier. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... threatened his worst, And fallen from branch and brier, Then time away calls from husbandry halls And from the good countryman's fire, Together to go to plough and to sow, To get us both food and array, And thus with content the time we have spent To ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... us possets by the fire And let the wild rose shiver on the brier. The cowslip tremble in the meadows chill, While thy unlovely battle-call wails higher And dusty squadrons charge adown ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... never failed to taste deliciously after a long day's ride. They were washed down by a tincupful of coffee strong enough to tan leather, then came a brier-wood pipeful of fragrant kinnikinnic, and a seat by the ruddy, sparkling fire of aromatic cedar logs, that diffused at once warmth, and spicy, pleasing incense. A chat over the events of the day, and the prospect of the morrow, the wonderful merits of each man's horse, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... your tender, wounded arm Bends back the brier that edges life's long way, That no hurt comes to heart, to soul no harm, I do not feel ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... of Mr. Thomas Cadge was darkened with disapproval, he shifted his stubby brier pipe to the other corner of his mouth, edged a little from his seat on the sunny front stoop and, craning his neck around the corner of his house, revealed an unwashed area extending from collarbone ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... 1864.—We have lost communication with the front. A small cavalry raid cut the Savannah Railroad and telegraph, this morning, at Brier Creek, twenty-six miles from here. Gen. Wheeler was, yesterday, confronting the enemy's infantry at Sandersville. An officer, who left Macon on the 23d, states that one corps of the enemy was still confronting ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... wide and capacious Kaskaskia houses were but a single story high, Maria's bedroom was almost in the garden. Sweet-brier stretched above the foundation and climbed her window; and there were rank flowers, such as marigolds and peppery bouncing-betties, which sent her pungent odors. Sometimes she could see her stepmother ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... slow flakes, as they fall On bank and brier and broken wall; Over the orchard, waste and brown, All noiselessly they settle down, Tipping the apple-boughs, and each Light quivering twig ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... do well on this soil. Baronial castles, with hot and cold water in them, were often neglected, because the colonists would not forsake their own lands to the thistle and blue-nosed brier in order to come and cook victuals for the baronial castles or sweep out the baronial halls and wax the baronial floors for a journeyman juke who ate custard pie with a knife and drank tea from his saucer through ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... a little patch of garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, where there are beautiful meadows and tall, flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern-filled ditches, and a little piece of water, deep and ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... she would allow us to do. We thanked her, entered, and went walking along a smooth road, through open sward, clumps of trees and an occasional piece of artful neglect in the shape of rough hillocks covered with wild shrubs, such as brier and broom. It was very delightful, and we walked along merrily. I can yet recall the individual shapes of certain hawthorn trees we passed, whose extreme age had found expression in a wild grotesqueness which would have been ridiculous but for a dim, painful resemblance to ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... lattices are all ablaze with the red glory; the fading light flickers upon the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still fish-pond into a sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses of brier and brushwood, amidst which the old well is hidden, the crimson brightness penetrates in fitful flashes till the dank weeds and the rusty iron wheel and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... and luxuriant, and not hard and scentless imitations of works of art. Here, in their season, flourished abundantly all those productions of Nature which are now banished from our once delighted senses; huge bushes of honey-suckle, and bowers of sweet-pea and sweet-brier, and jessamine clustering over the walls, and gillyflowers scenting with their sweet breath the ancient bricks from which they seemed to spring. There were banks of violets which the southern breeze always stirred, and mignonette filled every vacant nook. As they entered now, it seemed a ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... sweete Son, Thou art me dear, Oh why have men hanged thee here? Thy head is closed with a brier, O why have men so done ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... struggling from long Trousers toward his first brier-wood Pipe, had Growing Pains which he diagnosed as the pangs ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... tartly: Nay; that she knew no Milky Way! Whereupon Father Benedict, a sudden gleam of approval on his sinister face, had interposed, addressing the Prior: "Nay, verily! Our excellent Sub-Prioress knows no Milky Way! She is the brier, which hath sharply taught the tender flesh of each. She is the bed of nettles from which the most weary moves on to rest elsewhere. She is the fearsome burning, from which the frightened brands do ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... brown ring, plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he had come ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... to the far forest that day. A good horseman, and now well mounted, he made a handsome figure as he galloped off across the field. As he rode, his eye searched here and there, till it caught sight of the flash of a scarlet jacket beyond a distant screen of high green brier. He put his horse over the rail fence and pulled up ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... beginning to show a green sap tint along its gray branches, I seemed to see my poor little blue-ginghamed, pigtailed self crouched at Judge Crittenden's feet on the front steps, sobbing my lonely heart away while he smoked his sorrow down with a long brier pipe, and the Byrd chirped his little three-year-old protest in concert with us both. Most eighteen-year-old men would have resented having a motherless little brother and a long-legged girl neighbor eternally at their heels, but Sam never had; or, if he did, he gently ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... comprehensiveness, and a curious instinct in the selection of words. In this latter respect, though not in the moulding of sentences, the reader may perhaps be reminded of the choice and fragrant vocabulary of Washington Irving, whose words alone often leave an exquisite odor like the perfume of sweet-brier and arbutus."—GEORGE ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... hill, over dale, Through bush, through brier, Over park, over pale, Through flood, through fire, Farewell, thou wit of spirits, I'll be gone; Our queen and all her ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... wish to thank our Instructor most cordially for his thorough teaching; for the interest he awakened in us toward this intricate art, without which we would have long since been compelled to cry "Vanquished;" for his timely assistance over the sharp pointed stones and by the brier bushes in the darkened forest, and for his patience which our forgetfulness so sorely tried. And, though our words of gratitude may be weak, the feeling is deep-rooted in our hearts, and through the years to ...
— Silver Links • Various
... themselves, had fallen to the earth to rot in dull obscurity. The clear little streams that in Summer-time murmured musically down the slopes, under canopies of nodding roses and fragrant sweet-brier, were now turbid torrents, brawling like churls drunken with much wine, and tearing out with savage wantonness their banks, matted with the roots of the blue violets, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... and passed his forefinger across his forehead, brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook—he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then he drew a whetstone from his pocket, spat on it, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... (syn R. Eglanteria).—The Austrian Brier, or Yellow Eglantine. South Europe, 1596. This belongs to the Sweet Brier section, and is a bush of from 3 feet to 6 feet high, with shining dark-green leaves, and large, cup-shaped flowers that are ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... know you lie at peace?' Lawford audibly questioned, gazing at the doggerel. And yet, as his eyes wandered over the blunt green stone and the rambling crimson-berried brier that had almost encircled it with its thorns, the echo of that whisper rather jarred. He was, he supposed, rather a dull creature—at least people seemed to think so—and he seldom felt at ease even with his own small facetiousness. Besides, just that kind of question ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... quaint corners and projections, and the old-fashioned stone mansion said to be modelled after the cocked hat of Peter the Headstrong. Its low stories were full of nooks and angles. There were roses and hollyhocks like rows of sentinels, and sweet brier clambering about. The little girl thought of it many a time afterward, when it had become much more famous, as Sunnyside. Indeed, she was to sit on the old piazza overlooking the river and listen to the pleasant voice that had charmed so many ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... moons may go— She sleeps where early blossoms blow: Around her headstone many a seed Shall sow itself; and brier and weed Shall grow to hide it from men's heed, And ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... my Enthusiast was after a warbler. To my fellow bird-students that tells a story. Who among them has not been bewitched by one of those woodland sprites, led a wild dance through bush and brier, satisfied and happy if he could catch an occasional glimpse of ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... and the wheel-track, while bushes usurp what ought to be the sidewalk. Here, one morning in the time when every day was disclosing two or three new species for my delight, I stopped to listen to some bird of quite unsuspected identity, who was calling and singing and scolding in the Indian brier thicket, making, in truth, a prodigious racket. I twisted and turned, and was not a little astonished when at last I detected the author of all this outcry. From a study of the manual I set him down as probably the white-eyed vireo,—a conjecture which further investigation confirmed. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... matter. "She must have clothes!" thought I, "and that's flat!" Perhaps not such as befitted her, but something immediate, and not in tatters—something stout that threatened not to part and leave her naked. For the brier-torn rags she wore scarce seemed to hold together; and her small, shy feet peeped through her gaping ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... quite unnecessary to pursue the subject of woods beyond the few kinds mentioned. Woods such as ebony, sandalwood, cherry, brier, box, pear-tree, lancewood, and many others, are all good for the carver, but are better fitted for special purposes and small work. As this book is concerned more with the art of carving than its application, it will save confusion ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Repentance. With the speed of fire Orlando followed where the enchantress fled, Rending and scattering tree and bush and brier, And leaving wide the vestige of his tread. Nearer he drew, with feet that could not tire, And strong in hope to seise her as she sped. How vain the hope! Her form he seemed to clasp, But soon as seized, she vanished from ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... wind, for the summer is waning, Who 's for the road? Sun-flecked and soft, where the dead leaves are raining, Who 's for the road? Knapsack and alpenstock press hand and shoulder, Prick of the brier and roll of the boulder; This be your lot till the season grow older; Who 's ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... and the rush—then I like to throw myself back in my chair for a moment and close my eyes. I am back once more in the dear old lane among the haws and the filberts. I catch once more the smell of the brier. I see again the squirrel up there in the oak and the rabbit under the hedge. I listen as of old to the chirp of the grasshopper in the stubble, to the hum of the bees among the foxgloves, to the song of the blackbird on the hawthorn, and, best of all—yes, best of all for brain unsteadied ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... wistful faces, and dumbly pleading with me to accept them and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. I see the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbidden fields, and only regained my path after weary wandering, brier-torn, and none the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might have gladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have made happier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring its wasted treasure. How can ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... fellow, and the soldier deserved his 'Solace.' Many of them among us are poor indeed. 'Boys!' exclaimed a wounded volunteer to two comrades, as they paused the other day before a tobacconist's and examined with the eyes of connoisseurs the brier or bruyere-wood pipes in his window, 'Boys! I'd give fifty dollars, if I had it, for four shillins to buy one ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... parley they concluded to get some more dogs and be on the ground before daylight, so as to make sure of me. As soon as they had gone out of my hearing I emerged from the brier thicket. I found my limbs had become sore and benumbed from the exposure and hardships I had undergone, and I was intensely hungry. I worried along, however, to get out of that neighborhood as soon as possible. The sky was now clear, the air ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl before I died, and now was my chance. She never would know it, and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment! Would it wake her from her trance? and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise me ever after? Or should I carry off my trophy undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked upon her ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... up, and he's shot down, The bird upon the brier; And he's sent it hame to his ladye, Bade her ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... way Patricia felt that she was educating Joan, not weakening her foundations; but gradually Joan succumbed to the philosophy of snatch-and-fly, and the Brier Bush gave ample opportunity for her ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon's sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be: In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... moment the ghastly stillness, like an awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders, having been weather-be-witched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of the eglantine,— Of the pointed thistle and brier; And follow the track of the wandering vine, Whether it trail on the earth, supine, Or round the aspiring tree-top twine, And reach ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... poverty, returned from a journey, and, finding him in such an exalted state, said: "Praised be the God of excellence and glory, that your high fortune has aided you and prosperity been your guide, so that a rose has issued from the brier, and the thorn has been extracted from your foot, and you have arrived at this dignity. Of a truth, joy succeeds sorrow; the bud does sometimes blossom and sometimes wither; the tree is sometimes naked and sometimes clothed." He replied: "O brother, condole ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... nowest man you ever met up with. That book's just the kind of thing for a man like me who ain't got no time to go exhaustively delving and investigating and researching into things, and yet has got to keep as sharp as a brier." ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Adam's needle^, bear grass [U.S.], tine, yucca. nib, tooth, tusk; spoke, cog, ratchet. crag, crest, arete [Fr.], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille^; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, chevaux de frise [Fr.], porcupine, hedgehog, brier, bramble, thistle; comb; awn, beggar's lice, bur, burr, catchweed^, cleavers, clivers^, goose, grass, hairif^, hariff, flax comb, hackle, hatchel^, heckle. wedge; knife edge, cutting edge; blade, edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with Valerie he was uncertain. He could not remember her going. Of her coming he knew nothing at all. She had appeared and, he supposed, disappeared. Of Winchester's attack upon him, and the subsequent chase, his memory was clearer. How he had escaped, however, at the foot of the brier-clad slope, he could not conceive. He could have sworn that for the last thirty paces the man was not three ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... one side of the cave and there the others saw an automobile runabout standing and on the seat two men dressed for a tour. They were talking to a third man, who was lounging against a front wheel, smoking a brier-root pipe. ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... the cellar door and went down a flight of stone steps into the first cellar. He looked all about him, and there was nothing at all there but a switch made of brier lying on a shelf behind the door. "That is not much for the Master to have made such a fuss about," said the lad. "I could see as much as that any day without coming into a cellar for it;" and he went upstairs again and shut the ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... sitting posture, as if to reply, fumbled in his watch-pocket for a match, instead; shook the ashes from his brier-wood, filled the bowl with some tobacco from his rubber pouch, drew the lucifer across his shoe, waited until the blue smoke mounted skyward and resumed his former position. He was too happy mentally—the ...
— A Gentleman's Gentleman - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of meals, of books, of extra fees, the estimated allowances for clothing and spending-money dazed the poor shoe clerk and nearly sent Eric into business. But, fortunately, the brier pipe came to the rescue with an unexpected legacy ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... 15th, 1838. I want to give up every thing, every thought, every affection, in short, my whole self, to my offered Saviour. Then would His kingdom come, and His will be done. Instead of the thorn would come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier the myrtle-tree. How precious, how holy, how peaceful, that kingdom! Oh! if I may yet hope; if mercy is left, I beseech Thee, hear and behold me, and bring me "out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... much glory won by an army of two hundred men routing such a party and destroying their home. There was also nothing to indicate that these Indians had even any unfriendly feelings. The man and woman were employed in bruising what was called brier root, which they had dug from the forest, for food. It seems that this was the principal subsistence used by ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... funny pipe?' and she hands him a long-handled affair with a weichsel-wood bowl and a cherry stem that has a kind of rakish, good-natured curve to it. Then he sits down and grinds out copy that will make an Englishman laugh at first sight. A big, dumpy brier, with a shorter stem and a celluloid end, is responsible for general descriptive work, sporting news, etc., while a trim little meerschaum with a carved bowl engenders excellent criticisms of music and drama. Occasionally, too, this bright fellow, who does considerable work on the editorial ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... the miniature mandarin temples of the peppergrass—all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth's easter April mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... intentions to have a ruler, so they thought proper to make the offer of that honor to the vine; but when the vine was chosen, it made use of the same words which the fig-tree had used before, and excused itself from accepting the government: and when the olive-tree had done the same, the brier, whom the trees had desired to take the kingdom, [it is a sort of wood good for firing,] it promised to take the government, and to be zealous in the exercise of it; but that then they must sit down under its shadow, and if ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... doesn't," Jimmy replied. "I just stuck a brier into one of my eyes a few minutes ago and it hurt awful, then. But you'll be perfectly safe, so long as you ...
— Sleepy-Time Tales: The Tale of Fatty Coon • Arthur Scott Bailey
... and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty after me Sing, and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... away, and there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last year's brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized upon Mary by the skirts and legs, so that it was a matter of five minutes and piercing screams of merriment to cast her loose again. But soon we drew out of the hot sunshine into the old orchard with its paltry ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the clefts, and also those other flowers of paler purple, from the autumnal cups of which we collect the saffron; and forming a narrow path of such turf as I can find there, or rather following it as it creeps among the bays and hazels and sweet-brier, which had fallen at different times from the summit and are now grown old, with an infinity of primroses at the roots. There are nowhere twenty steps without a projection and a turn, nor in any ten together is the chasm of the same width or figure. Hence the ascent ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... subscribed for a few days previous by the persistent, efforts of an indefatigable canvasser. A white tidy covered the back of the rocking-chair, and another the back of the lounge. An old-fashioned pitcher filled with sweet-brier and some of the old-time flowers, such as bachelors' buttons, London pride, blue rocket and jump-up-johnnie stood on a kind of sideboard and showed a desire to make the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... with a condescending nod, and putting away the cigar, took out a brier pipe and began to fill it from his tobacco-pouch. "The Captain is a man of few words and extremely modest about himself," Clay continued, lightly; "so I must tell you who he is myself. He is a promoter of revolutions. That is his business,—a professional promoter of revolutions, and ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... The mound was newly made, no sight could pass Betwixt the nice partitions of the grass, The well-united sods so closely lay; 70 And all around the shades defended it from day; For sycamores with eglantine were spread, A hedge about the sides, a covering overhead. And so the fragrant brier was wove between, The sycamore and flowers were mixed with green, That nature seem'd to vary the delight, And satisfied at once the smell and sight. The master workman of the bower was known Through fairy-lands, and built for Oberon; Who twining leaves ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago: The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er I went, With ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... those stuffy old fathers puzzles me! As for praying in a cell, the whole wide heavens and earth that God has made lifts up one's soul to finer thoughts than mumbling over beads or worshiping a Christ on the cross. And you will be much too handsome, my brier rose, to shut yourself up in any Recollet house. There will be lovers suing for your pretty ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... stillness, like an awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer- cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... go and take a quiet walk in the woods, and returned just as I was becoming anxious about him, shouting, with a sweet-brier bush which he had pulled up by the roots in the wood. I took a spade, and dug a great cave, and planted it beneath his western window; and I am sure it must grow for him, for he sent sunshine down into ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... an old gray Pussy Cat, and she went away down by a brookside. There she saw a wee Robin Redbreast hopping on a brier bush. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... with smiles Said: "Speak to him, my dear. He tells the truth. Thy parents wandered through a desert land Beneath a cruel sun. Impossible It was to carry thee through brier and brush." Down at his sister's feet the young prince knelt. Then Bidasari clasped him in her arms. The brave young prince to them recounted all The sorrows of his parents. Much he wept, And they wept, too, as he the story told. Then sat they down to dine. ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... brown locks of Vivian's hair, Which play'd on her flush'd cheek, and her blue eyes Sparkled with mocking glee and exercise. Her palfrey's flanks were mired and bathed in sweat, 170 For they had travell'd far and not stopp'd yet. A brier in that tangled wilderness Had scored her white right hand, which she allows To rest ungloved on her green riding-dress; The other warded off the drooping boughs. 175 But still she chatted on, with her blue eyes Fix'd full on Merlin's face, her stately ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... mother sat very close together as they drove through the familiar village streets. When they did speak, it was incoherently. There was an odor of brier roses in the air and the sun was setting in a "bed of daffodil sky." Kate felt waves of beauty and tenderness breaking over her and wanted to cry. Her mother wanted to and did. Neither trusted herself to speak, but when they were in the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie |
