"Buttercup" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... concertina, and a lilac grew desperately jealous of me and tried to claw my hair. Then the dancing ceased, and I found myself in the midst of bluebells that shook their bells at me with loud trills of laughter. And out from among them, came a buttercup, pointing its yellow head at me. 'See! see,' it cried, 'what Gladys is carrying behind her. Naughty Gladys!' And trees and flowers—everything around me—shook with laughter. Then I grew hot and cold all over, and did not know which way to look for my confusion, till ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... is to be seen, and how full Nature is also of that ludicrous element of which we spoke above. And, indeed, it is in this form of Natural History: not in mere classification, and the finding out of means, and quarrellings as to the first discovery of that beetle or this buttercup, - too common, alas! among mere closet-collectors, - "endless genealogies," to apply St. Paul's words by no means irreverently or fancifully, "which do but gender strife;" - not in these pedantries ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... flower really is. Take, for example, a buttercup, cotton, tobacco, or plum blossom (see Figs. 31 and 32). You will find on the outside a row of green leaves inclosing the flower when it is still a bud. These leaves are the sepals. Next on the inside is a row of colored leaves, or petals. Arranged inside ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me, and was ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... pockets were emptiest, a fair was held in the neighbouring town, and he must needs go as well as the rest, though he had no money to spend. But he stuck a buttercup in his cap, for which he had nothing to pay, and strode along as ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... appetite the unhappy mate made David cook an omelet and bake a seed-cake, the latter so richly compounded that it opened to the knife like a freckled buttercup. With the same object he stuck night-lines into the banks of the mill-pond, and drew up next morning a family of fat eels, some of which were skinned and prepared for his breakfast. They were his favourite fish, but such had been his condition that, until the moment of making this effort, he had ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... really almost more than semi-detached. It had been but lightly wedged between two buttercup stalks. The two eggs in it were at once unseated, and one was broken. Sarah Brown was ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... between his bed-room and drawing-room. He then took his friend's arm, and away they went over the green meadows, where the cowslips and buttercups grew, making the grass look as if it were dotted all over with gold. Sometimes the two friends stopped by the way to rest under a buttercup, and sip a little morning dew; but seeing every one hastening past them, while they wasted their time, the Dormouse jumped up again, and cast a sly look at his blind friend as he asked him what he thought of the ...
— The Butterfly's Ball - The Grasshopper's Feast • R.M. Ballantyne
... counting them off on her fingers, "you've got a father—and a mother—and new tires to your bike. Good boots" (she had stuck buttercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful purple tie." (She held another buttercup ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... a tea rose, stood doubtfully in the cedar-wood door, poised for flight either way, sucking in the dimple at the left of her mouth. Running at his call she flew into his arms and dropped her buttercup head on his shoulder. For the first time he smiled, and the wise wife slipped quietly away and watched them from the door, guessing at their murmurs, counting their kisses. Later she disturbed ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... as the ranunculus aquatilis, the water buttercup, is under water its leaves are all finely indented, and the divisions are furnished with capillaries; but as soon as the stalk of the plant reaches the surface the leaves, which develop in the air, are broadened out, rounded, and simply lobed. If the plant manages ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... stone sustained the narrator, while the four disposed themselves on the sunny grass, in the various attitudes of severe inattention which youth assumes when listening to a story. Sweetheart pored into the depths of a buttercup. Hugh John scratched the freestone of a half-buried tomb with a nail till told to stop. Sir Toady Lion, having a "pinch-bug" coralled in his palms, sat regarding it cautiously between his thumbs. Only Maid Margaret, her dimpled chin on her knuckles, sat looking upward in rapt attention. ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives; His mate feels ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... with the bright yellow buttercup-looking flowers, are now in full luxuriance of bloom in wet places near running water; they may not be esteemed beautiful by all, and yet all God's works, and all his flowers, are good and beautiful. Let any one see them as I have ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the head Of many a columbine; And, taken from their rocky bed, They in our wreaths shall twine. Saxifrage, so small and sweet, Grows in plenty at our feet; From the grass we gather up, Golden bright, the buttercup. ...
— Cousin Hatty's Hymns and Twilight Stories • Wm. Crosby And H.P. Nichols
... cactus, all covered with warts and knobs and sharp spines. Dear mother was very proud of him, and she was always hoping he would blossom, but he never did. He lived in the house in winter, but in spring Mother set him out in the flower-bed, just beside the double buttercup. So when the buttercup blossomed, with its lovely yellow balls, I played that Old Moneybags, who was an odious old miser, was counting his gold. Then, when the petals dropped, he piled his money in little ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... Stingy spun it was Greenie's business to fold and put away carefully in the centre of a buttercup. He would get it and be back before it was time for Stingy to dance. He measured his way quickly over to the buttercup, his little back fairly popped into the air every other half second as he went furiously humping himself along. He found the cobweb covered with the gold dust of ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... I was a buttercup, Upon the mountain top, That you might sweetly pick me up, And sweetly let me drop. I wish I was a little worm, All rigling in the sun, That I myself towards thee might turn When thou along didst come. Oh, I wish ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Lamb, be good once more, And give your naughty tempers o'er. Then you again shall dine and sup On daisy white and buttercup. ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... if you love to fill your books with flowers. It is a real bookish delight, and they make such a pretty diary. My poets are full of them, and they all mean a memory—old spring mornings, lost sunsets, walks forgotten and unforgotten. Here a buttercup pressed like finely beaten brass, there a great yellow rose—in my Keats; my Chaucer is like his old meadows, 'ypoudred with daisie,' and my Herrick is full of violets. The only thing is that they haunt me sometimes. But then, again, they bloom afresh every ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the sun kisses Nature all the more lovingly, because he knows how short a time they have to be together, and as if they both, for the time, try to forget that they must part so soon. Then the hill grows green as if by a sudden miracle, and the bluebell, the dandelion, the buttercup, the dog-daisy, the wild rose, the raspberry and the strawberry spring up in lavish abundance, by every brook, on every hillock, on every mountain-slope; then hundreds of insects hum in the grass as in a tropical land; then cows, horses, and sheep are driven up the hills and the mountain-sides, ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... and changes the subject,—why, look there for something! just as, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of a nest:— There was once a nest in a hollow: Down in the mosses and knot-grass pressed, Soft and warm, and full to the brim— Vetches leaned over it purple and dim, With buttercup buds to follow. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... that in the midst of a shower of rain that might well be called golden, seeing the sun, shining as it fell, turned all its drops into molten topazes, and every drop was good for a grain of golden corn, or a yellow cowslip, or a buttercup, or a dandelion at least;—while this splendid rain was falling, I say, with a musical patter upon the great leaves of the horse-chestnuts, which hung like Vandyke collars about the necks of the creamy, red-spotted blossoms, and on the leaves of the sycamores, ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... roof, nestling under big trees—you never get a decently big, decently shaped tree by the seaside—its sign towards the roadway, its sun-blistered green bench and tables, its shapely white windows and its row of upshooting hollyhock plants in the garden. A hedge separated it from a buttercup-yellow meadow, and beyond stood three poplars in a group against the sky, three exceptionally tall, graceful and harmonious poplars. It is hard to say what there was about them that made them so beautiful to Mr. Polly; but they seemed to him to touch a pleasant scene ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Command and see no sense in them, should be savage in their irony when they pass a peaceful house where their doom is being planned, and green-eyed when they see an army general taking a stroll in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young A.D.C. slashing the flowers with his cane and telling the latest joke from London to his laughing chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of us—I, for one—adopted the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... seed would have to be in the ground two years in order to germinate. I didn't know that and left them in only a few months. I think the only way is to buy the plants. It is a very beautiful plant, yellow and shaped like golden glow, belongs to the same family as the buttercup. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... Buttercup, Tall Crowfoot or Cuckoo Flower; Tall Meadow Rue; Liver-leaf, Hepatica, Liverwort or Squirrel Cup; Wood Anemone or Wind Flower; Virgin's Bower, Virginia Clematis or Old Man's Beard; Marsh Marigold, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... great divisions distinguished by the character of the petals. In the first group, called Choripetalae, the petals are separate, or in some degenerate forms entirely absent. As familiar examples of this group, we may select the buttercup, rose, ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... terror to the sad-eyed aesthete, but an artist who liked to see colors burn and glow on the canvas would have been glad to paint her: a little frock of buttercup yellow calico, bare neck and arms, full of dimples, hair that put the yellow calico to shame by reason of its tinge of copper, skin of roses and milk that dared the microscope, red smiling lips, one stocking ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... grateful song resounding over every land; in homage to the blessing-laden blossoms? Lips long used to wailing swell that chorus loudest, for it was the sunshine caught in buttercup or dandelion that turned so many darkened faces in sudden smiles to heaven. Ah! they are the forms wasted and bowed down by anguish, that stoop most meekly, thankfully, only to lie where the daisies can grow ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The Nitella is another pleasing variety. The Ranunculus aquatilis, or Water-Crowfoot, is to be found in almost every pond in bloom by the middle of May, and continues so into the autumn. It is of the buttercup family, and may be known as a white buttercup with a yellow centre. The floating leaves are fleshy; the lower ones finely cut. It must be very carefully washed, and planted from a good joint, allowing length enough of stem ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... one holds a buttercup under a person's chin and a yellow light is reflected upon that person's chin, it is a sign ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... bread as we daily tread Country lane and city street, Let us kneel and pray on the broad highway To the saint with the vagrant feet. Our altar light is a buttercup bright, And our shrine is a bank of sod, But still we share St. Alexis' care, The ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... been wandering where the daisies grow, Great fields of tall, white daisies, and I saw Them bend reluctantly, and seem to draw Away in pride when the fresh breeze would blow From timothy and yellow buttercup, So by their fearless ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... utmost nicety. Thirty feet wide they were at their widest, then drew toward each other with no break in their symmetry; they did not close. Above was, roughly, a ten-foot rift, ragged edged, through which poured light like that in the heart of pale amber, a buttercup light shot through ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... her on the dusty street, And daisies spring about her feet; Or, touched to life beneath her tread, An English cowslip lifts its head; And, as to do her grace, rise up The primrose and the buttercup! I roam with her through fields of cane, And seem to stroll an English lane, Which, white with blossoms of the May, Spreads its green carpet in her way! As fancy wills, the path beneath Is golden gorse, or purple heath; And now we hear in woodlands dim ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... heralds on before: The bee rings out his bugle bold, The daisy spreads her marbled floor, The buttercup her ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... seasons, telling him of the blown golden armies of the daffodils that marched out for Easter, and the fragrant white glory of the may; and the pale pink stars of the hedge-roses, and the yellow joy of buttercup fields wherein cows stand knee-deep and munch, in order to give Thomas ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... professional neckcloth, as spotlessly pure as if it had been washed in innocency, and adjusted it in a tie which was like the white rose of Sharon. Myrtle Hazard was, he thought, on the whole, the handsomest girl he had ever seen; Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup from the meadow is to a tiger-lily. He, knew the nature of the nervous disturbances through which she had been passing, and that she must be in a singularly impressible condition. He felt sure that he could establish ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... what a dear little puppy it was!" said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with her hat. "I should have liked teaching it tricks, if—if I'd only been the right size to do it! Oh! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again! Let me see; how is it to ...
— Alice's Adventures Under Ground • Lewis Carroll
... aback, the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed eyelids at a very beautiful coast. The waves dance, and glimmer, and shine in the sunlight, the long stretch of sand is yellow as a buttercup, and the fringes of graceful casuarina trees quiver like aspens in the breeze, and shimmer in the heat haze. The wash of the waves against the boat's side, and the ripple of the bow make music in your drowsy ears, and, as you ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... there was some good fighting in the air, some of it at close quarters with collisions barely avoided. Twenty enemy machines were accounted for in the fighting, some flopping about until they broke up in the air and others being driven down on their noses in yellow buttercup fields so far back of the fighting line that no shell had ever marred the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... nice presents. There was a green and red needle-book that Phyllis had made herself in secret moments. There was a darling little silver brooch of Mother's shaped like a buttercup, which Bobbie had known and loved for years, but which she had never, never thought would come to be her very own. There was also a pair of blue glass vases from Mrs. Viney. Roberta had seen and admired them in the village shop. And there were three birthday ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... Mr Reilly?" asked the girl somewhat stiffly, for she had a suspicion of what was coming. A little negro girl in the back kitchen named Buttercup also had a suspicion of what was coming, and stationed herself with intense delight behind the door, through a crack in which she could both ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... the egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose; or harmonise itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla's bright passion of life. And the gradations which thus ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... night, if not hideous, at least discordant to the unconsidered minority who went to bed as usual. Outside in the country, even in the suburbs, June came in glory, with woods in freshest livery of green, with fragrance of hawthorn and broom and gorse, buttercup meadows and gardens brimmed with roses. It seemed to George Goring and Mildred as though somehow this warmth, this gayety and richness of life in the earth had never been there before, but that Fate and Nature, of which their love was part, were leading them on in a great festal train to the inevitable ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... noticed that some of the travellers hesitated, slowed up, and finally stood quite still. He saw that the tall beech tree stopped, and that the roebuck and the wheat blade tarried by the wayside, likewise the blackberry bush, the little yellow buttercup, the chestnut tree, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... cleared at this, and she laughed with satisfaction. When I blurted out something about having once run off to a shop parlour, before I came to Aunt, for a peep at a full-length glass, she laughed again at the confession and called me "a buttercup, a perfect Diane." ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch. I'm going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Peter, then a crowing baby, in her lap. Gilbert was tickling Peter's chin with a buttercup, Nancy was putting a wreath of leaves on her mother's hair, and Kathleen was swinging from an apple-tree bough, ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... seem to be peculiarly indubitable. One might instance the belief that two and two are four, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, nor one thing in two places, or that a particular buttercup that we are seeing is yellow. The suggestion we are to examine is that such: beliefs have some recognizable quality which secures their truth, and the truth of whatever is deduced from them according to self-evident principles of inference. This theory is ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow there will be a merry, merry note in the ash copse, the chiffchaffs' ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves! By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye next—a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots. There is no settled ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... taken, however, that it is a plant of the correct species, for in the etiquette of courtship all flowers have different meanings and many a promising affair has been ruined because a suitor sent his lady a buttercup, meaning "That's the last dance I'll ever take you to, you big cow," instead of a plant with a more tender significance. Some of the commoner flowers and their meaning in courtship ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... I saw it blooming with the daisy and buttercup upon the grave of Carlyle. The tender human and poetic element of his stern, rocky nature was well ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... if you make it jolly," answered Dorothy. "If there is one thing in this world worth while, it is fun," and she tossed her yellow head about like a buttercup, that has no other ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... the hill, his eyes roaming vaguely over the landscape, which was looking its fairest on this mellow June afternoon. Yonder rolled the downs, all golden green in the light of the sinking sun, nearer at hand lay the meadows, very sheets of buttercup gold; every leaf and twig of the hedgerow was a-glitter, too—all Nature, it seemed, had arrayed itself in splendour to correspond with the old pauper's sudden access of wealth. Not that any such fancy crossed his dazed mind. As he shuffled along he thought of how ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... stray far above the level at which bee-blossoms altogether cease to grow. Now, the butterfly differs greatly from the bee in his mode of honey-hunting: he does not bustle about in a business-like manner from one buttercup or dead-nettle to its nearest fellow; but he flits joyously, like a sauntering straggler that he is, from a great patch of color here to another great patch at a distance, whose gleam happens to strike ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the berberries (Berberideae); the custard-apples (Anonaceae); the magnolias (Magnoliaceae); and, finally, the great group (Ranunculaceae) containing the anemones, the clematis, hellebore, monkshood, and the buttercup, which last is of great use to the student of Botany because it is an excellent ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... suitable prop, the stem of a buttercup. The flower tipped a little to one side so that Maya could see him perfectly as he raised himself on his hind legs and looked up at her. She thought he had a nice, dear, friendly face—but not so very young any more and ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... t. iv, p. 426. The same author also cites Romer as having found two plants of Ranunculus, from the stem of which emerged a daisy. As it is not an uncommon practice to stick a daisy on a buttercup, it is to be hoped no hoax was played ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... you know whether you like it or not," Betsy observed, "unless you've looked into a buttercup ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... hawthorn, and hold blue eggs and chirps and songs. Skylarks would spring out of the fields and soar into the sky, dropping crystal chains of joyous trills. The cottage gardens would be full of flowers, there would be poppies gleaming scarlet in the corn, and in buttercup-time all the green grass would be ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... house and throw away her doll in a month or two more. Sweet Fern has learned to read and write, and has put on a jacket and pair of pantaloons—all of which improvements I am sorry for. Squash Blossom, Blue Eye, Plantain, and Buttercup have had the scarlet fever, but came easily through it. Huckleberry, Milkweed, and Dandelion were attacked with the whooping cough, but bore it bravely, and kept out of doors whenever the sun shone. ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... writing-paper in the fire, all of them and Tangle-wood itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up the chimney—even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at the same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus early did he begin to grasp the philosophy ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... angel took it, and kissed the child, and the little one half opened his eyes. They plucked some of the rich flowers, but also took with them the despised buttercup and the ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... couples, protecting between them the slender stalk with its drooping yellow bell. Later in the season come the larger and more brilliantly tinted flowers, the wild purple larkspur, the great yellow buttercup, and the lilac flox. There were dusky depths in the wood, too, into which, book in hand, we sometimes retreated from the mid-summer heat into an atmosphere of moist and murky coolness. There we found the Indian pipe, or ghost-flower—leaf, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was like one luminous ghost: and buttercup, daisy, snowdrop, primrose gathered Margaret, vagrant, flighty, light to the winds that wafted her as fluff, and tossed them suddenly aloft, and back they came to be tangled in her bare hair; and now she ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... flowers for the notation, then YR7 becomes the buttercup, and B3 is the wild violet. But, in comparing the two, the eye is more stimulated by the buttercup than by the violet, not alone because it is lighter, but because it is stronger in chroma; that is, farther away from the neutral axis of ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... later the masses of buttercups, and the ox-eye daisies. Both these flowers are increasing in our meadows, the former to the detriment of the grass itself, and to the loss of the butter-makers, for the cows will not eat the buttercups' bitter stems. Like the ox-eye daisy, the buttercup is a typical meadow flower, tall, so that it tops the grasses and catches the sun in its petals, thin-foliaged, for no real grass-growing flower has broad or remarkable leaves, and with a habit of deep, underground growth far below the upper surface ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... accounted for by the escape of imprisoned air unequally expanded, but "a veil of mystery hangs over the whole."[EN18] The valley-sides of dark trap were striped with white veins of heat-altered argil; the sole with black magnetic sand; and patches of the bed were buttercup-yellow with the Handn (dandelion), the Cytisus, and the Zaram (Panicum turgidum) loved by camels. Their jaundiced hue contrasted vividly with the red and mauve blossoms of the boragine El-Kahl, the blue flowerets of the Lavandula (El-Zayti), and the delicate green of the useless[EN19] ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... keep this quiet if she can," he said; "we all want to keep it quiet if we can. Look at the large facts—the big bones of the case. I believe those scientific gentlemen have made a highly scientific mistake. I believe Smith is as blameless as a buttercup. I admit buttercups don't often let off loaded pistols in private houses; I admit there is something demanding explanation. But I am morally certain there's some blunder, or some joke, or some allegory, or some accident behind ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... not," declared Mrs. Arty. "Still, there was one thing about Horatio. I never had to look up his account to find out how much he owed me. He stopped calling me, Little Buttercup, when he owed me ten dollars, and he even stopped slamming the front door when he got up to twenty. O Mr. Wrenn, did I ever tell you about the time I asked him if he ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... had flown too high, And felt a little lazy, Was resting near a buttercup Who wished ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... excellent scheme!" and Pipalee was so lively during the rest of the night that the old fairies in the honeysuckle insinuated that the lady of honour had drunk a buttercup ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not one day of rest remaining to me. I could be of a mind with your Puritan, positively. If I allow it, so innocent a creature in the atmosphere of a place like this must suffer some corruption. You should know that the station I took her from was . . . it was modest. She was absolutely a buttercup of the fields. She has had various masters. She dances . . . she dances prettily, I could say bewitchingly. And so she is now for airing her accomplishments: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... our study any of the following flowers: cherry, apple, buttercup, wild mustard, and start from the outside, we will find an outer and under part which in most flowers is green. This is called the calyx (Figs. 70-74). In the buttercup and mustard the calyx is divided into separate parts called sepals. ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... lilac, and apple trees, hanging over the wooden palings on each side—suddenly the trees stopped on the left, and out one came on the top of the field sloping down to the south into Dulwich valley—open field animate with cow and buttercup, and below, the beautiful meadows and high avenues of Dulwich; and beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood hills; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going down to the left, always so warm that invalids could be sheltered there in March, when to walk elsewhere would have been death to them; ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... over the sparse turf of these highest regions of life. Everywhere was a profusion of gentians, the larger and darker, as well as the smaller, bluest of all blue flowers. The large, plump, yellow globe-flowers (Trollius), the sulphur-yellow anemone, the glacial white-and-pink buttercup, the Alpine dryad, the Alpine forget-me-nots and pink primroses, the summer crocus, delicate hare-bells, and many other flowers of goodly size were abundant. The grass of Parnassus and the edelweiss were not yet in flower, but lower down the slopes the Alpine rhododendron was showing ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... dread,' he said, 'in dread for you. You have everything before you, everything, and then one day you will fall in love and your genius will be laid at the feet of some fool who will trample it under foot as a cow treads on a beautiful buttercup.' ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... orange-red berries. It is a member of the botanical natural order Berberidaceae, and contains about 100 species in the north temperate zone and in the Andes of South America extending into Patagonia. The order is nearly allied to the buttercup order in having the parts of the flowers all free and arranged in regular succession below the ovary which consists of only one carpel. It is distinguished by having the sepals, petals and stamens in multiples of 2, 3 or 4, never of 5. The berries of Berberis are edible; those of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... is up, the moon is up! The larks begin to fly, And, like a drowsy buttercup, Dark Phoebus skims the sky, The elephant with cheerful voice, Sings blithely on the spray; The bats and beetles all rejoice, Then let me, too, ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... remembered," he says in "My Life," "that my ignorance of plants at this time was extreme. I knew the wild rose, bramble, hawthorn, buttercup, poppy, daisy and foxglove, and a very few others equally common.... I knew nothing whatever as to genera and species, nor of the large number of distinct forms related to each and grouped into natural orders. My delight, therefore, was great when I ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... who does not easily stick fast when marsh and mire are so near? As for the hyacinthine purple cloak, I wear it because I like it. His crocus-yellow one is less to my taste, though he certainly looks fine enough in it in the sunlight. It shines like a buttercup in the grass. You know the plant. When it fades—and I ask whether you think Philostratus looks like a bud—when it fades, it leaves a hollow spiral ball which a child's breath could blow away. Suppose in future we should call the round buttercup seed-vessels ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... botanizing. She never got much farther than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?" he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... can be the forest, And he can be the sun, Or a buttercup, or an hour of rest When the weary day ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... 'cause the prize roses have got bugs on 'em he sets to work and kills the bugs; sprays the plants same's he would ordinary bushes, and they go to growing again like any other civilized flowers. An orchid ain't no more to him than a buttercup. He's too used to 'em. He's used to dogs as well, and with the shifting fashions he's seen during his fifty years with the family he's had experience with most every kind of dog that ever was. For there's ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... Hamilton, as having reached her drawing-room, she proceeded to adjust some dainty gilt cups that stood on a small table. "That is, if you are allowed to have coffee at night. From your roseleaf cheeks, I fancy you drink only honeydew or buttercup tea." ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... muzzle is too blunt; then she does not bite as do the sheep; she has no upper teeth; she crops. But on the lower slopes, and margins, and rich bottoms, she is at home. Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential, wealth of the land is ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a cat or ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... no snow it was as bad—worse, almost, Luke thought. When everything else went brave and young with new greenery; when the alders were laced with the yellow haze of leaf bud, and the brooks got out of prison again, and arbutus and violet and buttercup went through their rotation of bloom up in the rock pastures and maple bush—the farm buildings seemed only ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... forgot the puffs and the linen gown, and thought only of the exquisitely beautiful face and rippling golden hair, for Bessie's head was uncovered, and Neil saw that she received quite as much admiration from the fashionable crowd as did Little Buttercup or the Captain's daughter, and that Jack looked supremely happy and nodded to his friends here and there as if to call their attention to ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... ball, and browner; dandelion seed-balls are white. The grass is dotted with them now; they give a glossy, silky appearance to the meadows. Tiny pink geranium flowers show on bunches of dusty grass; silver weed lays its yellow buttercup-like flower on the ground, placing it in the angle of the road and the sward, where the sward makes a ridge. Cockspur grass—three claws and a spur like a cock's foot—is already whitened with pollen; already in comparison, for ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... along with the sprig of currant-blossom dangling between his fingers, and none of them spoke. The sun shone brightly on little showers of buttercup down the bank, in the fields the fool's-parsley was foamy, held very high and proud above a number of flowers that flitted in the greenish ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... slope I found some more tiny flowers of a day. One was a white daisy, very frail and delicate on long thin stem with scarcely any leaves. Another was a yellow flower, with four petals, a pale miniature California poppy. Still another was a purple-red flower, almost as large as a buttercup, with dark green leaves. Last and tiniest of all were infinitely fragile pink and white blossoms, on very flat plants, smiling wanly up from the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... portion known to me where the lines are barely fifty yards apart, and at the present time the grass is hiding the enemy's trenches; to peep over the parapet gives one the impression of looking on a beautiful meadow splashed with daisy, buttercup, and poppy flower; the whole is a riot of colour—crimson, heliotrope, mauve, and green. What a change from some weeks ago! Then the place was littered with dead bodies, and limp, (p. 080) lifeless figures hung on to the barbed wire where they ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... herself to go to any length of tenderness with me, was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to struggle to keep back her own. Then, as she saw that I had noticed this, she said to me, with a smile: "Why, my little buttercup, my little canary-boy, he's going to make Mamma as silly as himself if this goes on. Look, since you can't sleep, and Mamma can't either, we mustn't go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I'll get one of your books." But I had none ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... helped Pirlaps to set a dainty little round table (not at all like a multiplication table) with pink shell dishes, and put on a jar of honeysuckle honey and a pat of buttercup butter. Then Avrillia baked the waffles and they ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... asleep when the valleys are dark, And she chatters and dances the blessed day long, Now laughing in gladness, now singing a song. She never is silent; the whole summer day She is off on the green with the blossoms at play; Now seeking a buttercup, plucking a rose, Or laughing aloud at ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Hebe, the Graces, Peri, Houri, Cupid, Apollo^, Hyperion, Adonis^, Antionous^, Narcissus. peacock, butterfly; garden; flower of, pink of; bijou; jewel &c (ornament) 847; work of art. flower, flow'ret gay^; [flowers: list] wildflower; rose, lily, anemone, asphodel, buttercup, crane's bill, daffodil, tulip, tiger lily, day lily, begonia, marigold, geranium, lily of the valley, ranunculus, rhododendron, windflower. pleasurableness &c 829. beautifying; landscaping, landscape gardening; decoration &c 847; calisthenics^. [person who is beautiful] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dressed in colors. At a recent very fashionable wedding the bridesmaid wore bright buttercup yellow, a real Directoire dress, white lace skirt, yellow bodice, hat trimmed with yellow—a very picturesque, pretty costume. The silk stockings and slippers were of yellow, the hat of Leghorn, very large, turned up at one side, yellow plumes, and long streamers of yellow-velvet ribbon. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... road, the traction engine was not in sight, so they sat in the bank and waited, Mrs. Marston regal in the chair; and Hazel held a buttercup under Edward's chin to see if ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... slope a for mounted to its crown of rocks. The ground there was covered with a mist of bluebells, and nearly a score of crab-apple trees were in full bloom. He threw himself down on the grass. The change from the buttercup glory and oak-goldened glamour of the fields to this ethereal beauty under the grey for filled him with a sort of wonder; nothing the same, save the sound of running water and the songs of the cuckoos. He lay there ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the bears that in summer board at the Fountain Hotel, but they were not yet out of their dens. We saw the track of only one, and he was not making for the hotel. At all the formations where the geysers are, the ground was bare over a large area. I even saw a wild flower—an early buttercup, not an inch high—in bloom. This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... air when you tumble? Legs are meant to walk with, you know. Now, don't be cross about it, and don't begin putting out your wings yet; I've some more to say. Go down to the frog that lives behind that buttercup—give him my compliments—Sylvie's compliments—can ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... no olives here," he said, when they had gone a little further; "but just look at that hickory! It's growing as yellow as a buttercup." ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... simple as is possible by lessening temptation, is based on what life has taught me, that the fundamental character of people is not greatly alterable, but that the alteration of their circumstances will certainly influence the effect and working of their capacities and instincts. The buttercup which is tall with a flower at the end of a high firm stalk and leaves with slender spike fingers, if it grows in an open meadow, becomes a stunted flower on a short stem, and its leaves form squat webs, in order to force its growth on a close-cropped ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... is irresistible, and with true Inuit improvidence they indulge it, careless of consequences. Fortunate for them is it that their summer, is a short one, and the parwong not abundant, or cholera might be added to the other dangers of Arctic residence. But the days of the buttercup and the daisy, and of the butterfly and the mosquito are few. With the winter comes the all-pervading snow, and the keen, bracing north-west wind, the rosy cheek and the frozen nose; but with it also comes rugged health and a steady ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... harsh blackbird smote him with her wings, As through the glade, dark in the dim, she flew; Yet still the Pedlar his old burden sings,— 'What, pretty sweetheart, shall I show to you? Here's orange ribands, here's a string of pearls, Here's silk of buttercup and pansy glove, A pin of tortoiseshell for windy curls, A box of silver, scented sweet with clove: Come now,' he says, with dim and lifted face, 'I pass not often ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... chuckles. When you were young, you used, I think, to enjoy a butterfly's kiss; and that, you remember, was when your mother brushed your cheek with her eye-lashes. And also when you were young you held a buttercup under other children's chins to see if they liked butter, and they always did, and the golden glow showed and the world was glad. And you held a shell to your ear to hear the sound of the sea, and when it rained, you pressed your ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... John, "I recollect you called me a cool and calculating Englishman. I shall take you down to the lake, where it will be cool, and there I shall find a Smorblomst, or a buttercup, and by placing it to your chin, I shall be able to calculate the transparency of your complexion from the ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... Country Club course, also at Yonkers, had to keep moving to keep warm yesterday, but they played on greens which had been mowed only a few days ago, and those who were fond of flowers stopped now and then to pick a buttercup. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... Munn picked a buttercup and bit off the stem. With the blossom between his teeth he surveyed the sky, the river, the forest, and then ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... on a gray pony, and waits impatiently for the music. The seats fill, the organ sounds forth, "I'm called Little Buttercup," and away they float ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... world green almost universally colours the leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn woodland with splashes—pure palette-colour ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... when once they are gone. Just for the moment I tell myself that I know May like the multiplication table and could pass an examination on its flowers, their appearance and their order. To-day I can affirm confidently that the buttercup has five petals. (Or is it six? I knew for certain last week.) But next year I shall probably have forgotten my arithmetic, and may have to learn once more not to confuse the buttercup with the celandine. Once more I shall see the world as a garden through the ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... calmed the unrest of her heart, as she rode. Among the dead leaves of the woods, the snowy blossoms of the blood-root had already burst forth in starry clusters; the anemones trembled between the sheltering knees of the old oaks, and here and there a single buttercup dropped its gold on the meadows. These things were so many presentiments of brighter days in Nature, and they awoke a corresponding faith ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... world, now sunbeams higher climb, Oft dream of Spring, and wake before their time: Bees stroke their little legs across their wings, And venture short flights where the snow-drop hings Its silver bell, and winter aconite Its buttercup-like flowers that shut at night, With green leaf furling round its cup of gold, Like tender maiden muffled from the cold: They sip and find their honey-dreams are vain, Then feebly hasten to their hives again. The butterflies, by eager hopes undone, Glad ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... the road by asking, she had learnt the way to go; She had found the famous meadow—it was wrapped in cruel snow; Not a buttercup or daisy, not a single verdant blade Showed its head above its prison. Then she knelt her ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... I watch him go; He seems a floating flake of snow: Now to a milkweed bloom he's clinging; There on a buttercup he's swinging; And now he makes a little stop Upon a ...
— The Nursery, No. 103, July, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... unreasonable, and want to have all the gibberish to yourself. That you should have it all to yourself in your own pulpit we accede to you; but out here, on the heath, surely I may have my turn. You do not believe in Rumtunshid? Then why should farmer Buttercup be called on to believe in the communion of the saints? What does he believe about it? Or why should you make little Flora Buttercup tell such a huge fib as to say, that she believes in the resurrection of ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Captain Corcoran Commanding H.M.S. Pinafore. Ralph Rackstraw Able seaman. Dick Deadeye Able seaman. Bill Bobstay Boatswain's mate. Bob Becket Carpenter's mate. Tom Tucker Midshipmate. Sergeant of marines Josephine The Captain's daughter. Hebe Sir Joseph's first cousin. Little Buttercup A Portsmouth bumboat woman. First Lord's sisters, his cousins, his aunts, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... decidedly, or rather has been in his youth, a buttercup," resumed the stranger, continuing the remarks he had begun, and addressing himself to his auditors at the window, without paying the least attention to the exasperation of d'Artagnan, who, however placed himself between him and them. "It is a color ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... moment of which we enjoyed. Grand Rapids Island is prodigal in wild flowers,—vetches, woodbine, purple and pink columbines, wild roses, several varieties of false Solomon's seal, our persisting friend dwarf cornel, and, treasure-trove, our first anemone,—that beautiful buttercup ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... destroying numerous insect-pests. "Oh, papa," exclaimed May, "do come here, what a splendid cluster of bright golden flowers is growing on the side of the drain." Yes, indeed it is a beautiful cluster; it is the marsh-marigold, and looks like a gigantic buttercup; it is sometimes in flower as early as March, and continues to blossom for three months or more. Country people often call it the may-flower, as being one of the flowers once used for may-garlands. I dare say you have sometimes seen wreaths hanging on cottage doors. Some people have ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... is now the Buttercup,[67:1] but in Shakespeare's time it was applied to the Ragged Robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi), and I should think that this was the flower that poor Ophelia wove into her garland. Gerard says, "They are not used either in medicine or in nourishment; but they serve for garlands and crowns, and to ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... parcel out the objects according to those characters, and not, I conceive, according to resemblance to a type. We do not compose the species Ranunculus acris, of all plants which bear a satisfactory degree of resemblance to a model buttercup, but of those which possess certain characters selected as marks by which we might recognize the possibility of a common parentage; and the enumeration of those characters is the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... seed, green leaves, and insects. They have been seen as eager as country children after the ripe blackberries in the hedges, or, later in the year, after sloes and haws. The root of the buttercup is also a very favourite food of the pheasant, and they will eat greedily of acorns. When kept in confinement, the young birds require very careful feeding with ants' eggs, and many other ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... faces at his hospitable board, and to hear their merry shouts; it was pleasant, on Sunday, to see them, with their father and mother, follow the old gentleman respectfully at a distance, through the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... and far up overhead, a dappled sky shining down on a world of light and beauty; green verdant slopes and wide sweeps of meadowland glistening still with the early dew; flowers blossoming everywhere, from the modest daisy and golden buttercup to the queenliest rose and fairest lily; birds singing from every bush and tree their morning trill of flute-like melody; bees humming busily hither and thither; butterflies flitting idly by or resting snugly ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... was no good. He came to himself, at long intervals, to find that he had been looking about his room and wondering how it had formerly been furnished—whether a settee in buttercup or petunia satin had stood under the farther window, whether from the centre moulding of the light lofty ceiling had depended a glimmering crystal chandelier, or where the tambour-frame or the picquet-table had ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... was showing the Ashland dairyman the bull calf, child of Red Rover VII and Buttercup IV, Mrs. Egg saw her oldest daughter's motor sliding across the lane from the turnpike. It held all three of her female offspring. Mrs. Egg groaned, drawling commonplaces to her visitor, but he stayed a full hour, admiring the new milk shed and the cider press. When she waved him good-bye ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of the laburnum hung heavy with gold towards the sod below; and the air was full of the fragrance of the young leaves of the limes. Down in the valley below, the daisies shone in all the meadows, varied with the buttercup and the celandine; while in damp places grew large pimpernels, and along the sides of the river, the meadow-sweet stood amongst the reeds at the very edge of the water, breathing out the odours of dreamful sleep. The clumsy pollards were each one mass of undivided green. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald |
