"Nettle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... splendours of the wing-cases of a gardener-beetle, or the wings of a butterfly." At nightfall, among the bushes, he learned to recognize the chirp of the grasshopper. To put it in his own words, "he made for the flowers and insects as the Pieris makes for the cabbage and the Vanessa makes for the nettle." The riches of the rocks; the life which swarms in the depth of the waters; the world of plants and animals, that "prodigious poem; all nature filled him with curiosity and wonder." "A voice charmed him; untranslatable; ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... never have been a good thing, and even that bad thing is spoiled." This was in the same vein of asperity, and I believe with something like the same provocation, that he observed of a Scotch lady, "that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive," ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... whenever you come upon an ugly intruder of a thought which might bloom into some poisonous emotion such as fear, envy, hate, remorse, anger, and the like, there is only one right way to treat it. Pull it up like a weed; drop it on the rubbish heap as if it were a stinging nettle; and let some harmonious thought grow in its place. There is no more reckless consumer of all kinds of exuberance than the discordant thought, and weeding it out saves such an amazing quantity of eau de vie wherewith to water the garden of joy, that every man may thus be his ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... be of higher rank and the sons of richer men, he had been much courted and much plundered. At the age of twenty-five he found himself one of the leaders of fashion, renowned chiefly for reckless daring where-ever honour could be plucked out of the nettle danger: a steeple-chaser, whose exploits made a quiet man's hair stand on end; a rider across country, taking leaps which a more cautious huntsman carefully avoided. Known at Paris as well as in London, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at its height, Sir John Macdonald had refused to say a word. Now that the fever had run its course, now that the one able leader of the repeal cause realized the impasse into which he had brought his beloved province, Macdonald saw that it was the time for him 'from the nettle danger to pluck the flower safety.' He entered into negotiations with Howe, employing all his art and all his sagacity. Clearly he put the choice. Nova Scotia was in the Dominion, and the only way out led direct to Washington. Was not the only ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... kind, perhaps, which they used in the accomplishment of their own ends. France can never overestimate the great evil these two men did to the national cause. Napoleon's power and penetrating vision kept them in check only when he could grasp the nettle. Even when absent on his campaigns, they knew he was kept in close touch with what was going on. It was not until treason became entangled within treason that their evil designs had fuller scope and more disastrous ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... 1869, was signalized by a storm of extreme violence, and the thunder burst several times over the island. Large trees were struck by the electric fluid and shattered, and among others one of those gigantic nettle-trees which had shaded the poultry-yard at the southern extremity of the lake. Had this meteor any relation to the phenomena going on in the bowels of the earth? Was there any connection between the commotion ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... plants, which contain a green and glutinous juice; and lastly, collects two species of ants—one very large and black, and so venomous that its sting produces fever, and another little red ant which stings like a nettle. Having scraped the wourali vine and bitter root into thin shavings, he puts them into a sieve made of leaves, which he holds over the earthen pot, pouring water on them. A thick liquor comes through, having the appearance of coffee. He then produces the bulbous stalks, and squeezes a portion ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... which inheres in the private and particular nature,—and he does not call it any hard names at all from his scientific platform; indeed in the vocabulary of the Naturalist we are told, that these names are omitted, 'for we call a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools their folly,'—that exclusive good he finds both passive and active, and this also is one of those primary distinctions which 'is formed in all things,' and so too is the subdivision ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... moment of the bite, the sensation was sharp enough to deserve the name of pain; and this continued for five or six minutes more, but not so forcibly. I might compare it with the sensation produced by the stinging-nettle. A whitish tumefaction almost immediately surrounded the two pricks; and the circumference, within a radius of about an inch, was coloured an erysipelas red, accompanied by a very slight swelling. In an hour and a half, it had all disappeared, except the mark ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... decline, nor of what manner of folk worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the place and speculated ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... thought, "She is like my Maid Maleen, and I should believe that it was she herself, but she has long been shut up in the tower, or dead." He took her by the hand and led her to church. On the way was a nettle-plant, ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... The soil too is good, for the grass and weeds reach about two feet high, being the tallest we have observed this season, though on the high plains and prairies the grass is at no season above three inches in height. Among these weeds are the sandrush, and nettle in small quantities; the plains are still infested by great numbers of the small birds already mentioned, among whom is the brown curlew. The current of the river is here extremely gentle; the buffaloe have ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... the white variety and who made it popular in the neighbourhood of London. His terriers were of a strain founded by a dog named King Dick, and in 1863 he exhibited a notable team in Laddie, Fly, Teddie, and Nettle. Mr. S. E. Shirley, M. P., was attracted to the breed, and possessed many good examples, as also did the Rev. J. W. Mellor and Mr. J. H. Murchison. Mr. Alfred Benjamin's Silvio was a prominent ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... scarcely out of school like St. Just, Monet of Strasbourg, Rousseline of St. Albin, and Julien of the Drome—in short, the poorly sown and badly cultivated minds, and on which the theory had only to fall to smother the good grain and thrive like a nettle. Add to these charlatans and others who live by their wits, the visionary and morbid of all sorts, from Fanchet and Klootz to Chalier or Marat, the whole of that needy, chattering, irresponsible crowd, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... But it will be necessary to walk slowly to find the ground-ivy flowers under the cover of the briers. These bushes will be a likely place for a blackbird's nest; this thick close hawthorn for a bullfinch; these bramble thickets with remnants of old nettle stalks will be frequented by the whitethroat after a while. The hedge is now but a lattice-work which will before long be hung with green. Now it can be seen through, and now is the time to arrange for future discovery. In ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... hoop; an ancient marine custom. Four or more boys having their left hands tied fast to an iron hoop, and each of them a rope, called a nettle, in their right, being naked to the waist, wait the signal to begin: this being made by a stroke with a cat of nine tails, given by the boatswain to one of the boys, he strikes the boy before him, and ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... and that almost on top of a diminutive telegraph boy, who was waiting while the old hound read his telegram with one eye and watched emerging passengers with both. Whether we should have passed him unobserved I cannot say. We could but have tried; but Raffles preferred to grasp the nettle and salute ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... did not come from the two boys, who had fallen—quite safely, but rather unpleasantly—into a large nettle-bed; whence they crawled out, rubbing their arms and legs, and looking too much ashamed to complain. But they were rather frightened and a little cross, for Jess took a skittish fit, and refused to be caught and mounted again, till the bell rang for school—when she ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... at last the window faded from his sight, and he became insensible to what was going on around him, he was still conscious of that peculiar irritation, that prickled and itched and stung and burned, till he dreamed that he was travelling through a stinging-nettle wood that led up to a square window, through which a fierce-looking Turk armed with pistols and dagger crept to come and ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... ground, especially along the courses of the rivers Nore and Barrow; and as picturesque ground implies the existence of hill and valley, wood and rock, the naturalist will find himself at home here. The flora is rich, though without any very marked features; the Nettle-leaved Bell-flower (Campanula Trachelium) being the most characteristic species. Regarding the fauna much has still to be learned. In Tipperary, Queen's County, and King's County we are in typical central plain ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... face with one of the branches, pain was instantaneously caused; it increased as usual after a few seconds, and remaining sharp for some minutes, was perceptible for half an hour afterwards. The sensation was as bad as that from a nettle, but more like that caused by the Physalia or Portuguese man-of-war. Little red spots were produced on the tender skin of the arm, which appeared as if they would have formed watery pustules, but did not. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... question served to nettle and confuse him. "It is, perhaps, not my place to say, as my future happiness does not directly depend on the permanence of his reformation. But if his word can be depended upon, your happiness to a ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... absence is a pleasure." For this, according to the code of Mr. Thomas Miller (third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured plates) you would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure, wormwood for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew, and Cruelty by the stinging-nettle. There is always a little risk of mixing your predicates in this kind of communication, and he might, for instance, read that his Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss the point of the stinging-nettle. That and the gorse carefully concealed were about the only gleams ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... ground, that bears the weedes wick' *that same Bears eke the wholesome herbes, and full oft Next to the foule nettle, rough and thick, The lily waxeth,* white, and smooth, and soft; *grows And next the valley is the hill aloft, And next the darke night is the glad morrow, And also joy is next the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... makeshifts. Parkman, in his Old Regime, tells that in the year 1704, when a ship was lost that was to bring cloth and wool to Quebec, a Madame de Repentigny, one of the aristocrats of the French-Canadian colony, spun and wove coarse blankets of nettle and linden bark. Similar experiments were made by the English colonists. Coarse thread was spun out of nettle-fibre by pioneers in western New York. Levi Beardsley, in his Reminiscences, tells of his mother ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... latter suitable food; likewise some of the prickly pear bushes, which gave us only a few pears about the size of our small button pear; the outside has thorns, which if applied to the fingers or lips, will remain there, and cause a severe smarting similar to the nettle; the inside a spungy substance, full of juice and seeds, which are red and a little tartish—had they been there in abundance, we should not have suffered so much for water—but alas! even this substitute was not for us. On the northerly ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... put a stop on at twice and a half the circumference of the rope from the end, which will leave about the length for pointing, unlay the rope to the stop and then unlay the strands. Split a number of the outside yarns and make a nettle out of each yarn. (A nettle is made by laying up the yarns with the finger and thumb left-handed.) When the nettles are made stop them back on the standing part of the rope; then form the point with the rest ...
— Knots, Bends, Splices - With tables of strengths of ropes, etc. and wire rigging • J. Netherclift Jutsum
... had discovered that possibly in time he might have a weak chest, and he visited her, therefore, every morning in the dairy that he might receive a cup of new milk from her hand. For this, he gave her in return fresh spring-flowers, or, by way of change, a nettle (which was always thrown violently into a corner), and for the rest attentively remarked the occurrences in the dairy, and Susanna's movements, whilst she poured the milk out of the pails through a sieve into the ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... home, without stock or inheritance? born to no possession of your own, but a pair of wings and a drone-pipe. Your livelihood is a universal plunder upon nature; a freebooter over fields and gardens; and, for the sake of stealing, will rob a nettle as easily as a violet. Whereas I am a domestic animal, furnished with a native stock within myself. This large castle (to show my improvements in the mathematics) is all built with my own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of my ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... are also subject to attacks of urticaria or "hives" (nettle-rash), from these and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... time, as one who examining a fair shrub abruptly discovers that it is a stinging-nettle, Elizabeth realized the truth. This was no innocent young man who stood before her, but the blackest criminal known to criminologists—a stealer of other people's cats. Her manner shot down ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... man, but the eye of law and order, the eye of a country gentleman and a justice of the peace, the spectacle was scandalously disreputable. It was moss-grown; it was worm-eaten; it was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighboured by the nettle, peered the thistle,—the thistle! a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... also," he says, "be blended and arranged to suit the gastric idiosyncrasies of the individual consumer. A few of them are agrimony, comfrey, dandelion, camomile, woodruff, marjoram, hyssop, sage, horehound, tansy, thyme, rosemary, stinging-nettle and raspberry."] ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... streets, all the shops he passed were closed, except the beer-shops and the chemists'. "The nettle ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... no, but a little farther on at Pont y Meibion; she said, however, that the ground had belonged to him, and that they had some of his blood in their veins. I shook her by the hand, and gave the chubby bare-armed damsel a shilling, pointing to the marks of the nettle stings on her fat bacon-like arms. She laughed, made me a curtsey, and said: ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... you a quarter, Paul, if you will take me down to the Point in your boat," said Thomas Nettle, as he came down to the beach where the boy addressed was baling out ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... stroke a nettle, And it stings you for your pains; Grasp it like a man of mettle, And it ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... spindrift stinging their faces. Beyond the rail there was winter night, a moving blackness where the waves rushed and clamored; straining into the great dark, men sensed only the bitter salt of sea-scud, the nettle of sleet ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... thee—then be not faint-hearted; Life ne'er was ordained to be shadeless and bright; One morn from the other by night-time is parted; The sun always shines though we see not the light; Misfortunes in life, like the nettle, prove harmless, If grappled stout-hearted and fearlessly presst; Rich sweets, without bitters, soon cloy and grow charmless, Then press on, despair not, and hope for ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... I the plantation of this isle, my lord—Antonio. He'd sow't with nettle-seed. Sebastian. Or docks or mallows. Gonzalo. And were the king on't, what would I do? Sebastian. 'Scape being drunk, for want of wine. Gonzalo. I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things: for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... of disease in the Constitution? Not the least. The whole affair was like one of those alarms in a country-town which begin with the rumor of ten cases of confluent small-pox and end with the discovery that the doctor has been called to a case of nettle-rash at Deacon Scudder's. But sober men, who loved the Union in a quiet way, without advertising it in the newspapers, and who were willing to sacrifice everything to the Constitution but the rights it was intended to protect, began to fear that the alarmists might create the disease ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... boy-like,—for he was in his seventeenth year and she a year younger,—he liked to lurk behind the rest of the hands when they returned from their labors in the evening, and who made his pulse beat furiously when he fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. She sang sweetly, and among her songs there was one which was said to be composed by a small laird's son about one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love; and Robert saw no reason why he should not rhyme as well as he, for the author had no more school-craft than himself. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the rainy season was ushered in with heavy rain, thunder, lightning, and hail; the thermometer falling to 66 degrees Fahrenheit. The evening of this day I was attacked with urticaria, or "nettle rash," for the third time since arriving in Africa, and I suffered a woeful sickness; and it was the forerunner of an attack of remittent fever, which lasted four days. This is the malignant type, which has proved fatal to so many African travellers on the Zambezi, the White Nile, the Congo, and ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... undertake is dangerous';—why, that's certain: 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower safety.... What a frosty-spirited rogue is this!... O, I could divide myself and go to buffets, for moving such a dish of skimmed milk with so honourable an action! Hang him! Let him tell the King: we are prepared. I ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... thorn, they show no wit Who foolishly hug and foster it. If love is a weed, how simple they Who gather and gather it, day by day! If love is a nettle that makes you smart, Why do you wear it next your heart? And if it be neither of these, say I, Why do you ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... and sympathize with those beneath you; to mix with their pursuits, as far as you can, and thus, insensibly, to elevate them. Perhaps there is no mind that will not yield some return for your labour: it seems the dullest, bleakest, rock, not earth enough to feed a nettle; yet up grows, with ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... with the thin transparent globes of the "Portuguese Man of War," Physalus urticulus, which are piled upon the lines left by the waves, like globules of glass delicately tinted with purple and blue. They sting, as their trivial name indicates, like a nettle when incautiously touched. ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... that my kisses—I shower them not, Allah the All-seeing is my witness! and they be given daintily as 'twere to the leaf of a nettle, or over-hot pilau. Yet haply kisses repeated might restore her to a bloom, and it is certain youth is somehow stolen from her, if the Vizier Feshnavat went before her, and his blood be her blood; and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tendrils like a strawberry plant. I was abashed, tried to get out of it, to break through its clinging toils—that was no good.... I went away. Well, in that too I showed that I was an absurd person; I ought to have calmly waited for the storm to blow over, just as one waits for the end of nettle-rash, and the same kindly-disposed persons would have opened their arms to me again, the same ladies would have smiled approvingly again at my remarks.... But what's wrong is just that I'm not an original person. Conscientious scruples, please to observe, had been stirred up in me; I was somehow ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... puzzled over that exceedingly, and when he rhymed it at last, Mother Flower or one of the little girls had always to take the spider beside her, when she sat down, which was of course quite troublesome. The kettle he rhymed first with nettle, and hung a bunch of nettle over it, till all the children got dreadfully stung. Then he tried settle, and hung the kettle over the settle. But that was no place for it; they had to go without their tea, and everybody who sat on the settle bumped his head against the kettle. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... of ointment. Believe me, a life of love is an exception to the laws of this earth; all flowers fade; great joys and emotions have a morrow of evil—if a morrow at all. Real life is a life of anguish; its image is in that nettle growing there at the foot of the wall,—no sun can reach it and it keeps green. Yet, here, as in parts of the North, there are smiles in the sky, few to be sure, but they compensate for many a grief. Moreover, women who are naturally mothers live and love far more ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... blood; if wine be recommended for this, there is a deeply rooted prejudice in favour of red wine because the blood is red, and upon no better principle than that which prescribes the yellow bark of the barberry for the yellow state of jaundice; the nettle, for the nettle-rash; and the navel-wort (Cotyledon umbilicus), for weakness about the umbilical region. The truth is, that rustic practice is much influenced by the doctrine of similitudes, the principle of "similia similibus curantur" having been more extensively ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... they cam to yon nettle bush, The nettles they war spread: 'O an my mither war but here,' she says, 'These nettles she ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... and curtseys and recovers When the wind blows above, The nettle on the graves of lovers That ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker, was unreasonable. In the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... he got it on board, then he flung it down at the bottom of the boat, with a loud cry, exclaiming, "The horrid beast has stung me, as if it were a great nettle!" So it was, for it had thrown round his fingers its long tentaculae, discharging, at the same time, an acrid fluid from them, which caused the pain he felt. We all laughed at him at first very much; but he ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... husbanded the supply of cotton most carefully, so that, after an unexpectedly long war, a little was still left over. The mills which were running, displayed great assiduity in procuring and utilizing substitutes for cotton. Paper, wood, cellulose, reed and nettle fibres, and other materials were tried, some were manufactured quite extensively. During the war they did good service, but in normal times, they cannot usurp the place of cotton. After surmounting many difficulties, the German cotton industry is once more in full swing, ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer
... stream of life, the innumerable living organisms that make up the dust of the sunshine. Pink and white, black and yellow spores from the mushrooms over the fence in the pasture; pollen pushed from the glumes of the red top grasses and the lilac spires of the hedge nettle and germander by the roadside; shoals of spores from the mosses and ferns by the trees and in the swamp; all these life particles rose and floated in the haze, giving it tints and meanings strangely sweet. ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... be seen. Shoe and corset laces, braces, twine, cakes, oranges, every kind of small articles are offered by men, women, and children; and at other times also, such peddlers are always to be seen standing at the street corners, or going about with cakes and ginger-beer or nettle-beer. Matches and such things, sealing-wax, and patent mixtures for lighting fires are further resources of such venders. Others, so-called jobbers, go about the streets seeking small jobs. Many of these succeed in getting a day's work, many are ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... the nettle stung her, And the thistle's rude embrace Burned her sensitive nature, And ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... sittest at the fireside; Teach one year, in words of kindness, Teach with eyes of love a second, In the third year teach with firmness. If she should not heed thy teaching, Should not hear thy kindly counsel, After three long years of effort, Cut a reed upon the lowlands, Cut a nettle from the border, Teach thy wife with harder measures. In the fourth year, if she heed not, Threaten her with sterner treatment, With the stalks of rougher edges, Use not yet the thongs of leather, Do not touch her with the birch-whip. If she should not heed this warning, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie |
