"Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... From swamps, and ponds, and marshy bogs, Up rose the wailings of the frogs. "What shall we do, should he have progeny?" Said they to Destiny; 'One sun we scarcely can endure, And half-a-dozen, we are sure, Will dry the very sea. Adieu to marsh and fen! Our race will perish then, Or be obliged to fix Their dwelling in the Styx!' For such an humble animal, The frog, I take it, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... 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 ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... Ely Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' 'a story worthy ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the house 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 robe of plain white muslin, ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... '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 shattering of ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... Over bog, and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten of ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... The dim land that gives shelter to the wolf, The windy headlands, perilous fen paths, Where, under mountain mist, the stream flows down And floods the ground. Not far hence, but a mile, The mere stands, over which hang death-chill groves, A wood fast-rooted overshades the flood; There every night a ghastly miracle Is seen, fire ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... conception what an ugly place Plaistow is. The land isn't actual fen now, but it was once. And it's quite flat. And there is a great dike, twenty feet wide, oozing through it just oozing, you know; and lots of little dikes, at right angles with the big one. And the fields are all square. And there are no hedges ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... 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 the ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... passage through his dominions to the Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a reluctant heart Theodoric gave ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... 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 and such regiments. They are not nearly ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... 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 ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 sunshine, winter's ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... two men, as in the case of a thousand others in the gold-camp, it seemed as if easy, unhoped-for affluence was to prove their undoing. On the trail they had been supreme; in fen or forest, on peak or plain, they were men among men, fighting with nature savagely, exultantly. But when the fight was over their arms rested, their muscles relaxed, they yielded to sensuous pleasures. It seemed as if to ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... is der. wos kinde we hauen told gu her. for he is faier, ouer alle men. so euen sterre o'uer ere fen. 630 ful 'wel he taunede his luue to man. wan he urg 'holi spel him wan. [&] longe he lai her i{n} an hole. wel him dat he it wulde olen. re daies slep he al on on. 635 anne he ded was in blod [&] bon. vp he ros [&] rmede i{}wis. of helle pine of ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... that mountain peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... sooth, Whether to give thee joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden and his Flemings ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... roads, and drift the fields with snow; I chase the wild fowl from the frozen fen; My frosts congeal the rivers in their flow, My fires light up the hearths ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... Pestilence, and his footsteps were so soft that neither scout nor picket could bar his entrance. His paths were subterranean,—through the tepid swamp water, the shallow graves of the dead; and aerial,—through the stench of rotting animals, the nightly miasms of bog and fen. His victims were not pierced, or crushed, or mangled, but their deaths were not less terrible, because more lingering. They seemed to wither and shrivel away; their eyes became at first very bright, and afterward lustreless; their skins grew hard and sallow; their lips faded ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 iach, gyfeillion ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... washed with vast and rapid rivers, whose peculiar qualities strike horror into mortals. Cocytus falls with an impetuous roaring; Phlegethon rages with a torrent of flames; the Acharusian fen is dreadful for its stench and filth: nor does Charon, the ferryman, who wafts souls over, occasion any less horror; Cerberus, the triple-headed dog, stands ready with open mouths to receive them; and the Furies shake at them ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... shouldst be 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 ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... north of Peterborough the ruins of Crowland Abbey arise out of the flat fen country like a lighthouse out of the sea. With only the nave and north aisle standing, it breathes the very spirit of romance even in its decay. It is easy to picture the time when four streams surrounded the monastery and church and ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... the last stand of the great English leader, Hereward, against the advance of the Normans. The scene is largely laid in the Fen country, and every page is a record of fierce strife. The fall of Hereward is one of the greatest death ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of Oliver having died, as before truthfully stated, first prophesying that his son would grow up a ne'er-do-well, this son took his new-found wife up to the Fen Country to live with his mother and sister. That he would be Lord Protector of the Farm seems quite the proper thing to say, but that he was dutiful, modest, teachable, is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... civ'il 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 hur'ry ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... the sweet and solemn music of the monastery choir that floated out to them over the tranquil water. The monks of Ely, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of King Canute, tell us that he had a strong affection for the fen country and for their church, and gave the following story in that connection. It is at ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... the shaggy bear, The tiger with velvet feet, The lion, crept to the light Whining for bullock meat. We fed them and stroked their necks . . . They took their way to the fen Where they hunted or hid all night; No ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... the prairie; Ho, north wind off the pine; Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped, Like cups of living wine; Ho, mighty river rolling; Ho, fallow, field and fen; By a thousand voices nature calls, To fire ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Thorold[2] freely holds What his stout sires held before— Broad lands for plough, and fruitful folds,— Though by gold he sets no store; And he saith, from fen and woodland wolds, From marish, heath, and moor,— To feast in his hall, Both free and thrall, Shall come as ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... earth we live And weigh the various Qualities of men, Seeing how most are fugitive, Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then, Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty Of plain devotedness to duty, 290 Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, But finding amplest recompense For life's ungarlanded expense In work done squarely and unwasted days. For this we honor him, that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... lonely sublimity, like the everlasting granite of the Alps or the Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the Ganges. As the serene air that ever surrounds the head of Mont Blanc excels in purity the mists of the fen, so does the lofty theism of the Mosaic account rise high above the nature-worship of the Egyptian and Hesiodean theogonies. "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God brooded over ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen. We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth our while Spinning our ropes of sand; And laugh, and cry, and live, and die At the waft of an ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... so frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only cold—say dear again"— But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, And he a ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... do with the general statements in the book. They occur with reference only to my own idiosyncrasy. I was much surprised when I found first how individual it was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece of unwholesome reedy fen to be ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... the nameless dead,—the men Who perished in fever swamp and fen, The slowly-starved of the prison pen; And, marching beside the others, Came the dusky martyrs of Pillow's fight, With limbs enfranchised and bearing bright; I thought—perhaps 'twas the pale moonlight— They looked ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... wide, Jungle, thicket, pasture, fen, Not another dared him then, Dared him and again defied; Not a sovereign buck or boar Came ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... protruded, his forehead receded obliquely; his ears formed one solid piece with head and neck—a horrible man. The other, Manteca, was so much human refuse; his eyes were almost hidden, his look sullen; his wiry straight hair fen over his ears, forehead and neck; his scrofulous lips hung eternally agape. Once more, Luis Cervantes felt his ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... 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 undertakings of the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... only his Creator and ours knows—had found his way to her grave over two hundred miles of fen, field, and forest. Not finding her there, he had tracked me to the room where she had last played with him. When carried to other parts of the house, he cried piteously all day and all night. When the north wing was locked against him, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... and the sleep That wrapped the stalwart frame so deep, Was woke by guard and sign; The forest sounded with the tramp Of rushing steeds, until the camp Was reached by foremost line Of the brigade of fearless men, Who rode through wood, and brake, and fen, As speeds the red deer to his glen. No gorgeous suit of war array, No uniform of red or gray In that rude band were seen; The ploughman's dress, but coarse and plain, And marred by toil with many a stain, Betrayed no gilded sheen; Their only badge the white cockade, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... afar 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 ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... and black, &c. Drink; thick, thin, sour, &c. Water unclean, milk, oil, vinegar, wine, spices &c. Flesh Parts: heads, feet, entrails, fat, bacon, blood, &c. Kinds: Beef, pork, venison, hares, goats, pigeons, peacocks, fen-fowl, &c. Herbs, Fish, &c. Of fish; all shellfish, hard and slimy fish, &c. Of herbs; pulse, cabbage, melons, garlic, onions, &c. All roots, raw fruits, hard and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... shaking fen Fix'd me, in dark tempestuous night; There never trod the foot of men, There flock'd the fowl in wint'ry flight; There danced the moor's deceitful light Above the pool where sedges grow; And when the morning-sun shone bright, It shone upon a ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... balmy and beautiful, with a bright array of stars, and a golden harvest moon, which seemed to diffuse even warmth with its radiance; but now Turpin was approaching the region of fog and fen, and he began to feel the influence of that dank atmosphere. The intersecting dykes, yawners, gullies, or whatever they are called, began to send forth their steaming vapors, and chilled the soft and wholesome air, obscuring the void, and in some instances, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to forego the glory and delight of creation even of fantastic types. He is only told never to pretend to see what he has not seen. He is urged to follow Imagination in her most erratic course, though like a will-o'-wisp she lead over marsh and fen away from the haunts of mortals; but not to pretend that he is following a will-o'-wisp when his vagrant fancy never was allured by one. It is idle to paint fairies and goblins unless you have a genuine vision of them which forces you ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... trade and poulation The Thames St. Katherine's Docks Tewkesburg Bridge Gloucester Bridge Dean Bridge, Edinburgh Glasgow Bridge Telford's works of drainage in the Fens The North Level The Nene Outfall Effects of Fen drainage ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Chinaman," he replied promptly, referring to his documents. "Set down as cook—I'm told most of those coasting steamers in that part of the world carry Chinamen as cooks. Chuh Fen—that's the name. And why it's significant to me, when all the rest aren't, is this—during the course of my inquiries at Lloyds, I learnt that about three years ago a certain Chinaman, calling himself Chuh Fen, dropped in at Lloyds and was very anxious to know if the steamer Elizabeth ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... confidence to ask you.... Isn't the reason, Fen ... isn't the reason she will not come here to pour out ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... desolate reedy swamp, with pools, and stunted alder-like trees, reminding us again of the Deep Fens, while the tall chimneys of the sugar-works, and the high woods beyond, completed the illusion. One might have been looking over Holm Fen toward Caistor Hanglands; or over Deeping toward the remnants of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... called; His 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 rib So rentful[14] they were. His wife ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... glorious part To check their pride; and when the brazen voice Of war is hushed (as erst victorious Rome) To employ his stationed legions in the works Of peace; to smoothe the rugged wilderness, To drain the stagnate fen, to raise the slope 440 Depending road, and to make gay the face Of nature, with the embellishments of art. How melts my beating heart! as I behold Each lovely nymph our island's boast and pride, Push on the generous ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... 