"Gorse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... sun on the rocks behind me, Bright on the gorse an' whin, An' the sun on the slantin' dories With ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... in his own mind a whole world, and he peopled it. He wandered in the shade of those Norman groves; he saw the Breton hero and Madame Bryond among the gorse and shrubbery; he inhabited the old chateau of Saint-Savin; he shared in the diverse acts of all those many personages, picturing to himself the notary, the merchant, and those bold Chouans. His mind conceived the state of that wild country where lingered still the memory of ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... became a hollow lane, with fern and heather and gorse intermingled below the thickets on the bank. Another five minutes would bring him to the top of the hill, to the avenue of trees by which the house was approached. And the nearer he came, the more awkward seemed his enterprise. It might have been better to write a note ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... their mature beauty. Crimsons and purples, oranges, golds, yellows, browns, greens, and scarlet dye the trees; gathered sheaves and golden pumpkins, marguerites, feathery golden rods, and bright blue gorse are on every field. Have we not, in very truth, a country for which a patriot should gladly die, and the devout heart never cease to quiver in prayer that God may vouchsafe ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... near to the church, An ornament unto the town; On one side an old coal pit, The other well gorsed around. Peter Hadley peeped through the gorse, In order to see them fight; Spittle jobbed out his eye with a fork, And said, — thee, it served ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... winding, up-hill road, with its clouds of dust, as horsemen and carriages ascend the gentle eminence, its borders of turf, and its primrosy hedges! Farewell to the breezy common, with its islands of cottages and cottage-gardens; its oaken avenues, populous with rooks; its clear waters fringed with gorse, where lambs are straying; its cricket-ground where children already linger, anticipating their summer revelry; its pretty boundary of field and woodland, and distant farms; and latest and best of its ornaments, the dear and pleasant mansion where dwelt ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... off we started in that direction, trying the west end of Jermyn Street and Piccadilly in our way; but, as was expected, both coverts proved blank. We were almost afraid of the same result in the Clarges Street gorse; for it was not until we arrived at No. 33, that any one gave tongue. Young Dashover was the first, and clearly and beautifully came his shrill tone upon the ear, as he exclaimed "Hereth a knocker—thuch a one, too!" The rush was instantaneous; and in the space of a moment one feeling seemed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... into the world to try their luck, and each took his own way; but when the youngest had gorse a while, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... at tretat, his beautiful childhood; it was there that his instincts were awakened in the unfoldment of his prehistoric soul. Years went by in an ecstasy of physical happiness. The delight of running at full speed through fields of gorse, the charm of voyages of discovery in hollows and ravines, games beneath the dark hedges, a passion for going to sea with the fishermen and, on nights when there was no moon, for dreaming on ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... topmost knoll they stood a while. Dovenald laid down the bleating kid, whose little feet were tethered one to the other, and he bade the two youths go about and gather some dry twigs of heather and gorse that a ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... deserves it. In twenty strides he left me behind. I saw him jumping over the heather, knocking off with his cane the young shoots on the oaks, or turning his head to look at me as I struggled after, torn by brambles and pricked by gorse. A startled pheasant brought him to a halt. The bird rose under his feet and soared into the ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... the stormy breezes—those breezes which will never more fan his cheek—that water where he has often bathed his limbs will be his rippling monument. The shady moonlight of an August evening is gilding the rich pastures of Hertfordshire; the gorse bushes have not yet lost their beauty, the pheasants are playing in the woods—woods that so lately resounded with laughter—laughter ringing like a bell—the music of a merry heart. Withdraw those curtains which hide the heart-struck and the dead. Above you is the exquisite ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... skirted the lake for nearly its whole length. Loch Vennachar lies between hills of comparatively gentle declivity, pastured by flocks, and tufted with patches of the prickly gorse and coarse ferns. On its north bank lies Lanrick Mead, a little grassy level where Scott makes the tribe of Clan Alpine assemble at the command of Roderick Dhu. At a little distance from Vennachar lies Loch Achray, which we reached by a road winding ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... tack, and smilingly she eyed me (Dreadful the low cunning of these creechars, don't you think?) "That's all right! The weather's bright. Them bushes there 'ull hide me. Don't the gorse smell nice?" I felt my derned old eyelids blink! "Supper? I've a crust of bread, a big one, and a bottle," (Just as I expected! Ah, these creechars always drink!) "Sugar and water and half a pinch of tea to rinse my throttle, Then I'll curl up cosy!"—"If ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... eat many sorts of herbage, as reeds and gorse, if cut small; but will not touch them, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... sitting on a bed of it. He thought of it afterwards as one of the sweetnesses that must be always associated with Mary Gray, like the smell of violets. The full golden sun poured on them, warming them to the heart. The bees buzzed about the wild thyme and the golden heads of gorse. Little blue moths fluttered on the hillside. The rabbits, lower down the hill, came out of their burrows again and ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... drawing to a close; he has lived in this manse, a stone's throw from his grave, for fifty years, and the approaching change of habitat will cost him nothing. He will still lie at the foot of his beloved hills, and the purple moorland will spread around him for all eternity, and the smell of the gorse and heather will fill his nostrils as he sleeps. He is a bit of a pagan, old McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter Catechism. I should not wonder if he were the original of the story of the minister who prayed for the "puir Deil." He planted a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and peace My soul was nurst, amid the loveliest scenes Of-unpolluted nature. Sweet it was, As the white mists of morning roll'd away, To see the mountain's wooded heights appear Dark in the early dawn, and mark its slope With gorse-flowers glowing, as the rising sun On the golden ripeness pour'd a deepening light. Pleasant at noon beside the vocal brook To lay me down, and watch the the floating clouds, And shape to Fancy's wild similitudes Their ever-varying forms; and oh, how sweet, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... said, "I shall hit the sphere properly," and with a terrific swing I stroked it gently into a gorse bush. I looked at the thing in disgust and then felt my pulse. Apparently I was still quite well. Thomson, forgetting about his liver, drove a beauty. We ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... trace his family back to John Goose, "my lord of Yorkes fole," [Footnote: Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York (1502).] may likewise choose the French Josse or Gosse. Goss may also be a dialect pronunciation of gorse, the older form of which has given the name Gorst. Coward, though humble, cow-herd, is no more timid than Craven, the name of a district in the ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... preparing their supper. She hoped they would all be too busy with their cooking to notice her. As she passed behind some bushes she suddenly caught the gleam of a steel helmet within a few yards of her. She crouched down under the shelter of a clump of gorse. But in doing so she made a ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... inn. A little to my surprise (for I had begun to expect unaccountable behaviour from him) we reached the inn without Rooum having dodged about changing places with me, or having fallen cowering under a gorse-bush, or anything of that kind. Our talk, too, was about work, not ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... moment it struck him that it would be foolish to run and give the alarm without being sure. The monk had declared the force to be the enemy, but the boy wished to see for himself, and, darting sidewise, he ran down the hill, bearing to his right, till by stooping he could keep under cover of the gorse-bushes and approach quite near to ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... the west, and the town ended on the east in a plain of short grass called the Links, on which the townspeople had the right of pasturing their cows and geese. The Links were bounded on each side by low hills covered with gorse and heather, and on the east by a beautiful bay with a sandy beach, which, beginning at a low rocky point, formed a bow and then stretched for several miles to the town of Kinghorn, the distant part skirting a ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... fours, save when he clung to his spectacles, Beetle wormed into the gorse, and presently announced between grunts of pain that he had found a very fair fox-track. This was well for Beetle, since Stalky pinched him a tergo. Down that tunnel they crawled. It was evidently a highway for ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... Kingston, and was told among the rollicking Romanys of 'Appy Ampton; for there are always a merry, loafing lot of them about that festive spot, looking out for excursionists through the months when the gorse blooms, and kissing is in season—which is always. And he who seeks them on Sunday may find ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... delicious spring day, all sunshine and south wind. We hailed a fishing boat and went ashore. We had left a land buried in snow and ice, and we reached one in early spring, though it was still January, the gorse in odorous blossoming, and in the hedgerows the early wild flowers in profusion. But we learned, on landing, that the recent gales had strewn the shores of England with wrecks, with great loss of life. It had been one of those terrible winters which have ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... these Pasture or Meadow Grounds being supposed to be, either Weeds, Moss, Sour-grass, Heath, Fern, Bushes, Bryars, Brambles, Broom, Rushes, Sedges, Gorse or Furzes: what ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... very dark night, when the goblins' light Was as long and as white as a feather, A fairy spirit bade me stray Amongst the gorse and heather. The pixies' glee enamoured me, They were as merry as merry ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... valley were not, as they appeared, a range of hills. Their crest was only the abrupt termination of a vast and enclosed tableland, abounding in all the qualities of the ancient chase: turf and trees, a wilderness of underwood, and a vast spread of gorse and fern. The deer, that abounded, lived here in a world as savage as themselves: trooping down in the evening to the river. Some of them, indeed, were ever in sight of those who were in the valley, and you might often observe various groups clustered on the green heights above ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the park. It was a joyous morning, and men and women looked at the sky and smiled as they went about their work or their pleasure, and the wind blew as blithely as upon the meadows and the scented gorse. But somehow or other I got out of the bustle and the gaiety, and found myself walking slowly along a quiet, dull street, where there seemed to be no sunshine and no air, and where the few foot-passengers ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... lights, running on each side before the horses, and which were merely the beams that the two lanterns projected on the never-ending hedges of the roadway. But how was it that trees were so green in the month of December? Astonished at first, she bent to look out, and then she remembered how the gorse, the evergreen gorse of the paths and the cliffs, never fades in the country of Paimpol. At the same time a warmer breeze began to blow, which she knew again and which ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... the month was rainier than elsewhere, but if possible, milder. Yellow buds were already foolishly breaking on the gorse, and weak primroses, as though afraid to venture, and yet venturing, were to be found in the ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... who will stoop to chiding, in a fancied courage priding, When we know that he is riding the fearful Phooka Horse?[101] Ah! his heart beats quick and faster than the smitings of remorse As he sweepeth through the wild grass and gorse! ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below. They were coming; they were among the rocks! He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes as the red flare of their pistols ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of the scented-gorse floats through the sun-stained air, On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours long and heard Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer, And the river ripple by and the distant call ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... through which he travelled was at first varied with trees and bushes clothed in rich foliage; but soon its aspect changed, and ere long he pursued a path which led over a wide extent of wild moorland covered with purple heath and gorse in golden-yellow bloom. The ground, too, became so rough that the youth was fain to confine himself to the highroad; but being of an explorative disposition, he quickly diverged into the lanes, which in that part of Cornwall were, and still are, sufficiently ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... thing alive—a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and twisted itself into wraiths. First I noticed and liked it some day, perhaps, when it was purple and yellow with gorse and heather and broom, and the honey scents drew bees and butterflies and birds. But soon I saw and ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... meadow of a million dandelion-clocks seems to me to be one of the most beautiful of spectacles. But I would go further than this. I should never see a hill-side cultivated without going out at night and sowing it with the seeds of gorse and thistle. Not that I should bear any ill-will to the farmer, but it is said that the diminution of waste land, with its abundance of gorse and thistles, has led to a great diminution in the number of linnets and goldfinches. ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... achievement with him, and not a natural habit. Yet I should suppose that he was not a valetudinarian, although that has been said of him, on account of his spare and vegetable diet: for I have the remembrance of his scampering and bounding over the gorse-bushes on Hampstead Heath, late one night,—now close upon us, and now shouting from the height, like a wild school-boy. He was both an active and an enduring walker,—feats which do not accompany an ailing and feeble constitution. His face was round, flat, pale, with small features; mouth ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... peculiarity. They show no impatience of cold, and are very healthy; requiring only the occasional shelter of a shed in very rough weather. In spring, summer, and autumn, they graze like sheep; and, during winter, have been fed with hay, and refuse vegetables from the garden; but their favourite food is gorse (U'lex europae'a), which they devour eagerly, without being annoyed by its prickles. They damage young plantations, but not more than other goats or deer will do. They breed very early: three of Mr. Tower's goats this year produced kids before they were themselves a twelvemonth old. A few produce ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... beautiful Yolande de Foix, radiant and charming as ever, riding slowly by—apparently returning from the chase. He followed her with his eyes admiringly, but felt no regret as her figure was lost to view amid the thick gorse bushes bordering the road down which she was going, and turned with ever increasing love and adoration to the sweet being at his side. The memory of the fair Yolande, whom he had once worshipped in a vague, boyish ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... which but feebly gilded the sorrowful, age-old forests and the mossy sandstone. There were the same endless stretches of broken, rocky soil, pitted with ponds of rusty water, dotted with scattered clumps of gorse and fruze copse, and sprinkled with pink harebells ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... alone in the forest, what with the whispering leaves overhead, the stir and hum of insects, the rustle of ghostly foot-falls, and (in my case) the uneasy sense of green-liveried keepers sneaking up at one through the clumps of gorse. However, I was not the man to belie the blood of Revolutionary heroes and meanly carry my unexploded crackers beyond the scene of danger, so I remembered the brave days of old and touched a whitey off. It burst with the roar of a cannon and reverberated ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... as I have said, was impenetrable above; but it was burrowed at its base by over-ground runs of some wild animal—not, I think, a very large one; they were just like the runs which rabbits make among gorse and heather, only on a bigger scale—bigger, even, than a fox's or badger's. By crouching and bending our backs, we could crawl through them with difficulty into the scrubby tangle. It was hard work creeping. The runs divided ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... me belongs, The paltry acres thine; The painted beauty sings thy songs, The lavrock lilts me mine; The hot-housed orchid blooms for thee, The gorse and heather bloom for me, Ride on, young ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... little village lay on the edge of a wild heath and common country that stretches to Guildford and Godalming and all through that part of Surrey to Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, and the Sussex coast—a region of light, sandy soil, hiding its agricultural poverty under a royal mantle of golden gorse and purple heather, and with large tracts of blue aromatic pine wood and one or two points of really fine scenery, where the wild moorland rolls itself up into ridges and rises to crests of considerable ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Tunbridge Wells are numerous. The common, with its mixture of springy turf, golden gorse, with here and there a bold group of rocks, is one of the most beautiful in the home counties, and in whatever direction one wanders there are long views over far-stretching wooded ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... higher round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... on, the road ran across a field, and when he was near the middle he saw something move behind a gorse bush. Although it looked like a man's head, he did not stop. Going on, as if he had seen nothing, until he was close to the gorse, he left the track and walked swiftly but softly across the grass. When he reached the bush a ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... one on the top of the other in Tom's arms, then sat down on the mossy root of a tree, and watched him as he crossed the common towards the little brown hut among the gorse bushes. ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... lavender; and with sight-dazzling bougainvillea of five varieties, in mauve, pink, and orange sheets. Nor have the upper heights been wholly bared. The mountain-flanks are still bushy and tufty with broom, gorse, and furze; with myrtle, bilberry and whortleberry; with laurels; with heaths 20 feet high, and with ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... plain would interest me, but since I got Doris's letter I am primitive man, and he abhors the brown and the waving field, and 'the spirit in his feet' leads him to some grassy glen where he follows his flocks, listening to the song of the wilding bee that sings as it labours amid the gorse. What a soulless race that plain must breed," I thought; "what soulless days are lived there; peasants going forth at dusk to plough, and turning home at dusk to eat, procreate and sleep." At last a river appeared flowing amid sparse and stunted trees and reeds, a great ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a few yards from the shore, and swinging the boat round, stared up through the gloom. There was just light enough to make out the top of the cliff, which appeared to be covered by a thick growth of gorse several feet in height. I backed away a stroke or two, and as I did so, there came a sudden snapping, rustling sound from up above, and the next instant the figure of a man broke through ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... of motive clothes barren rocks in rich hues and waste bogland in golden gorse, it does like loving service for homely characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the enemy and driving them back. At last the order came to advance. Donald Roy leaped to his feet, waved his sword and shouted "Claymore!" Next moment we were rushing pell-mell down the hillside through the thick gorse, over hedges, and across ditches. We met the dragoons in full retreat across the moor at right angles toward us, raked them with a cross fire, and coming to close quarters cut them to pieces with the sword. In this little skirmish, which ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... such shower-clouds the pimpernel does not invariably respond, but it is perfectly accurate if anything serious be brewing. By a furrow in the sward by the roadside there grew a little piece of some species of gorse—so small and delicate, with the tiniest yellow flowers, that it was well worthy of a place where it would be admired; for few could have seen it ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... gratefully and eagerly took the flowers, "don't they make you glad? They are one of our three signs, you know, of the approaching holidays. One sign was the first sight of the summer steamer going across the bay; another was May eve, when these island-fellows light big gorse fires all over the mountains, and throw yellow marsh-lilies at their doors to keep off the fairies. Do you remember, Eddy, gathering some last May eve, and sitting out in the playground till sunset, watching the fires begin to twinkle on Cronck-Irey and Barrule for miles ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... House, Osborne, St. James, Victoria, and Albert houses, Tank Villa, Poplar Villa, Rose, Brake, and Thorn Villas, as well as Hawthorn, Gorse, Fern, Shrubbery, and Providence Cottages. All had apartments, but many were taken, and many more had rooms either dark and stuffy or without view. Holly House was my first stopping-place. Why will a woman voluntarily call her place by a name which she can never pronounce? It is my landlady's misfortune ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the wind; the poppies in the standing corn, the carmine yew-stems on the downs; above you the soft grey clouds delicately floating; below you, as the day declines, some distant lonely water emerging in its glory to be the mirror and refuge of all heaven's light; to remember the gorse and broom and look forward to the royal purple of the heather—all this is a consummation of pure life, a high, sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and of such exceeding price that to disdain its offerings or to pass incurious before them, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Cyclopean wall of stones loosely piled one upon another. Yet this was the main road from Ashburton to Princetown! Apollo glided along a desolate white way between creamy and silver grasses artistically intermingled, and burning, golden gorse, which caught the sun. The splendid, dignified loneliness of the moor was like the retreat chosen by a hermit god! There may be only twenty square miles of moor, but it feels like ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... as well that I go back to Flanders," he said again, somewhat gloomily; and as he spoke he heard voices on the fall of the hill below him, and glancing down through the gorse bushes, saw approaching his resting-place four sportsmen who ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... small fire of hazel sticks crackled under the pot that swung from a forked triangle of oak limbs. Fagots were stacked at one end of the clearing; a pile of loose bark lay near. It was a charcoal pit, and behind a line of hurdles that were propped with poles and intertwined with dead grass and gorse, an old man was ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... of it, when I repented and thought I would go and see what it was. So I dashed down the moory slope on my right, and presently saw the object again—and now I saw that it was water. I sped towards it through gorse and heather, occasionally leaping a deep drain. At last I reached it. It was a small lake. Wearied and panting I flung myself on its ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... ere I could seize it. For now the man was taking long strides over the worn-out planks of the bridge, disdaining the hand-rail, and looking upward, as if to shun sight of the footing. Advancing thus, he must have had his gaze point-blank upon my lair of leafage; but, luckily for me, there was gorse upon the ridge, and bracken and rag-thistles, so that none could spy up and through the footing of my lurking-place. But if any person could have spied me, this man was the one to do it. So carefully did he scan the distance and inspect the foreground, as if he were resolved that no eye ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... front. The top of the funnel is spread out into large broad sheets, and the whole snare is attached by silken cords to the twigs of the bushes. This is the snare and residence of a good-sized species, the Agelena labyrinthica. Such webs are common on hedges, on grass, heath, and gorse. Now you must distinguish between spiders' nests and spiders' snares. The very common wheel-like webs, which you see abundantly on hedges, are snares or traps for insects, and beautiful they look on a dewy morning all strung with liquid pearls. Here under this oak are ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... the beauty of open spaces which rest and relieve the mind; and of immensity in the shining sea-line beyond the cliffs, and the arching vault of the sky overhead dipping down to encircle the earth; and of colour for all moods, from the vividest green of grass and yellow of gorse to the amethyst ling, and the browns with which the waning year tipped every bush and bramble—things which, when properly appreciated, make life worth living. It was in this direction that Evadne walked, taking it without design, but drawn insensibly ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... as a ballroom floor," said he. It was a clear, still day and we were sitting among the gorse on the top of the garrison, looking down the sea towards the west. Five miles from the Scillies, the thin column of the Bishop showed like a cord strung tight in the sky. "But out there all round the lighthouse there are eddies twisting and twisting, without ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... lonely moor, where the heather and gorse bloomed so bravely, so lonely that even along the road which skirted it the number of those who passed by in a day could be counted on the fingers of your hand; and as for the moor itself, it seldom had any visitors but the cows from the little farm which ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... nearer Heaven to-day, I am. I should like you to look after the covers in the West Spinney, squire; them gorse, you know, where th' old fox had her hole—her as give 'em so many a run. You'll mind it, squire, though you was but a lad. I could laugh to think on her tricks yet.' And, with a weak attempt at a laugh, he got himself into a violent fit of coughing, which alarmed the squire, who ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had wandered on from Willey Water along the course of the bright little stream. The afternoon was full of larks' singing. On the bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots flowered by the water. There was a rousedness and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... absolutely no trees on these islands, although Tierra del Fuego is covered by one large forest. The largest bush in the island (belonging to the family of Compositae) is scarcely so tall as our gorse. The best fuel is afforded by a green little bush about the size of common heath, which has the useful property of burning while fresh and green. It was very surprising to see the Gauchos, in the midst of rain and everything ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... neighbourhood of Penzance the visitor who is fortunate enough to be a good sailor should not fail to make the trip to the Scilly Isles, although the passage is generally a trying one. The islands consist mainly of low rocks, covered with gorse and heather where their slopes are not given over to flower growing, that great industry of these solitary isles. The coastward sides of the downs terminate in granitic rocks which are a terror to navigators. Even under the guard ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... of May. The young nobleman was thinking of the May days when he was a boy—of how the common near his early home was yellow with gorse, and the hedges were white with hawthorn. He strolled sadly along the sea-shore, thinking of the sunniest May he had known since then, the May before his marriage. The sea was unusually calm, the sky above was blue, the ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... and there are many places where a horse would be a source of danger. The sides of the valley are closely wooded for the first seven or eight miles north of Pickering, but the surrounding country gradually loses its cultivation, at first gorse and bracken, and then heather, taking the place of ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... rock and dell There's not an inch in all thy course I have not track'd. I know thee well: I know where blossoms the yellow gorse; I know where waves the pale bluebell, And where the orchis and violets dwell. I know where the foxglove rears its head, And where the heather tufts are spread; I know where the meadow-sweets exhale, And the white valerians load ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... gorse the raspberry Red for the gatherer springs, Two children did we stray and talk ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... irreproachable antecedents from Tunbridge Wells. Respectability is a plant which in that fashionable watering-place has been so assiduously cultivated that it flourishes now in the open air; like the yellow gorse, it is found in every corner, thriving hardily under the most unfavourable conditions; and the keener the wind, the harder the frost, the more proudly does it hold its head. But on this particular day the gathering was confined to the immediate neighbours, and when ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... brown bracken, the blackberry bough, The scent of the gorse in the air! I shall love them ever as I love them now, I shall weary ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... blazed down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamy vegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... charming self. The American whispered to her that a picnic without her would be a desolation and he had half a mind to stop another week at his aunt's—but Gertrude was not enjoying herself. From behind the gorse bushes, from between the moss-grown boulders, from beneath the dark foliage of the Scotch firs, there peeped ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... to show us the way up the "Hareknap"—the war-path of ancient armies—to a famous point of view. There we saw the Quantock Hills, rolling all around us. They were like long smooth steep billows of earth, covered with bracken, and gorse, and heather just coming into bloom. Thick woodlands hung on their sides, but above their purple shoulders the ridges were bare. They looked more than a thousand feet high. Among their cloven combes, deep-thicketed and watered with cool ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... how merry a start we got, When the red fox broke from the gorse, In a country so deep, with a scent so hot, That the hound could outpace the horse; I remember how few in the front rank shew'd, How endless appeared the tail, On the brown hill-side, where we cross'd the road, And headed towards ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... cry, "Oh, Sir TENNIS, our own, Drive him back whence he came to his bunkers and gorse." And the men shake their heads, for Sir TENNIS seems blown, There are cracks in his armour, and wounds on his horse. But the Umpire, Sir PUNCH, as he watches says, "Pooh! Let them fight and be friends; there is room ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various
... eagerly to her advances, and by the time they reached the farm had formed quite a different estimation of the head girl. The walk in itself was delightful. Their way lay along a road that led over the moors. On either side stretched an expanse of gorse and whinberry bushes, interspersed with patches of grass, where sheep were feeding. Dykes filled with water edged the road, and in these were growing rushes, and sedges, and crowfoot, and a few forget-me-nots and other water-loving flowers. Larks were singing ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... is here, and the world is lovely in its yellow and green. It must be urromassy nice over yandher in the 'oilan' too, with the primroses and the violets and the gorse in the glen. Oh, dear! oh, dear! I can smell it all three hundred miles away! The lilacs will be out at Glenfaba now, and Aunt Anna will be collecting her Easter eggs. Well—wait a whilley, and I'll come to thee, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... heels. It was a delicious morning; the feeling of the coming summer was in the air, the larks were singing joyously above the moorland, as if they, too, were revelling in the bright sunlight, the clean, keen air, the scent of the gorse with which it was perfumed. Celia could scarcely refrain from singing; she walked quickly, and sometimes, to Roddy's delight, she ran races with him. She came to the end of the moor at last, and swung down to ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... the stretches of pasture and plough And the flicker of sterns through the gorse on the hill, And the mulberry coats there, alone with them now, To cheer as they're finding and whoop at the kill; Farewell to the vale and the woodland forlorn, To the fox in his earth and the hound on his bench; Unheard is the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... umbrageous, intermingled with elms, ashes, and horse-chestnuts, and overshadowing brakes, covered with maples, alders, and hazels. The other spaces among the trees were enlivened by patches of yellow flowering and odorous gorse. Mixed with the warblings of innumerable feathered songsters were heard the cheering notes of the cuckoo; and the newly-arrived swallows were seen chasing the flies along the plain, or skimming over the surface of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... which overhung the sea; away through the furze, the gorse, and the large brake-ferns; away until they had left the pretty villa far behind them, and found themselves in the small sheltered bay where Mr. Smith's boat, the ...
— The Boy Artist. - A Tale for the Young • F.M. S.
... bit of gorse-bush. The whole year round the thorn has been hardening and sharpening. Spring comes: the thorn does not drop off, and it does not soften; there it is, as uncompromising as ever; but half-way up appear two brown furry balls, mere specks at first, that break ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... joined in from the right. The noise spread through the gallery as a fire spreads through gorse. Soon three hundred pairs of well-shod feet were rising and falling. Somebody began to whistle. Everybody whistled. Mr Kay was on his feet, gesticulating wildly. His words were ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... we took the carriage road to Pisa, over which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those last days. It passes an immense forest of stone-pines—aisles and avenues; undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their velvet roof and stationary ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... or stimuli, stings, as in the nettles, which are armed with a venomous fluid for the annoyance of naked animals. The shrubs and trees, which have prickles or thorns, are grateful food to many animals, as goosberry, and gorse; and would be quickly devoured, if not thus armed; the stings seem a protection against some kinds of insects, as well as the naked mouths of quadrupeds. Many plants lose their thorns by cultivation, as wild animals lose their ferocity; and some of them their horns. A curious ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... had been small freeholders, copyholders and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the village. These common lands were not mere stretches of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable, to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and Tolstoy are famous. Dostoevsky even ridicules Turgeneff for his feminine portraits, in "Devils," under the character of the writer Karmazinoff, with his passion for depicting kisses not as they take place with all mankind, but with gorse or some such weed growing round about, which one must look up in a botany, while the sky must not fail to be of a purplish hue, which, of course, no mortal ever beheld, and the tree under which the interesting pair is seated must ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of wayfaring humanity, and can't be got rid of without some little difficulty. Most of them, you will find on examination, belonged to confirmed hedgerow or woodside plants: they grow among bushes or low scrub, and thickets of gorse or bramble. Now, to such plants as these, it is obviously useful to have adhesive fruits and seeds: for when sheep or other animals get them caught in their coats, they carry them away to other bushy spots, and there, to get rid of the annoyance caused by the foreign body, scratch them off at ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... stay on deck?" demanded the mother angrily, as she lifted the transformation from her brow and heaved it on to the upper berth, thereby unashamedly exposing a head not unlike a gorse common ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... gorse, and tufts of broom. Tall pines with branches like steps to tempt you to climb. Regular precipices after climbing above the sand-pit, from which you could jump into the soft sand, and then slide and roll down to the bottom. Once I jumped upon a little promontory high ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... slopes were dotted every here and there with dark clumps of gorse bushes, all alight with the flaming yellow blossoms. To the left lay the broad Portsmouth Road curving over the hill, with a line of gaunt telegraph posts marking its course. Beyond a huge white chasm opened in the grass, where the great Butser chalk quarry had been sunk. From ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pleased. His feet took him by an unfrequented way, and in the course of an hour's devious ramble he found himself on the canal spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or at ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... Gorse and heather riot over the moorland. There is a charm and peace about this too little known country that ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... the blue waters of the loch glittering in the sunshine, a bleak moorland sprinkled here and there with white-fleeced sheep stretching away on one side, and on the other a valley, down which flowed, with ceaseless murmurings, a rapid stream, a steep hill covered with gorse and heather, the summit crowned with a wood of dark pines rising beyond it. Just above the manse could be seen the kirk, which, with a few cottages, composed the village; while scattered far around were the huts in which the larger ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... Herrick Daisies Bliss Carman To the Daisy William Wordsworth To Daisies Francis Thompson To the Dandelion James Russell Lowell Dandelion Annie Rankin Annan The Dandelions Helen Gray Cone To the Fringed Gentian William Cullen Bryant Goldenrod Elaine Goodale Eastman Lessons from the Gorse Elizabeth Barrett Browning The Voice of The Grass Sarah Roberts Boyle A Song the Grass Sings Charles G. Blanden The Wild Honeysuckle Philip Freneau The Ivy Green Charles Dickens Yellow Jessamine Constance Fenimore Woolson ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... and potatoe, its neat patches of parsley and thyme; then a field beyond. I note the double meandering hedge-line that indicates the high road, and beyond again the ground rises in sun-bathed pastures and ploughed land to the gorse-covered cliff edge with its background of pure sky; a little to the right, yet still in full view from my window, is an abrupt dip in the cliff, which shows a great wedge of glittering sea. It is here that my eyes always ultimately rest, until they ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... loved by the riding men. It was always presumed that Manor Cross itself was preserved for foxes, and the hounds were carefully run through the belt of woods. But half an hour did that, and then they went away to Price's Little Holt. On that side there were no more gentlemen's places; there was a gorse cover or two and sundry little spinnies; but the county was a country for foxes to run and men to ride; and with this before them, the members of the Brotherton Hunt were pleased to be summoned to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... well I found a very little dell, No higher than my head. The heather and the gorse about In summer bloom were coming out, Some yellow and ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and the Danaans had passed into the hills and the unseen; and with the old centuries of their enchantment heavy on them, their eyes had grown no better than the eyes of mortals: gorse-grown hills they saw, and green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the bells ringing from a church, and were frightened at the "thin, dreadful ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... upon the down, Alone amid a prospect wide; There's neither Johnny nor his horse, Among the fern or in the gorse; There's neither ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... civilized. That was nice to learn, practically on the spot. We were chatting about the few Indians who exist to this day on Long Island (rather mixed up with negroes) and admiring the gorgeous golden dunes, and gorgeouser goldener gorse when suddenly bump! bump! The moderately bad road became immoderately awful. At this spot some disillusioned motorist had revengefully printed on a proud sign-post the classic words: "Damn Bad Road." We were forced ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... and decidedly dark. Every now and then Bennett, to call the stranger by what was almost confessedly a nom-de-guerre, flashed a powerful electric torch on the roadway. "Don't want to walk into a gorse-bush," he ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... the gorse, or Ulex, is not narrow and spinose like the older leaves. On the other hand, with many Leguminous plants, for instance, Cassia, Acacia lophantha, etc., the first leaf has essentially the same character as the older leaves, excepting that ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin |
