"Bulrush" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... division was not responsible. The smash was before that. Probably it came with the realization that he stood beneath the shadow of the Criminal Law. Be that as it may, the ex-financier emerged from prison a broken man. But for the interest of Mr. Blithe, the senior partner of Bulrush & Co., who had had him met at the gates and straightway sent him for a month to the seaside, poor Mr. Slumper must have sunk like a stone. When he was fit to follow an occupation, he was encouraged to accept a living wage, the work of an office-boy, and a tiny ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the rest of his body, resting in the crotch of a great oak-tree, and he lay with his vest open and his hat off, idly sucking the pith from a young sapsago-tree that he had just broken off. Near him, on the top of a tall bulrush, sat the little fairy Ting-a-ling. They had been talking together for some time, and Tur-il-i-ra said, "Ting-a-ling, you must come and see me. You have never been to my castle except when you came for the good of somebody else. Come now for yours and mine, ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... A knot in a bulrush)—Ver. 942. "Nodum in scirpo quaerere" was a proverbial expression implying a desire to create doubts and difficulties where there really were none; there being no knots in the bulrush. The same expression occurs in the Menaechmi ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... that has catch'd a cold, sir, and can scarce be heard six inches off; as if he spoke out of a bulrush that were not pick'd, or his throat were full of pith: a fine quick fellow, and an excellent barber of prayers. I came to tell you, sir, that you might omnem movere lapidem, as they say, be ready with ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... and female (below) flowers. The familiar brown spike is a dense mass of minute one-seeded fruits, each on a long hair-like stalk and covered with long downy hairs, which render the fruits very light and readily carried by the wind. The name bulrush is more correctly applied to Scirpus lacustris, a member of a different family (Cyperaceae), a common plant in wet places, with tall spongy, usually leafless stems, bearing a tuft of many-flowered spikelets. The stems are used for matting, &c. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... by no merely external system of benevolent action, any farther than such a system has a reflex influence on the moral feelings. Farther than this, the effort would be like attempting to stop the floods of the Amazon with a bulrush. ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... were full of the fine plant which is popularly known by the name of bull-rush, or bulrush (Typha latifolia), but which ought by rights to be called the "cat's-tail" or "reed-mace." Of this plant it is said that a little girl, on seeing it growing, exclaimed that she never knew before that sausages grew on sticks. The teasel (Dipsacus) was abundant, as were also several ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... and red Lifts its head, Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread, Where the aster grew With the social goldenrod, In a chapel, which the dew Made beautiful for God:— O what would Nature say? She spared no speech to-day: The fungus and the bulrush spoke, Answered the pine-tree and the oak, The wizard South blew down the glen, Filled the straits and filled the wide, Each maple leaf turned up its silver side. All things shine in his smoky ray, And all we see are pictures high; Many a high hillside, While oaks of pride Climb ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the Cull, which has run for miles under willow and alder, through deep pastures golden with marsh marigolds or scented with meadow-sweet, past cuckoo-flower and pitcher-plant and iris and nodding bulrush, forsakes better traditions, and becomes a common town-sluice before it deepens at the wharves, and meets the sandy churn of the tideway. Mr Sharnall had become aware that he was tired, and he stood and leant over the iron paling that divides the roadway from the stream. He did not ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... the ear of which is two hand-breadths long and as big as a great bulrush, the stem or straw being almost as thick as a man's little finger. The grains are white and round, shining like pearls that have lost their lustre, and about the size of our pease. Almost their whole substance turns to flour, leaving very little bran. The ear is inclosed in three blades, each about ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword, 135 And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... meekly down, Clad in his remnant of autumnal brown; The oriole, drifting like a flake of fire Rent by a whirlwind from a blazing spire. The robin, jerking his spasmodic throat, Repeats, imperious, his staccato note; The crack-brained bobolink courts his crazy mate, Poised on a bulrush tipsy with his weight; Nay, in his cage the lone canary sings, Feels the soft air, and spreads his ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five, is pretending to stop the ocean with a bulrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires which were kindled for heretics will serve also for the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Rush often stands for any water-loving, grassy plant, and, like the Reed, it was the emblem of yielding weakness and of uselessness.[264:1] The three principal Rushes referred to by Shakespeare are the Common Rush (Juncus communis), the Bulrush (Scirpus lacustris), and the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the flowers shall come again, mother, beneath the waning light, You'll never see me more in the long gray fields at night: When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool, On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... had been asleep, started up, and came forth to the gate with a huge oak-tree in his hand, which he flourished about his head as if it had been a light battle-axe, in a loud voice comparing the Knight's spear to a bulrush, and threatening to hurl him and his Squire down ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... one day Did ted the new mown grass; There came a gay and lovely may From out the nigh morass. Clad in a dress of silk was she, Green as the leaves which deck the tree, Her head so winsomely to see With bulrush plaited was. ...
— The Brother Avenged - and Other Ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... you, too, the bulrush where Moses was found and the indentures in the stones in the crypt of the Coptic Church where Saint Joseph and Mary sat to rest after the flight into Egypt?" laughed the Captain. And, with a teasing smile, "Ah, what imbeciles they think ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief[20] 195 With quaint arabesques[21] of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops And hung them thickly with diamond drops, 200 Which crystalled the beams of moon and sun, And made a star of every one: So mortal builder's most rare device Could match this winter-palace of ice; 'T was ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... of beauties, nor added to them one dark defect. All you derived from him is excellent. You owe him gratitude. Leave, between him and me, the settlement of our mutual account. Meddle not. God is the arbiter. This world's laws never came near us—never! They were powerless as a rotten bulrush to protect me—impotent as idiot babblings to restrain him! As you said, it is all over now; the grave lies between us. There he sleeps, in that church. To his dust I say this night, what I have never said before, 'James, slumber ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... make way for great Cyrus of Elam. Watching for signal from him whose truncheon this way or that bids: 'Strike!' said Cyrus the King. 'Strike!' said the princes of Elam; And the brazen gates at the word, like flax that is broken asunder By fire from earth or from heaven, snapped as a bulrush, Snapped as a reed, as a wand, as the tiny toy of an infant. Marvellous the sight that followed! Oh, most august revelation! Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open spaces enormous; Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle; Hosts ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing, but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody. The little piper will sometimes climb a bulrush, to which he clings like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard when you have reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... could the prince give it her when there was no water at hand? So the lovely maiden flew away. He split the second bulrush as an experiment and just ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward,—I think he said ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes |