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 ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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 fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. 797 MILTON: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... 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 ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... 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 ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... 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
... county; both the wet half and the dry half, both the Fen district and the Wold district, are treeless; and the Wolds are only a line of molehills, of great utility, but no special beauty. But it is the greatest producing county in England, and the produce, purely agricultural, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... presumed, knows where Shelford Fen is, and that it is famous for rearing geese. A luckless wight, who had the misfortune to be plucked at his examination for the degree of B.A., when the Rev. T. Shelford was his examiner, made ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... at St. James's the other day more people were invited than there was room for, and some half-dozen were forced to sit at a side table. He said to Lord Brownlow, 'Well, when you are flooded (he thinks Lincolnshire is all fen) you will come to us at Windsor.' To the Freemasons he was rather good. The Duke of Sussex wanted him to receive their address in a solemn audience, which he refused, and when they did come he said, 'Gentlemen, if my love ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the Earl now proceeded toward the more important city which he had determined to besiege. Zutphen, or South-Fen, an antique town of wealth and elegance, was the capital of the old Landgraves of Zutphen. It is situate on the right bank of the Yssel, that branch of the Rhine which flows between Gelderland and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Madame de Blacy, je crains bien que le Fils de l'Homme ne soit la porte; que la venue d'Elie ne soit proche, et que nous ne touchions au rgne de l'Anti-christ. Tous les jours, quand je me lve, je regarde par ma fentre, si la grande prostitue de Babylone ne se promne point dj dans les rues avec sa grande coupe la main et s'il ne se fait aucun des signes prdits ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... pretty mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I don't know ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... blood, 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, to ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... no escape by the river, There is no flight left by the fen; We are compassed about by the shiver Of the night of their marching men. Give a cheer! For our hearts shall not give way. Here's to a dark to-morrow, And here's ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... a spy for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... our mortal antics. Indeed, there was 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 with beauty; and her loosened hair rippled in such a burst ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... and modern writers. Some claim that the best reeds for pen purposes formerly grew near Memphis on the Nile, near Cnidus of Caria, in Asia Minor, and in Armenia. Those grown in Italy were estimated to have been of but poor quality. Chardin calls attention to a kind to be found, "in a large fen or tract of soggy land supplied with water by the river Helle, a place in Arabia formed by the united arms of the Euphrates and Tigris. They are cut in March, tied in bundles, laid six months in a manure heap, where they assume a beautiful color, mottled ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... gradually encroaching bog and marsh in his land, and realises that with drainage he could reclaim this as good farm land. On the other hand some of the locals would rather see the fen remain, along with their various occupations, and the wonderful and fragile wet-land natural history. When digging begins there are a number of nasty incidents—torching of houses, malicious woundings of horses and cows, gunshot wounds to ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... poultry, of which these countries particularly abound, they have within these few years found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot too, as well as the turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up to London in droves from the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from the fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as also from all the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet droves with a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove. They begin to drive them generally in August, by which time ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... Twigs. Fensalir (fen sa ler'). The home of Frigga. forget-me-not (for get'-me-not). A small herb bearing a blue flower, and considered the emblem of fidelity. Frigga (frig' ga). The supreme goddess of the Northland, ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... rogue, sharply, "a pullet in the pen is worth a hundred in the fen. Come, we will deal kindly with thee: give us ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... man is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... you a fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and worse ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake ... Nursling of the mountain sky, Leaving Dian's choir on high, Down her cataracts laughing loud, Ockment leapt from crag and cloud, Leading many a nymph, who dwells Where ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... 