"Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is Afric but the home Of burning Phlegethon? What the low beach and silent gloom, And chilling mists of that dull river, Along whose bank the thin ghosts shiver, The thin, wan ghosts that once were men, But Tauris, isle of moor and fen; Or, dimly traced by seaman's ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... bequeath my farm of West Woldland to my eldest nephew, Grimes Goodenough; my farm of Holland Fen to my dear nephew, John Wright, and my farm of Clover-hill to my youngest nephew, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... healthy-looking them days. Always was strong, never took a dollars worth of medicine in fifty year or more till I had these last sick spells. But we had good living in slave days. In one sense we were better off then than after the war, 'cause we had plenty to eat. Nowadays, everybody has to fen' for himself, and they'd kill a man ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... measure, and dive into. They will invent, for all that is incomprehensible, words and numbers; and heap system upon system, till they have brought deeper darkness upon the earth, through which doubt, like the fen-fire, will only shine to allure the wanderer into the morass. Only then will they think to see clearly, and then I expect them. After they have shovelled away religion, and are forced, out of the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... boy lost in the lonely fen, Led by the wandering light, Began to cry, but God, ever nigh, Appeared ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last. But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... justice when Henry came to the throne. The wretched freeholders summoned to the Shire Court from farm and cattle, from mill or anvil or carpenter's bench, knew well the terrors of the journey through marsh and fen and forest, the dangers of flood and torrent, and perhaps of outlawed thief or murderer, the privations and hardships of the way; and the heavy fines which occur in the king's rolls for non-attendance show how anxiously great numbers of the suitors avoided joining in the troublesome and ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye, And blister ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a foul stream from a festering fen Is met and scattered by a mountain brook Leaping along its beautiful, bright course, So now the force Of these new Followers of the camp has come Straight from God's Source To cleanse the world and cleanse the minds of men. Good women, of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen. And wasted fields and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... Ocnus of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields and ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... Winkelried it was Who slew the dragon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... which our suffering heroine occupied, to New-York, was not very great, yet the snow fen so fast, and the cold so intense, that, being unable from her situation to walk quick, she found herself almost sinking with cold and fatigue before she reached the town; her garments, which were merely suitable to the summer season, being an undress ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... boys began playing, but they made so much noise, crying "Fen!" and "Ebbs!" and "Knuckle down!" that Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, went to ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... would paddle down the river as far as the edge of the sea to get mussels and lobsters to sell. And out there on the cold lonely marshes we would see wild geese flying, and curlews and redshanks and many other kinds of seabirds that live among the samfire and the long grass of the great salt fen. And as we crept up the river in the evening, when the tide had turned, we would see the lights on Kingsbridge twinkle in the dusk, reminding us of tea-time ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... longer need us who needed us of yore? We stood not still aforetime when England marched to war; Like those our wind-driven brothers, far seen o'er weald and fen, We ground the wheat and barley to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp are ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the wings broken, one in ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with man's? Where art thou that wast prophetess and bride, When truth and thou trod under time and chance? What latter light of what new hope shall guide Out of the snares of hell thy feet, O France? What heel shall bruise these heads that hiss and glide, What wind blow out these fen-born fires that dance Before thee to thy death? No light, no life, no breath, From thy dead eyes and lips shall take the trance, Till on that deadliest crime Reddening the feet of time Who treads through blood and passes, time shall glance Pardon, and Italy forgive, ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... desolation dwells, By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades, She may pass on with unblenched majesty, Be it not done in pride, or in presumption. Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost, That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. Do ye believe me yet, or shall I call Antiquity from the old schools of Greece To testify the arms of chastity? Hence had the ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... people, belonging to the said parish, being no less than six or seven miles distant from their own kirk; for which and other reasons the heritors and others procured a disjunction, and called the new parish Fen wick or ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As we were part ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... their land, exceeding quickly, with innumerable folk. Then were they fearfullest, who ere were boldest, and gan to flee exceeding quickly into the water, where wonders are enow! That is a marvellous lake, set in middle-earth, with fen, and with reed, and with water exceeding broad; with fish, and with fowl, with evil things! The water is immeasurably broad; nikers therein bathe; there is play of elves in the hideous pool. Sixty islands ...
— Brut • Layamon
... forms the northern portion, with a jurisdiction partially separate; within its bounds there are, besides the city of Ely, several towns and villages, as Wisbech, March, Chatteris, &c. and the former great waste of marsh and fen has become, by means of drainage, a fertile corn-growing district of great importance. Ely is believed to have taken its name from Elig in the Saxon tongue, signifying a willow; or from Elge in the Latin of Bede the historian, from the abundance ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... the block, and raise her features, then, Bloodless and ghastly, for the scorn of men! Begone forever. Go where terrors spread Their sea and forest mouths to crush you dead. Oh, how the clouds shall crimson from each glen, A roar with blaze, and flame search out each fen, If back to us, yea ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... are the two magnificent gold torcs found in the side of one of the raths at Tara, and these belong to a type that has been found in England and France, of which the best known examples are those found at Yeovil, Somerset,[28] and Grunty Fen, Cambridge.[29] A torc of this type was also found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy. This find has led to a good deal of speculative opinions varying as to whether the model of the torc was imported into Ireland from the south, or whether the Irish gold ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... to the fen lands—the Campagna that so greatly needs the magic and glamour of the Roman sunshine, the vault of the blue sky above, and the sound of larks singing to adorn it. It seemed a desolate and dreary waste, wind-swept, and shivering under the lash ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... this formidable work were in many respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... each leading up to the abbey. The dukes are liberal patrons of agriculture, and their annual "sheep-shearing" used to be one of the great festivals of this part of England. They have also aided in the work of draining the Fen country, which extends into Bedfordshire, and which has reclaimed a vast domain of the best farm-land, stretching ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in—before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond the lot of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... though be, 'twas borne on me that land had lived of old, And men had crept and slain and slept where now they toiled for gold; Through jungles dim the mammoth grim had sought the oozy fen, And on his track, all bent of back, had crawled ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... the eye could see, even to the faint blue distance, in the haze of which the glaciers and clouds and mountain tops seemed to commingle, troops of armed men could be seen pouring down from gorge and glen, through wood and furze and fen. On the fiord, too, the same activity and concentration prevailed, though not quite to the same extent. Constantly there swept round the promontories to the north and south, boat after boat, and ship after ship, until the bay close below Ulfstede was crowded ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... 's a flower in garden fair, Her beauty charms the sicht o' men; And I 'm a weed upon the wolde, For nane reck how I fare or fen'. She blooms in beild o' castle wa', I bide the blast o' povertie; My covert looks are treasures stown— Sae how culd my luve think ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high. We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or basil, and found that most of them had three longitudinal nerves in each leaf, and ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... be attempted in calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might reckon each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Saint Guthlac was an abbot of Croyland, and many conflicts did he have with the devils of the fen country, whose presence could generally be ascertained by the hissing which took place when they settled with their fiery hoofs and claws on the wet swamps ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... the spot very lately, but, according to the best of my recollection, it has not now any feature in keeping with the mythological character of the fiend of the moor and fen. The neighbouring district of down and common land would not be an inappropriate habitat for such a personage. It has few trees of any pretension to age, and is still covered in great part with a dark and scanty vegetation, which is sufficiently dreary except at those seasons when ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... of the crews had complexions described as light, fair, fresh, ruddy or freckled, and the same proportion had blue or gray eyes. They would have contrasted strongly with Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, who were recruited from the dark-haired men of the fen districts, and who are said to have left the impression on contemporary observers as being men of a peculiar breed. They would also probably have contrasted with any body of thoroughgoing Puritan soldiers taken ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. The rural peace of that brilliant ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... always something more than human in her loveliness, though, to be frank, it savored less of chilling paradisial perfection than of a vision of some great-eyed queen of faery, such as those whose feet glide unwetted over our fen-waters when they roam o' nights in search of unwary travellers. Lady Adeliza was a fair beauty; that is, her eyes were of the color of opals, and her complexion as the first rose of spring, blushing at her haste to snare men's hearts ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... to come here to me soon?" Her voice had the steadiness of despair—that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... through glade and fen, 'Till passing near a rocky glen, Mild Patience came and sweetly smiled Upon the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... cul'prit al'to hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... anchor, and buildings along the flat shore, marked Port of Spain, destined hereafter to stand, not on the seaside, but, like Lynn in Norfolk, and other fen-land towns, in the midst of some of the richest ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead of ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus, the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... from my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake, Where to fill mine urns I use, Daily with Atlantic dews; While beside the reedy flood Wild duck leads her paddling brood. For this morn, as Phoebus gay Chased through heaven the night mist gray, Close beside me, prankt in pride, Sister ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... wan crescent scarcely gleams, Ghost-like she fades in morning beams; Hie hence each peevish imp and fay, That scare the pilgrim on his way:— Quench, kelpy! quench, in bog and fen, Thy torch that cheats benighted men; Thy dance is o'er, thy reign is done, For Benyieglo hath ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... was young, we dwelt in a vale By a misty fen that rang all night, And thus it was the maidens pale I knew so well, whose garments trail Across the reeds to a window light. The fen had every kind of bloom, And for every kind there was a face, And a voice that has sounded in my room Across the sill from the outer gloom. Each came singly unto ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... ymadawiad ysol, Nwyf i loesau anfelusol, Ond pa'm beiaf rhagluninethol Anorffennol ffyrdd Dyma law 'madawiad, A'r llall mi sychaf lygad; Mae'r fen gerllaw, i'm cludo draw,— Ofer—ofer siarad; Yn iach bob dengar gwm a chlogwyn,— Yn iach, yn ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... James Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer, and with the word "Amen" sank back upon his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Like all pretentious frauds, she shortly came to grief; She was found out, you know, and took a strange belief Which none could heal, and faded like a leaf. Then, slyly fled the town!—was never seen again, Though faithful search was made o'er mountain, moor and fen. ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... author of Ulalume. In Professor Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots overshrouds the water." The ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... bird of night flies past them, and they hear the whooping of the owl, and see him skimming like a ghost over the waste. Then more fen fires arise, showing that other treacherous quagmires are at hand; but Crouch skirts them safely. Now the bull-frog croaks in the marsh, and a deep booming tells of a bittern passing by. They see the mighty bird above them, with his wide heavy wings and long neck. Grip howls at him, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Roger, shivering and glancing about him, "here is Hangstone Waste, and yonder the swamps of Hundleby Fen—you can smell them from here! And 'tis an evil place, this, for 'tis said the souls of murdered folk do meet here betimes, and hold high revel when the moon be full. Here, on wild nights witches and warlocks ride shrieking upon ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Sir Frederick Hamilton's men Were hungry for the fray, And it was a son of the bog and fen Would guide them on ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... sails spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea. Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, Le Fen Follet (Jack-o'-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper's sea phrases,—for which he had an unfailing instinct,—that meant something "even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo." It is ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... the skirts of gray forest o'erhung with wild vine; Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild ass ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... swept by at the end of a long glade. He fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... circled a great arc of the foul fen, between the dry bank and the slough, with eyes turned on those who guzzle the mire. We came at length to the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the Wisbech parliamentary division of Cambridgeshire, England, 25-1/2 m. N. by W. of Cambridge by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 4711. It lies in the midst of the flat Fen country. The church of St Peter is principally Decorated; and there are fragments of a Benedictine convent founded in the 10th century and rebuilt after fire in the first half of the 14th. The town has breweries, and engineering and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... and embrasures, outlying scarps and counterscarps, remarkably suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land was puckered with brown tracts of naked soil, and seamed and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Nature, is thy face; * * * all that grows, has grace. All are appropriate. Bog and moss and fen Are only poor to undiscerning men. Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the ruby moor; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But will repay th' ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... had more acres of fen than any man on this coast: but what are fens to love? What are dykes and windmills ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... serves as an incantation authorizing the speaker to deliver his fire from any point other than that where his marble lies, equally distant from the objective point; "clearings," in like manner, authorizing the preparation of a reasonably unobstructed line of fire; and "fen ebs," "fen clearings," and "fen everythings," to be pronounced before the other player speaks, and which, by virtue of the prohibitory syllable "fen" (defendre, Fr.), prevent respectively ebs, clearings, and everything,—that is to say, any elusion or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... in my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake; Thou know'st it well,—nor fen, nor sedge, Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge; Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink At once upon the level brink; And just a trace of silver sand Marks where the water ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields, and slaughtered men, ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... alfa-grass which surround it, with its quadrangular enclosure, its roads on the projection of the walls behind the battlements, its squat turrets, it has a look as archaic, as strange, as our own Aigues-Mortes amid its marshy fen. Nothing can be more rich and joyous to the eye than the rust which covers its ruins—a complete gilding that one would say had been laid on by the hand ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... bought at thousands, what with better wit You purchase as you want, and bit by bit; Now, or long since, what difference will be found? You pay a penny, and he paid a pound. Heathcote himself, and such large-acred men, Lords of fat E'sham, or of Lincoln fen, Buy every stick of wood that lends them heat, Buy every pullet they afford to eat. Yet these are wights, who fondly call their own Half that the Devil o'erlooks from Lincoln town. The laws of God, as well as of the land, Abhor, a perpetuity should ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... bog, and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... woke, and there, as in a dream, Which holds some boding fear of wrong, By fog-bound fen and sluggard stream I dragged my leaden steps along. My blood ran ice; I turned and spied A ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... precious, as heavenly breath. Loss of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a dastardly lord. So that another God might tread that portal ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... "Fen says that these animal drawings of yours show promise and he wants to know whether you ever thought of trying something ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... as Newton Dale, with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast. All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the knowledge of twenty years of life behind her—the delicious aroma of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life, the ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... him o'er the seas, To the drear antipodes; There he saw a felon band, Chains on neck, and spade in hand, Orators, all sworn to die In "Old Ireland's" cause—or fly! Now, divorced from pike and pen, Digging ditch, and draining fen, Sky their ceiling, sand their bed, Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed. "Operatives!" he harangued; "Ere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the horizon to the zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time in the sky! Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Patricia not far but straight, and Merle, after impressive preliminaries that should have intimidated any golf ball, far but not straight. After his shot he lectured instructively upon its faults. When he had done they knew why he had sliced into the miry fen on the right. Then with an expert eye he studied his brother's stance and swing. The ball of Wilbur went low and straight and far, but the shot was prefaced, apparently, by no nice adjustment of the feet or by any preliminary ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... ancient fabric, receiving education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... of the night, Waking she heard the night-fowl crow: The cock sung out an hour ere light: From the dark fen the oxen's low Came to her: without hope of change, In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About the lonely moated grange. She only said, 'The day is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... 'twas not one but ten —- Rank on rank of ghostly soldiers marching o'er the fen, Marching in the misty air they showed in dreams to me, And behind me was the shouting and the ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... from all brother-men, in the weird of the fen, With God's creatures I bide, 'mid the birds that I ken; Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea Brings a message of peace from the ocean ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... over a considerable amount of ground, but the work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields. The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers; the only "society" was that of the neighboring ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Ingelow (1820-1897) was an English poet, novelist, and writer of stories for children, who lived in the fen district of Lincolnshire. Her most noted poem deals with a terrible catastrophe that happened there more than three centuries ago. It is called "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." Many reading books for the third or fourth grade contain her dainty and melodious ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... "far from home", he trusts to the light shining through the darkness to keep his feet from stumbling; he does not trouble himself about what lies far before him, he attends only to his footsteps one by one. He feels he can pass safely over the "moor", the "fen", the "crag", and the "torrent", by trusting to the guidance of the light. With the dawning of the day will come the reunion with his loved ones from whom he has ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... she drops down, she lies flat at your feet— Take her then!" Well, I knew it—what fools are men! Take the bee by her horns, will your honey prove sweet? Sweet is grass—will you pasture your cows in a fen? Oh, if contraries ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Valens, are found everywhere below ground, while above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms, like crows, upon the fertile marsh lands; but the number ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... enables them to make their way through dense herbage with facility. I can't find anything clear about its country, except that it 'occasionally visits' Sweden in summer, and Smyrna in winter, and that it has been found in Corfu, Sicily, Crete,—Whittlesea Mere,—and Yarley Fen;—in marshes always, wherever it is; (nothing said of its behavior on ice,) and not generally found farther north than Cumberland. Its food is rather nasty—water-slugs and the like,—but it is itself as fat as an ortolan, "almost melts in the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... coast-line to the north of the East Saxons was seized at some unascertained dates by different groups of Angles. The land between the Stour and the great fen which in those days stretched far inland from the Wash was occupied by two of these groups, known as the North folk and the South folk. They gave their names to Norfolk and Suffolk, and at some later time combined under the name of East Anglians. North of the Wash were the Lindiswara—that is to ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... wavelets dash, We see the summer lightning flash; While now and then, In marsh and fen Too muddy for ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... preserved the memory of the more extended settlement which gradually formed round the Palatine. Suburbs grew up one after another, each protected by its own separate though weaker circumvallation and joined to the original ring-wall of the Palatine, as in fen districts the outer dikes are joined on to the main dike. The "Seven Rings" were, the Palatine itself; the Cermalus, the slope of the Palatine in the direction of the morass that extended between it and the Capitol towards the river (-velabrum-); the Velia, the ridge which connected ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Most of them have very fair hair, often gold, and fair rosy cheeks. They seem a very Saxon type. I have been wondering whether they are descendents of the Danes and Saxons, who took refuge in the fens in Norman times, a memory of Hereward the Wake. The fen men have always been a separate race; they must have very little Norman blood in their veins. They have the Saxon stolidity also. I am very glad I am not in a town battalion like the Northumberlands ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... it becomes known what a splendid abode it is. The first who settled there were the wild ducks; and they still live there by thousands. But they no longer own the entire lake, for they have been obliged to share it with swans, grebes, coots, loons, fen-ducks, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... on the lower reaches of the river. The "sweet sedge," so called—the smell is rather sickly to most tastes—is now found on the Thames near Dorchester, and between Kingston and Teddington among other places, though it was once thought only to flourish on the Norfolk and Fen rivers. It is not a sedge at all, but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the little finger, represents the "lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the burr reed, among the prettiest of all the upright plants growing out of the ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... certain hill in Phrygia stands a linden tree and an oak, enclosed by a low wall. Not far from the spot is a marsh, formerly good habitable land, but now indented with pools, the resort of fen-birds and cormorants. Once on a time Jupiter, in, human shape, visited this country, and with him his son Mercury (he of the caduceus), without his wings. They presented themselves, as weary travellers, at many a door, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... back, puts out their eyes, Turns them to tears and words? Ah my sweet knight, You have the better of us that weave and weep While the blithe battle blows upon your eyes Like rain and wind; yet I remember too When this last year the fight at Corrichie Reddened the rushes with stained fen-water, I rode with my good men and took delight, Feeling the sweet clear wind upon my eyes And rainy soft smells blown upon my face In riding: then the great fight jarred and joined, And the sound stung me right ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fox. She on a leafless tree; he in a cloud on the hill. Dark, panting, trembling, sad, the traveller has lost his way. Through shrubs, through thorns he goes, along the gurgling mill. He fears the rock and the fen. He fears the ghost of night. The old tree groans to the blast; the falling branch resounds. The wind drives the weathered burs, clung together, along the grass. It is the light tread of a ghost! He trembles amidst the night. Dark, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... sharp and keen, And laid on the Sheriff's men And drived them down bydene. ROBIN started to that Knight, And cut a two his bond; And took him in his hand a bow, And bade him by him stand. "Leave thy horse thee behind, And learn for to run! Thou shalt with me to green wood Through mire, moss, and fen! Thou shalt with me to green wood Without any leasing, Till that I have got us grace Of ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... the groom of General Harrison Had news denied to ordinary men, How the Brigade was going home to garrison A restful corner of the Lincoln fen; But weeks have passed and we are as we were; And possibly, when Peace is in the air And these dear myths have died of sheer despair, They may come true—but not, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,' Exclaim'd Orlando: 'all that grows has grace: All are appropriate—bog, and marsh, and fen, Are only poor to undiscerning men; Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor, Here the rare moss in secret shade is found, Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground; Beauties are these that from the view ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... in hidden glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, I lost ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... my lay is yet not sweet enough, I'll bid a gentler, subtler strain awake, And sing of fights with Jackson on the Gulf And Perry's hard-fought battle on the Lake! Of fights in fen and moor and hoary brake, On Lookout Mountain and the rolling main— Through searing blasts of bleak December's flake, And drenching torrents of fair April's rain: Their valiant deeds are springing ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with eternal snow. Where a thousand foaming fountains singing seek the plains below. Fields of corn and feet of cities lo the mighty river laves, Where the Saxon sings his ditties o'er the swarthy warriors' graves. Aye, before ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... they sitting, All the gods and lords of time, Whence they watched as fen-fires flitting Years and names of men sublime, When their counsels found it fitting One should stand where none might climb— None of man begotten, none Born of men beneath the sun Till the race of time be run, Save this ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne |
