"Bramble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... copse of various hue In barbarous luxuriance grew. 90 No knife had curb'd the rambling sprays, No hand had wove the implicit maze. The flowering thorn, self-taught to wind, The hazel's stubborn stem entwined, And bramble twigs were wreathed around, And rough furze crept along the ground. Here sheltering from the sons of murther, The hares their tired limbs drag no further. But, lo! the western wind ere long Was loud, and roar'd the woods among; 100 ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... darkening hills. Yet on she went, following the murmur of a tiny stream that dropped through thick-set bushes into a shadowed valley. On she went still, and now the darkness came, and she had lost her way. She stumbled over fallen logs, pushed with bleeding hands and torn clothes through bramble wildernesses, and found at last her way again to the narrow track beside the little stream ...
— Wonderwings and other Fairy Stories • Edith Howes
... become new. I thought it would turn out to be the thing that we are longing for when the beauty of nature makes us feel sad with a longing we know not for what. I thought it would change life's dusty paths into golden pavements, and earth's commonest bramble-bush into ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... form, colour and veining, cannot be distinguished from a withered leaf with its footstalk. In some other cases the lower surfaces of the wings are brilliantly coloured, and yet are protective; thus in Thecla rubi the wings when closed are of an emerald green, and resemble the young leaves of the bramble, on which in spring this butterfly may often be seen seated. It is also remarkable that in very many species in which the sexes differ greatly in colour on their upper surface, the lower surface is closely similar or identical in both sexes, and serves ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... woodland was now echoing with the happy cries of the chase, the ki-yi of excited lap-dogs, the breathless voices of the young girls, the heavy crashing racket of stampeding young men rushing headlong through bramble and thicket with a noise like a hurricane amid ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... and adjure the Divine Aphrodite. Did you ever see my pretty young cousin, Miss Newcome, Sir Brian's daughter? She has a great look of the huntress Diana. It is sometimes too proud and too cold for me. The blare of those horns is too shrill and the rapid pursuit through bush and bramble too daring. O thou generous Venus! O thou beautiful bountiful calm! At thy soft feet let me kneel—on cushions of Tyrian purple. Don't show this to Warrington, please: I never thought when I began that Pegasus was going to run ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... botanists, for example, can agree as to the number of roses, still less as to how many species of bramble we possess. Of the latter genus, Rubus, there is one set of forms respecting which it is still a question whether it ought to be regarded as constituting three species or thirty-seven. Mr. Bentham adopts the first alternative and Mr. Babington the second, in ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... my word and honour, &c. and to-morrow morning we set out for Bristol Wells, where I expect to hear from you by the return of the post. — I have got into a family of originals, whom I may one day attempt to describe for your amusement. My aunt, Mrs Tabitha Bramble, is a maiden of forty-five, exceedingly starched, vain, and ridiculous. — My uncle is an odd kind of humorist, always on the fret, and so unpleasant in his manner, that rather than be obliged to keep him company, I'd resign all claim to the inheritance of his estate. Indeed his ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... marked by a wooden cross. There was a double layer of bodies beneath, lying side by side; no margin could of course be given at the surface; the thickly planted crosses, therefore, looked, at a little distance, like a great waste of heath or bramble, broken now and then by a dwarf cedar, and hung to the full with flowers and tokens. The width of the trenches was that of the added height of two full-grown men, and the length a half mile perhaps; a narrow passage-way separated them, so that, however undistinguishable they ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... 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 as by a magnet ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... girls, Maisie Norris, Dolly and Dotty, and three or four others, were in the crowd and they were to go in two motor boats to Bramble Brook, the very spot where the boys were trout fishing ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... had grown rough and narrow, but the barefooted boy went over it as lightly and as unharmed as if he had been a happy bird. The boots, however, of his companion seemed a tight fit for climbing, and at last a straggling bramble that crossed the way turned up two little black points, like doors, to show the way to the untanned leather behind the bright polish. The traveller stopped, and smoothed them down in vain with her finger; the mischief was done. "This is an ugly, ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... heart because he felt quite smart enough to keep out of their clutches. To be sure, they gave him sudden frights sometimes, when they happened to surprise him, but these frights lasted only until he reached the nearest bramble-tangle or hollow log where they could not get at him. But the fear that chilled his heart now never left him ...
— The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer • Thornton W. Burgess
... chimney, down the ditch And up the bank, plunge horse and man; And down the Kills of bramble pitch, Oft-stumbling, those old gray knees which, Hunting the raccoon, led the van; Now, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... himself to the solitary life in Finchale. Buried in the woods and crags of the "Royal Park," as it was then called, which swarmed with every kind of game, there was a little flat meadow, rough with sweet-gale and bramble and willow, beside a teeming salmon-pool. Great wolves haunted the woods; but Godric cared nought for them; and the shingles swarmed with snakes,—probably only the harmless collared snakes of wet meadows, but reputed, as all snakes are ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Incidentally the mosquitoes and black flies had found him: his face was purple, and, like that of the lady at the Brick Lane Branch tea-party, "swellin' wisibly;" and blood was trickling down his well-shaped nose from a bramble-scratch. He had fallen down once or twice in the bog, with results to his clothes; and altogether he presented a singular figure to the view of his parishioners as he strode hastily through the street. Heads ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... the lil chirruping griggans [Footnote: Grasshoppers.] do seem so young beside 'em; but they'm big an' kind. They warm my heart somethin' braave; an' they let the gray mosses cling to 'em an' the dinky blue butterflies open an' shut their wings 'pon 'em, an' the bramble climb around theer arms. They've tawld me a many good things; an' fust as I must be humbler in my bearin'. Wance I said I'd forgive faither, an' I thot 'twas a fair thing to say; now I awnly wants en to forgive me an' let me come to my time ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... there is nothing like spines. 'The fox's tricks are many; one is enough for the urchin.' What is the one unfailing, all-sufficing trick? The proper and judicious use of spines. All of you would use spines if you could. Most of you do. Think of the bramble-thickets, think of the furze, the last resort of valiant stoat and viper, think of the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... disputed as to which was the most beautiful. When their strife was at its height, a Bramble from the neighboring hedge lifted up its voice, and said in a boastful tone: "Pray, my dear friends, in my presence at least cease from such ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... genial breezes sigh, They shake the bramble branches to and fro, Whose lovely green delights the gazer's eye— A mother's thoughts ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... bramble and vine, Piles up to a climax the praise of good wine; For in Judges we read—look it up, as you can— 'It cheereth the heart, both of God and of man;' And everywhere lightness, and brightness, and health, Gild the true temperance ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... same kind of variation. Take such a case even as the common bramble. The botanists are all at war about it; some of them wanting to make out that there are many species of it, and others maintaining that they are but many varieties of one species; and they cannot settle to this day which is a species ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... in Sikhim, Mr. Gammie says:—"I have seen two nests of this bird; both were in bramble-bushes about five feet from the ground, and exactly resembled those of Dryonastes caerulatus, only they were a little smaller. One nest had three young ones, the other three very pale blue unspotted eggs, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... conscious and secure, Unaw'd by arms the nations tranquil slept. The teeming earth by barrows yet unras'd, By ploughs unwounded, plenteous pour'd her stores. Content with food unforc'd, man pluck'd with ease Young strawberries from the mountains; cornels red; The thorny bramble's fruit; and acorns shook From Jove's wide-spreading tree. Spring ever smil'd; And placid Zephyr foster'd with his breeze The flowers unsown, which everlasting bloom'd. Untill'd the land its welcome produce gave, And unmanur'd its hoary crop renew'd. Here streams of milk, there streams of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... leaves fell from the branch on which they were perched, and the wolf closed his eyes on life, his muzzle resting on the sandal of Francis. For two days his neck had been so weak that it could no longer support his head, and his spine had become like the branch of a bramble bespattered with mud, shivering in the wind. His master kissed ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... pieces of it till Twelfth Night for the sake of their chickens. Nevertheless if you sit down on the log, you become subject to boils, and to cure yourself of them you must pass nine times under a bramble branch which happens to be rooted in the ground at both ends. The charcoal heals sheep of a disease called the goumon; and the ashes, carefully wrapt up in white linen, preserve the whole household from accidents. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... most perfect description. Her own occupations did not, however, prevent her from observing all her cousin's proceedings; she knew whenever he captured a trout, she was at hand to offer help when his hook, was caught in a bramble, and took full and complete ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... long to tell the story of all his dogs, from the spaniel Dash, commemorated in his earliest poems, and Wisie, whose sagacity is related in "Praeterita," down through the long line of bulldogs, St. Bernards, and collies, to Bramble, the reigning favourite; and all the cats who made his study their home, or were flirted with abroad. To Miss Beever, from Bolton Abbey (January 24th, 1875) he describes the Wharfe in flood, and then continues: ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... and melancholy beauty; while the huge remnant of a massive tower seemed to plead with mute dignity against the violence which had rent and marred it, and against the encroaching vegetation, which was climbing higher and higher, and enveloping its giant stones in a fantastic clothing of shrub and bramble. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... of ultimate success, until it has now become the aspiration, we might almost say, the one, quenchless, all-absorbing passion of the Irish people. The consequence is that the first calm moment after a most exciting and vigorous electoral contest, during which "the fire out of the bramble" has devoured many "cedars of Lebanon," the two great parties in the State find themselves face to face with a difficulty which, even for the most zealous aspirant to place and power, robs the honors and emoluments ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... Alonzo had participated with her in admiring the splendours of rural prospects, raised in her bosom the sigh of deep regret. She entered the garden and traversed the alleys, now overgrown with weeds and tufted knot-grass. The flower beds were choaked with the low running bramble and tangling five-finger; tall, rank rushes, mullens and daisies, had usurped the empire of the kitchen garden. The viny arbour was broken, and principally gone to decay; yet the "lonely wild rose" blushed mournfully amidst the ruins. As she passed from ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... the act of killing a long black snake, which was curled up with head thrust out in an attitude of defence, and there was Nancy, who had evidently started to run and, missing the trail, had rushed into a tall clump of bramble bushes. The brambles had wrapped themselves about her like the tentacles of an octopus, and the jaunty feather was caught in an ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... his boat ashore and tied it to a tree. Pressing forward, he had to push his way through a thicket of huge willows and poplars—overthrown in many places by repeated storms—and there the fruitful bramble forms a thorny undergrowth, and tall valerian, shooting upward from the weather-beaten soil, mixes its aromatic scent with the ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... all: is there one breath still drawn Among those fierce and fearless lads who played So merrily, and sang as sweet in the dawn As thrushes singing in the bramble shade? ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... soldiers, gave their mace to a corporal, put their keys in his pocket, and drove them forth with base terms, borrowed half from the conventicle and half from the ale-house. Then were we, like the trees of the forest in holy writ, given over to the rule of the bramble; then from the basest of the shrubs came forth the fire which devoured the cedars of Lebanon. We bowed down before a man of mean birth, of ungraceful demeanour, of stammering and most vulgar utterance, of scandalous and notorious hypocrisy. Our laws were ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... with a bramble bush, Sing ivy, sing ivy; And reaped it with my little penknife, Sing holly, go ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... IS BENT THE TREE'S INCLINED."—Yet the bramble cannot be bent to bear delicious peaches, nor the sycamore to bear grain. Education is something, but parentage is everything; because it "dyes in the wool" and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... out of the ditch and went on more carefully, keeping still in the shade of the hedge. Then a great spray of bramble caught a bow of ribbon on her hat and lifted the whole thing off her head. It flew up in the air, and only after repeated jumps could she get hold of it and bring it down again. This ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... the mouth with the bright azure sheet of ocean.—Then some long stretch of the road would be banked on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close, that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green sprays and grey stems, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... hast fire at hand, beneath the embers, and let make ready dry fuel of gorse, or thorn, or bramble, or pear boughs dried with the wind's buffeting, and on the wild fire burn these serpents twain, at midnight, even at the hour when they would have slain thy child. But at dawn let one of thy maidens gather the dust of the fire, and bear and cast it ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... long bramble full of thorns, so called because, "when once they gets a holt an ye, ye do{a}nt easy ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... A bramble caught her dress; she stopped and laid her white hand to it, but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and between them they wrenched it away, but not till those soft slim fingers had several times felt the neighbourhood of his brown ones, and till there had flown ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by no ploughshares, of its own accord produced everything; and men, contented with the food created under no compulsion, gathered the fruit of the arbute-tree, and the strawberries of the mountain, and cornels, and blackberries adhering to the prickly bramble-bushes, and acorns which had fallen from the wide-spreading tree of Jove. {Then} it was an eternal spring; and the gentle Zephyrs, with their soothing breezes, cherished the flowers produced without any seed. Soon, too, the Earth unploughed ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... old bird-nests? These are some of the ends they serve. A Deermouse seeking the safety of a bramble thicket and a warm house, will make his own nest in the forsaken home of a Cat-bird. A Gray Squirrel will roof over the open nest of a Crow or Hawk and so make it a castle in the air for himself. But one of the strangest uses is this: The Solitary Sandpiper is a bird that cannot build a tree ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... the Silky Epeira, those experts in the manufacture of rainproof textures, lay their eggs high up, on brushwood and bramble, without shelter of any kind. The thick material of the wallets is enough to protect the eggs from the inclemencies of the winter, especially from damp. The Diadem Epeira, or Cross Spider, needs a cranny ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... loth, marched up to Master Bramble and demanded his blanket. A general engagement ensued, some of the inhabitants of the dormitory siding with Stephen, and some with Bramble, until it seemed as if the coveted blanket would have parted in twain. In the midst of the confusion a sentry at the door suddenly ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Marko's horse even weeps, when he feels that the death of his master approaches. Nay, life is breathed even into inanimate objects by the imagination of Slavic girls and youths. A Servian youth contracts a regular league of friendship and brotherhood with a bramble-bush, in order to induce it to catch his coy love's clothes, when she flees before his kisses. Even the stars and planets sympathize with human beings, and live in constant intercourse with them and ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... nights have I lain with pleasure in the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow; frequently have I resorted to the old walls about the glen, near to Camragen, and there sweetly rested.' The visible band of God protected and directed him. Dragoons were turned aside from the bramble-bush where he lay hidden. Miracles were performed for his behoof. 'I got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the same mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known by the name of Kellsrhins: ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the grassy, fruit-grown land, Was Volsung the King of the Wood-world with his sons on either hand; Therewith down lighted Siggeir the lord of a mighty folk, Yet showed he by King Volsung as the bramble by the oak, Nor reached his helm to the shoulder of the least of Volsung's sons. And so into the hall they wended, the Kings and their mighty ones; And they dight the feast full glorious, and drank through the death of the day, Till the shadowless moon rose ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... otherwise. At times he climbed a mole-heap. At other times he hunted head down—and again one noticed the hound-like manner—in every possible direction, questing, casting here, casting there, working back, throwing forward, describing circles, and poking into and out of every reed-patch, bramble-heap, furze-clump, or other bit of cover that that ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... a man in our town, And he was wondrous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush, And scratch'd out both ...
— The Little Mother Goose • Anonymous
... little dog could only retrace the familiar route of the farm carts. It was a notable feat for a small creature whose tufted legs were not more than six inches in length, whose thatch of long hair almost swept the roadway and caught at every burr and bramble, and who was still so young that his nose could not be said to ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... pensive on a hill-side about mid-way between Mannering and Chetworth. She had a bunch of autumn berries in her hands. Her tweed skirt and country boots showed traces of mud much deeper than anything on the high road; her dress was covered with bits of bramble, dead leaves, and thistledown; and her bright gold hair had been pulled here and there out of its neat coils, as though she had been pushing through hedges ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had heard Shibli Bagarag to a close, the countenance of Shagpat waxed fiery, as it had been flame kindled by travellers at night in a thorny bramble-bush, and he ruffled, and heaved, and was as when dense jungle-growths are stirred violently by the near approach of a wild animal in his fury, shouting in short breaths, 'A barber! a barber! Is't so? can it be? To me? A barber! O thou, thou reptile! filthy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... donkeys—when, almost as soon as a boy was mounted, another came to tickle the donkey's tail with a piece of furze, with the result that the animal's head went down, its heels up, and the rider off on to his back, perhaps into a furze or bramble patch. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... off her hat and tossed it on the grass at her feet; then, going to the spring, she waited while he plucked a leaf from the bramble and bent it into shape. When he filled it and held it out, she placed her lips to the edge of the leaf and looked up at him with smiling eyes while she drank slowly ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... saw him," continued Dame Ermengarde; "he carried the old Norman scorn towards the Saxon stock, whom they wed but for what they can make by them, as the bramble clings to the elm;—nay, never seek to vindicate him," she continued, observing that Eveline was about to speak, "I have known the Norman spirit for many a year ere ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... to City Point are ridges of breastworks, rifle-pits, and forts, lying bare, yellow, and deserted, to defend its passage, excepting at James Island, where the solitary and broken tower of the ancient colony holds guard over some bramble and ruin. Here Smith founded the celebrated settlement, which wooed to its threshold the gentle Pocahontas, and fell to fragments at the behest of the fiery Bacon. The ramparts on the James will remain forever; great as they are, they would hardly hold the bones of the slain in the capture and ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... night when I had seen her clasped in Guido's arms, a red rose on her breast had been crushed in that embrace—a rose whose withered leaves I still possess. In the forest solitude where I now dwell there are no roses—and I am glad! The trees are too high, the tangle of bramble and coarse brushwood too dense—nothing grows here but a few herbs and field flowers—weeds unfit for wearing by fine ladies, yet to my taste infinitely sweeter than all the tenderly tinted cups of fragrance, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... hooked Gory nose, had remoulded that wrecked feature into a pure Greek line at first sight of which Giddy stood staring weakly into the mirror; reeling a little with surprise and horror and unbelief and general misery. "Can this be I?" he thought, feeling like the old man of the bramble bush in the Mother Goose rhyme. A well-made and becoming nose, but not so fine looking as the original feature had been, as ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... man in our town, And he was wondrous wise, He jumped into a bramble bush, And scratched out both his eyes; But when he saw his eyes were out, With all his might and main, He jumped into another bush, ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... would immediately begin to ebb, and so continue till the channels should be left almost dry; but there was no instance of the tide's rising a second time to any considerable influx in the same nation' ('Humphry Clinker', 1771, ii. 192. Letter of Mr. Bramble to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... fruit grows in both a wild and a cultivated state. It derives its name from the rough rasps or spines with which the bushes are covered. Among the ancients it was called "the bramble of Mt. Ida," because it was abundant upon that mountain. It is a hardy fruit, found in most parts of the world, and is of two special varieties, the black and ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... played out. The boots and leggings he wore were caked with mud, and his coat had little torn ends of wool sticking up over it, as if he had been walking blindly ahead, careless of direction, and had forced his way through thickets of bramble rather than turn aside to ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... Napier. In those days post horses were ridden, not driven; and about all we could see of the post boy was what Mistress Tabitha Bramble saw of Humphrey Clinker. 'Where the dickens have ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... life's pleasant ways Their life is always clouded, They see no happy sunny days, For all in gloom is shrouded; They never see the flowers that bloom As on Life's road they ramble, But in the darkest paths of gloom Are seeking for a bramble. ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... took the pistol from the ground where it had lain, and turning his back on Maskew, walked slowly to and fro among the bramble-plumps. ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... That she was going to some specially arranged trysting-place they were certain. Using infinite caution, they followed her. Towards the middle of the wood she paused, looked round, and, seeing nobody (for the girls were hidden behind a tangle of bramble), she stood still and called softly. There was no answer. She called again, waited a few moments, and then began to walk farther on into the wood. She was at a point where two paths divided, and she chose the one ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... dragging a dry bramble that had fastened its thorns to the folds of her satin skirt and she stopped to ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Gemma moved restlessly. "Orazio, per carita! Your hand is so hot and sticky! I shall change places with Carmela," she said. She released her fingers from the young man's grasp with the air of one crushing a forward insect or removing a bramble from the path, and she actually beckoned to her ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... pale—a sulphur colour; upon the Downs it is a deep and beautiful yellow. In a ditch, of this marshy meadow was a great bunch of woodruff, above whose green whorls the white flowers were lifted. Over them the brambles arched, their leaves growing in fives, and each leaf prickly. The bramble-shoots, as they touch the ground, take root and rise again, and thus would soon cross a field were they not ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... ripened and many of the leaves are as red and bright as flowers. The edges of most of the leaves have began to crumple: they are victims of a creeping sickness that eats into them and dirties them, and makes bramble and fern together an inextricable wilderness ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... healthy contempt for that what-d'-ye-call-it that hedges in a king. Having mingled with English-speaking people, she returned to her native land, her brain filled with the importance of feminine liberty of thought and action. Hence, she became the bramble that prodded the grand duke whichever way he turned. His days were filled with horrors, his nights with mares which did not ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... groping painfully and profanely through a close-growing wood, paused to unwind a clinging tendril from his bare knees. As he bent down, his face came into sudden contact with a cold, wet, prickly bramble-bush, which promptly drew a loving but excoriating finger ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... forward, nearer and nearer; for one must come as the wind comes who would approach the Red Admiral. Peter had no paper, so a fly-leaf of his geography would have to do. All athrill, he worked with his bit of pencil; and on the fly-leaf grew the worm-fence with the blackberry bramble climbing along its corners, and the fennel, and the elder bushes near by; and in the foreground the tall thistle, with the butterfly upon it. The Red Admiral is a gourmet; he lingers daintily over his meals; so Peter had time to make a careful ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... and No Man's Land. It went over dead leaves and quite lonely to the thick of the forest; there it died out into a vaguer and a vaguer trail. At last it ceased altogether, and for half an hour or so I pushed carefully, always climbing upwards, through the branches, and picked my way along the bramble-shoots, until at last I came out upon that open space of which I had spoken, and which I have known since my childhood. As I came out of the wood the south-west wind met me, full of the Atlantic, and it seemed to me to blow ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... madrigals for a number of voices, but his innovations remained sterile so far as the development of music is concerned, for the reason that while his music often acquired a wonderful poignancy for his time by the use of chromatics, just as often it led him into the merest bramble bush of sound, real music ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... formidable advantage over him. They were, indeed, contemptible assailants. Of all that they wrote against him, nothing has survived except what he has himself preserved. But the constitution of his mind resembled the constitution of those bodies in which the slightest scratch of a bramble, or the bite of a gnat, never fails to fester. Though his reputation was rather raised than lowered by the abuse of such writers as Freron and Desfontaines, though the vengeance which he took on Freron and Desfontaines was such that scourging, branding, pillorying, would have ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on through the woods to the hollow stump bungalow. He had not quite reached it when, all of a sudden, there was a rustling in the hushes, and out from behind a bramble bush jumped a big black bear. Not a nice good bear, like Neddie or Beckie Stubtail, but a bear ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... water still in the pond at the camp of 15th June, where we therefore again set up our tents. The sky had cleared up, and the air was pleasantly cool, with a fine breeze blowing from S.E. On the river bank, we observed this day the native bramble, or Australian form of RUBUS PARVIFOLIUS, L. A small nondescript animal ran before Mr. Stephenson and myself this morning. It started from a little bush at the foot of a tree, had large ears, a short black tail, ran like a hare, and left a similar track. It was about the size of a small rabbit. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... his back without any wound to grieve him: he had neither sword nor any other armour to help him. So the strong- thieves took his raiment from him, all to his shirt, and his spurs and shoon; and then they took a sword-belt, and bound his hands and his feet, and cast him into a bramble-bush much sharp ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... behind him. The horse lost its foothold among the loose stones, and the rash equestrian fell. The Dean died two days afterwards, but the young lady recovered, saved by her hair having caught in the thorns of a bramble bush. High up, among the rocks on the Staffordshire side in a most secluded spot, is a cleft called Cotton's Cave, which extends something like 40 feet within the rock. Here it was that Charles Cotton, the careless, impecunious poet, the friend of ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... through brush, bramble, and brier, hunt his enemy's trail, far over the mountains and down in the vales; comes he to the water, he snuffs idly ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... More sacred than thy son himself to thee." The altar still burned. Abraham was blessed By the King of mankind, the kinsman of Lot, With the grace of God, since he gave his son, 2925 Isaac, alive. Then the aged man looked Around over his shoulder, and a ram he saw Not far away fastened alone In a bramble bush— Haran's brother saw it. Then Abraham seized it and set it on the altar 2930 In eager haste for his own son. With his sword he smote it; as a sacrifice he adorned The reeking altar with the ram's hot blood, Gave to ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... went far faster than his legs, for it was very hard work here. The low birch scrub and hazel, interspersed with sapling ash, mingled and were interlaced with the shade-loving woodland bramble, whose spiny strands wove the branches together, clung to his clothes and checked him continually. Well might they be called briars, for it was as if a hundred hands were snatching at him. But, keeping his hands well before his face, he struggled on, with ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths. All around was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound seemed shaggy with gorse and thorn, that rose against the sides, and intertwisted their prickly branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the furze, and the bramble choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the brake; and where his track had opened up a way through the fern, I could see the red and corroded bars stretching idly across. There was a viaduct beside me: the flawed and shattered masonry had exchanged ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... in detail to four studies of bramble branches, leaves, and flowers and fruit, in the royal collection at Windsor, most wonderful for patient accuracy and delicate execution: also to drawings of oak leaves, wild guelder-rose, broom, columbine, asphodel, bull-rush, and wood-spurge in the same collection. These careful ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... hillside, by happy boys kindled, That has burnt black a heath-tuft, scorcht a bramble, and dwindled, Blown by wind yet arises in a wave of flogged flame, So the souls of those horses ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... glen, Far from footsteps of men, Once a bright-featured Brooklet was born, It could boast of its birth From a hole in the earth Well protected by bramble and thorn. For a time 'twas content, Nor on wandering bent, Till the raindrops fell plenteous and free, And disturbed the sweet rest Of the rivulet's breast, By whispering tales of ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... game, the largest part of their food is mice and insects. The Blacksnake, the Milk Snake, and one or two others, will bite in self-defence, but they have no poison fangs, and the bite is much like the prick of a bramble. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... which runs through the village is the river; on the other, green vineyards and orchards, beyond which are seen the driftsands of the Nogay Steppe. The village is surrounded by earth-banks and prickly bramble hedges, and is entered by tall gates hung between posts and covered with little reed-thatched roofs. Beside them on a wooden gun-carriage stands an unwieldy cannon captured by the Cossacks at some time or other, and which has not been fired for a hundred years. A ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... went off down fell the magpie, and into a great bramble thicket; and away went the sheriff up into the bramble after it, and he picked it up and held it up high for the lad to see. But just then Little Freddy began to play his fiddle, and the sheriff began to dance, and the thorns to tear him; but still ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... After all his villainies, which he perpetrates without any apparent qualms of conscience, it is incredible that he should honestly repent of his crimes. We are much inclined to doubt when we read that "his vice and ambition was now quite mortified within him," the subsequent testimony of Matthew Bramble, Esq., in Humphry Clinker, to the contrary, notwithstanding. Yet Fathom up to this point is consistently drawn, and drawn for a purpose:—to show that cold-blooded roguery, though successful for a while, will come to grief in the end. To heighten ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... unwholesome, as French peasants often maintain, I ought to have been dead long ago. Strange that this prejudice should be so general in France with regard to the fruit of so harmless a tribe. But these same peasants gather the leaves of the bramble to make a decoction for sore throat. I passed a cottage that had a vine-trellis, the first I had seen on this side of the Auvergne mountains, and it was half surrounded by a forest of beans in full flower on very high sticks. In ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... cream All the year lasting, And drink the crystal stream Pleasant in tasting; Whig and whey whilst thou lust, And bramble-berries, Pie-lid and pastry-crust, Pears, plums, and cherries. Thy raiment shall be thin, Made of a weevil's skin— Yet all 's not worth a ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... who wrote not far from 45 A.D., states that the Greeks distinguished the raspberry bramble by the term "Idoea," and, like so many other Grecian ideas, it has found increasing favor ever since. Mr. A. S. Fuller, one of the best-read authorities on these subjects, writes that "Paladius, a Roman agricultural author who flourished in the fourth century, mentions the raspberry as one of ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... ceaselessly, year after year. Perhaps we badgers too, in our small way, helped a little—who knows? It was all down, down, down, gradually—ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help. Leaf-mould rose and obliterated, streams in their winter freshets brought sand and soil to clog and to cover, and in course of time our home was ready for us again, and we moved ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... the rainbow, being all equally white on the high lights. But my drawing of leaves, facing page 120, Vol. III., is Turneresque; because, though I leave pure white to represent the pale green of leaves and grass in high light, I give definite increase of darkness to four of the bramble leaves, which, in reality, were purple, and leave a dark withered stalk nearly black, though it is in light, where it crosses the leaf in the centre. These distinctions could only be properly explained by a lengthy series of examples; which I hope to give some day or other, but have not ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... an eminent authority, in which we are disposed to place great trust, the oldest contest that has divided society is that which has so long been waged between the House of HAVE and the House of WANT. It began before the bramble was chosen king of the trees, and it has outlasted the cedars of Lebanon. We find it going on when Herodotus wrote his History, and the historians of the nineteenth century will have to continue writing of the actions of the parties to it. There seems never to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... less a personage than the Right Rev. Charles Walmesley, D.D., a Roman Catholic prelate, whose false prophecies under the name of Pastorini were intended to bring about the events they pretended to foretell—the destruction of the Irish Protestants in 1825. Just previous to this year every bush and bramble in Ireland had this remarkable couplet ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... down the woodland path. It was a shady path, and it led through a deep dell arched with hazels on every side, while a little brawling brook ran along hard by, more heard than seen, in the bottom of the dingle. Thick bramble obscured the petty rapids from view and half trailed their lush shoots here and there across the pathway. It was just such a mossy spot as Cyril would have loved to paint; and Guy, himself half an artist by nature, would ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... sheer from the grass and bramble-grown ditches at the roadsides. At the junction of the two roads there is a signpost, its arms pointing towards the right and the left, rear. A pile of round stones is at the road corner, left forward. A full moon, riding high overhead, throws ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... Osmiae. One stacks her cells in the spiral staircase of an empty snail-shell; another, attacking the pith of a dry bit of bramble, obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and divides it into floors by means of partition-walls; a third employs the natural channel of a cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free tenant of the vacant galleries of some Mason-bee. Here ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... produce a puny race of little value. The Arabs use exclusively their smaller breed of camels, because they endure heat, thirst, and fatigue, infinitely better than the others, which are well suited to hilly districts. The camels of the Turkmans feed upon a kind of low bramble called in Turkish Kufan, which grows in abundance upon the hills; in the evening they descend the mountains and come trotting towards the tents, where each camel receives a ball of paste, made of barley meal and water, weighing about one pound. The expense of feeding these useful animals is ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... loaded a cart with wares of all kinds, yoked two bulls to it, named Lusty-life and Roarer, and started for Kashmir to trade. He had not gone far upon his journey when in passing through a great forest called Bramble-wood, Lusty-life slipped down and broke his foreleg. At sight of this disaster ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... cat warming herself in the first keen fires of spring, conscious of anything about her; of the low house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail-fence in front of it, out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth; of the wild bramble of roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon layer—the under stratum all dead and brown—over the decaying arbor which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles were ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Sometimes it is a matted pile of tree vine, and bramble, obscuring every thing, and impervious save with knife and hatchet. At others, it is a Gothic temple. The sward spreads openly for miles on every side, while, from its even surface, the trunks of ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... felt as if she was being dragged through prickly bramble-bushes. Her husband considered a sinner! She flushed with shame, wished to speak, but was silent. She was afraid; she had not the power. But why did God keep silent? Why did God let ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... our town, And he was wondrous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush, And scratched out both his eyes: And when he saw his eyes were out, With all his might and main He jumped into another bush, And scratched ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... this beautiful pigeon is always near water. It is a bird of the depresed interior, never ascending to higher land where there are extensive marshes covered with the polygonum geranium. In river valleys, on the flats of which the same bramble grows, the Ocyphaps lophotes is sure to be found. It was first seen by me on the banks of the Macquarie, in lat. 31 degrees during my expedition to the Darling, but there is no part of the interior over which I have subsequently travelled where it is ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... completeness. Someone, indeed, had come; but this Someone, as Judy told herself, was "simply all over the place." To see him "distinkly is an awful job," according to Uncle Felix; or as Come-Back Stumper realised in the middle of another clump of bramble bushes, "Perspective is necessary to proper vision." "He" lay too close before their eyes to be discovered fully. Tim had long ago described it instinctively as "an enormous hide," but it was more than that; it was ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... her locality; the beach, with its huge boulders and inspiring music; the fields and "uplands airy," with their hedge wealth of vetch, briar, and bramble; the garden, the ancient walled garden, at whose ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... nook, as he called it, was a small hollow in the cliff a few feet from the summit, surrounded by a thick growth of purple bramble, scented clematis, pink thorn, and other shrubs, which formed a complete shelter from all but southerly winds, and likewise concealed it from any one passing along the downs above. It was on a part of the Dorsetshire coast ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... tracks, and Downy followed slowly on hands and knees, rescuing a hair or two from the edges of the rock or from a bramble ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... trouble there repaid, By the wild tenants of that oaken shade, While rabbits, hares, successive, cross your road, And scarcely give the time to fire and load,— While shots resound, and pheasants loudly crow, Who heeds the bramble? Who fatigue can know? Here from the brake, that bird of stealthy flight, The mottled woodcock glads our eager sight, Great is his triumph, whose lucky shot shall kill The dark-eyed stranger of the lengthy bill Unlike the pheasant, who himself betrays, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... feeling for revolvers, and we entered the wood and followed a bridle-path. I could imagine that wood in the pleasant careless days of peace, a proper wood for picnics and nutting expeditions. Ripening blackberries even now loaded the bramble bushes, but the foul noxiousness of gas shells had made them uneatable. The heavy sickly smell of phosgene pervaded the close air; no birds fluttered and piped among the upper branches. The heavy steel helmet caused rills of sweat ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... woodcock and the dove." He breaks decidedly from the doctrine that noxious things in Nature are caused by sin, and shows that they, too, are useful; that, "if nettles sting, it is to secure an excellent medicine for children and cattle"; that, "if the bramble hurts man, it makes all the better hedge"; and that, "if it chances to prick the owner, it tears the thief." "Weasels, kites, and other hurtful animals induce us to watchfulness; thistles and moles, to good husbandry; lice oblige us to cleanliness ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... on with her sketching—a trailing spray of Irish ivy, winding away and losing itself in a confusion of bramble and fern, every leaf sharply defined by the light pencil touches, with loving pre-Raphaelite care—she went on, trying to think that it was not the slightest consequence to her whether this man remembered their brief acquaintance of the railway-carriage. And yet she would have ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... wood sedge clusters about the oak-scrub roots, round which the delicate and rare oak-fern mingles its fronds with great blue campanulas; while the "white admirals" and silver-washed "fritillaries" flit round every bramble bed, and the great "purple emperors" come down to drink in the road puddles, and sit, fearless flashing off their velvet wings a blue as of that empyrean which is ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... blemishes are dear to me, for each darn and tear has its story, each scar is an armorial bearing. This tear was made by a hazel tree under Jaman—that by the buckle of a strap on the Frohnalp—that, again, by a bramble at Charnex; and each time fairy needles have repaired ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... valleys. The hills in the middle-distance look barren, but the foreground is interesting on account of the variety of broken forms caused by projecting rocks and stones. It is starred with green humps, and there are trees in places. The humps are stunted growths of juniper, sloe, bramble, hawthorn, or a trifoliate plant, with grass growing in the shadow. The trees are hawthorns, ilex, olive, fig, almond, chestnut, mountain ash, hornbeam, or elm, and I thought I saw oak, though it is said that it does not grow in Dalmatia. Colour ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... morning in late April I paid a visit to a shallow lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some weeks before hidden in a depression in the land, among luxuriant furze, bramble, and blackthorn bushes. Between the thickets the boggy ground was everywhere covered with great tussocks of last year's dead and faded marsh grass—a wet, rough, lonely place where a lover of solitude need have no fear of being intruded on by a being of his own species, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson |