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 ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is well— And let him shun the spot, The damp and dismal brake, That skirts the shallow lake, The brown and stagnant pool[A], The dark and miry fen, And let him never at nightfall spread His blanket among the isles that dot The surface of that lake; And let my brother tell The men of his race that the wolf hath fed Ere now on warriors brave and true, In the fearful Lake of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... FEN. Low tracts inundated by the tides, capable, when in a dry state, of bearing the weight of cattle grazing upon them; differing therein from bog or quagmire. When well drained, they form some of the best ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 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, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... I did see the good woman's eyes fill with tears: but she wiped them away, and took advantage of the additional persuasion they gave to her natural whine to say, "If, Sir, you know of any young gentleman who likes fen-shooting, and wants a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... than her eyes could see. Behind the happiest hours the dark cloud hung Distant or nearing, and its dullness flung On the south meadows of her thought, the fairest Shrinking in shadow; aspirations rarest Falling, like shot birds in a reedy fen, Slain by the old Enemy of men. Life ebbed while men strove for the means of life; The grudging earth turned labour into strife. The moving hosts within the heavy clod Seemed infinite in malice; frost and flood, Season and inter-season, were conspired ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... plea. There would the daughter of the Sea God dive, And thither came the Land Nymphs every eve To wait upon her: bringing for her brows Rich garlands of sweet flowers and beechy boughs. For pleasant was that pool, and near it then Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen, It was nor overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely then along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leaved flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush. But here well-ordered was a grove with bowers, There grassy plots ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... clear'd the groun' vor grass to teaeke The pleaece that bore the bremble breaeke, An' drain'd the fen, where water spread, A-lyen dead, a beaene to men; An' built the mill, where still the wheel Do grind our meal, below the hill; An' turn'd the bridge, wi' arch a-spread, Below a ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... meeting of the Board of Baptist Ministers, specially convened at Fen Court, Nov. 25th, 1834, the Rev. F. A. Cox, LL.D. in the Chair, the above communication having been read, the following ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... 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 ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... 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 their chief efforts were bent toward directing the choice of a regent. It was ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of England. All his early poetry is suffused with tints, sombre or bright, and breathes of sounds that recall the landscape of the Lincolnshire in whose sunniest spot he was born, but in near neighborhood to "the level waste, the rounding gray" of "the dark fen," and within sight and sound of the "sandy tracts" and "the ocean roaring into cataracts." Later, we find in some of the poems that have made for themselves a place in the heart of all English-speaking people, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... and learn to run on foot," he counselled him. "Thou shalt go with me to the greenwood through mire and moss and fen. Thou shalt go with me to the forest, and dwell with me there, until I have got our pardon from Edward, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... day. Monasteries unnumbered lifted their towers above the forests of a land in which the streams still ran unstained and the air of which had not yet been dimmed by smoke, imparting a dignity to fen and flat morass. Round them ere long cities gathered, as at St. Albans, Malmesbury, Sherborne, and Wimborne; the most memorable of those monasteries being that at Canterbury, and that at Westminister, dedicated to St. Peter, as the cathedral church near it had been ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... which P. has evidently witnessed in the case of his father, and which lawyers call livery of seisin; nor is there on Dartmoor any such word as ven signifying peat, or as fail, signifying turf. No doubt a fen on the moor would probably contain "black earth or peat," like most other mountain bogs; and if (as K. says) fail means a "turf or flat clod" in Scotland, I think it probable that a Scotchman on Dartmoor might now and then ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... my men, Fittest for sunless work; Old Night is steaming from her den, And her children gather and lurk; Bad things are creeping from the fen, And sliding down ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... 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 his face over ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the mast-high run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of the time's fen-politics Hide thee, And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art, — till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... drew Me on I knew not, till I saw in you The treasure I had blindly sought in vain. I praise Him, who our love has lifted thus To noble rank by sorrow,—licensed us To a triumphal progress, bade us sweep Thro' fen and forest to our castle-keep, A ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... Mirth's my trade and follies fond, Methinks a fair name were Joconde; And for thy sake I travail make Through briar and brake, O'er fen and lake, The Southward ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Isles-men carried at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and yell'd the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tomb-stones 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 ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... our Lorde 1402. certaine of the Hans, of Rostok, and of Wismer, tooke vpon the coast of England, neere vnto Plimmouth a certaine barge called the Michael of Yarmouth (whereof Hugh ap Fen was the owner, and Robert Rigweys the master) laden with bay salt, to the quantitie of 130. wayes, and with a thousand canuasse clothes of Britaine, and doe as yet detaine the saide goods in their possession, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... days, comrades. The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood was ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... In the fen country of Lincolnshire, there lived, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, a wealthy Saxon franklin named Leofric, Lord of Bourn. He was related to the great Earls of Mercia, and his brother Brand was Abbot of Peterborough, so that he, and his wife Ediva, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... 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 ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... poison on the ground Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool, But brought no taint and threatened ill to none. Far off adown the mountain's craggy side From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding Like sport of giant children, and the rocks Whereon it smote re-echoed innocently. Then in a pause of silence Lucifer Struck music ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen - from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens |
