"Cowslip" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bee sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... soft voice, after the song had been finished; "I wish I could creep into a cowslip-bell. Miss Araminta, you are not coming down the walk yet; it appears you are in no hurry, so ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... that as a remedy against the dejection caused by myrrh we may apply the 'hymelsloszel' (Himmelschluessel), which is—or appears to be—Primula officinalis, the cowslip, whose bunches of fragrant yellow blossoms are to be seen in moist woods and meadows. This plant is 'warm,' and imbibes its qualities from the light. Hence it can drive away melancholy, which, says St. Hildegarde, spoils men's good manners, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... doggrel rhymes with little or no meaning. Long afterwards that girl will retain an unconscious memory of the scene, when, wheeling her employer's children out on some suburban road, she seeks a green meadow and makes a cowslip ball for the delighted infants. In summer they go down to the hay-field, but dare not meddle with the hay, which the bailiff does not like to see disturbed; they remain under the shadow of the hedge. In autumn they search for the berries, like the birds, nibbling the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... over beyond the orchard for them. Miss Janet says as long as she lives there she wants to see those cows—or other ones—come down the lane by the orchard at milking time—only she wishes there were more of them and a collie to drive them. Think I'll have to get a collie, to satisfy her, though Cowslip and Whitenose are at the bars regular as a ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... she moves, her dainty foot is set, On cowslip, hyacinth and violet, And all day long the woodland minstrels sing Changes ...
— All Round the Year • Edith Nesbit
... more, no more, since thou art dead, Shall we e'er bring coy brides to bed, No more, at yearly festivals, We cowslip balls Or chains of columbines shall make, For this or that occasion's sake. No, no! our maiden pleasures be Wrapt in thy ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... early, though the more gradual expansion of the buds renders it less easy to give dates. And there are nearly twenty species which I have noted, for five or six years together, as found before May-Day, and which may therefore be properly assigned to April. The list includes bloodroot, cowslip, houstonia, saxifrage, dandelion, chickweed, cinquefoil, strawberry, mouse-ear, bellwort, dog's-tooth violet, five species of violet proper, and two of anemone. These are all common flowers, and easily observed; and the catalogue might be increased by rare ones, as the white corydalis, the smaller ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... No cowslip bright, or hyacinth that clings Close to the earth, from whence it springs; Nor tulip, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... English Flower Garden," says of the Mertensias: "There is something about them more beautiful in form of foliage and stem, and in the graceful way in which they rise to panicles of blue, than in almost any other family.... Handsomest of all is the Virginia cowslip." And yet Robinson never saw the alluvial meadows in the Ohio Valley blued with lovely masses of the plant ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her The flowery May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... cakes with sugar castles and flower gardens on the tops of them, and the charming shapes of gold and ruby-coloured jellies. There were wonderful bonbons which even the Mayor's daughter did not have every day; and all sorts of fruits, fresh and candied. They had cowslip wine in green glasses, and elderberry wine in red, and they drank each other's health. The glasses held a thimbleful each; the Mayor's wife thought that was all the wine they ought to have. Under each child's plate there ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... would be highly good to test comparatively the wild parent-form and its varying offspring with this third species: for instance, if a polyanthus would cross with some species of Primula, then to try a wild cowslip with it. I believe hardly any primulas have ever been crossed. If we knew and could get the parent of the carnation (150/6. Dianthus caryophyllus, garden variety.), it would be very good for this end. Any member of the Lythraceae raised from seed ought to be well looked after for dimorphism. I ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... share the beauty with you, and their singing seems a part of the very peace and quiet of it all. The old-fashioned flowers are set out in the old-fashioned way. There are (or once were) the prim squares, each with its cowslip border, and the stiffly regular little hedgerows. One may hunt them all out now; but for so many generations have shrub and vine and plant lived together here, that a good deal of formality has been dispensed with, and across old ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... the tree, leapt over the stile, ran along the fields, and did not stay to gather one cowslip, though each one made him a golden bow as he passed. And when he went into the school-room, though he was only five minutes later than his brother, he told his master the whole truth, and how naughty he would have been, had it not been for a ...
— Child's New Story Book; - Tales and Dialogues for Little Folks • Anonymous
... gay mead The daisy and cowslip appear! The flocks, as they carelessly feed, Rejoice in the spring of the year; The myrtles that shade the gay bowers, The herbage that springs from the sod, Trees, plants, cooling fruits, and sweet flowers, All rise to the praise ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... completely carpeted with verdure; where every air breathed of the balmy pasture, and the honey-suckled hedge. I was continually coming upon some little document of poetry, in the blossomed hawthorn, the daisy, the cowslip, the primrose, or some other simple object that has received a supernatural value from the muse. The first time that I heard the song of the nightingale, I was intoxicated more by the delicious crowd of remembered associations ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... is the blue Hepatica, Anemone, Hepatica L., apink variety of which is sometimes met with, the pink cyclamen-like flower, Erythronium Dens Canis L. with its trefoil-like and spotted leaves; in shady places the Primrose, Primula acaulis All.; everywhere over the summit of the mountain the Cowslip, Primula veris; two species of Gentian, Gentiana verna and G. acaulis L.; Ophrys fusca Link, also a species of Asphodel, Asphodelus albus Willd.; Saxifraga cuneifolia; Sempervivum arachnoideum L.; and lastly, in shady dells, Daphne ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... revelation of which Wordsworth and Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in many a heart quite untaught of books. The face of Mother Earth is the book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight, spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple leaf and goldenrod. Such lessons mean little save to the pure ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... expectation. Then there was a night at Whitby, when the wind made speech impossible, and the seas rushed up and over the great lighthouse like the hungry spirits of the deep. I like better to remember the scent of the first cowslip field under the warm side of the hedge, when I sang to myself for pure joy of their colour and fragrance. Again, there were the bluebells in the deserted quarry like the backwash of a southern sea, and below them the miniature forest of sheltering bracken with its quaint conceits; and, crowned ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... sucks, there suck !; In a cowslip's bell I lie: There I crouch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ah, yes, she remembered him now. She had made a cowslip ball for him once, and he had tossed it right into the middle of the great elms, where the rooks had their nest; and once she had harnessed him with daisy chains and driven him up and down the bowling-green, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Meliboeus did, under their broad beech tree. No life, my honest scholar, no life so happy and so pleasant, as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams, which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, "Doubtless, God ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these bound up in our souls with each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth? do they not rouse faint echoes of Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I ever set foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my first foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that run obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries, for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... results of which are thus told by one of his officers: "On the afternoon of the day of our arrival, Admiral Farragut, with the commanding officers of the different vessels, made a reconnoissance on the steam-tender 'Cowslip,' running inside of Sand Island, where the monitors were anchored, and near enough to get a good view of both forts. On the left, some two miles distant, was Fort Gaines, a small brick-and-earth work, mounting a few heavy guns, but too ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... pressed too heavily upon their fragile roots; and at night she joined the elves in their merry dance upon the greensward. She was not alone in the great forest; near her were many of her sister fairies, all old friends and playmates. There was the Fairy Primrose in a gown of pale yellow, and Cowslip, who wore a robe of the same colour, but of a deeper shade. There was the graceful Bluebell, and the wild Anemone, the delicate Woodsorrel, and the Yellow Kingcup. The Fairy Bluebell wore a robe the colour of the sky on a ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... these moths were very easy to paint. Their markings were elaborate, but they could be followed accurately, and the ground work of colour was warm cowslip yellow. The only difficulty was to make the almost threadlike antennae show, and to blend the faint touches of heliotrope on the upper wings ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... with still more effective designs also in red (Lumsden, Glasgow), "Gulliver's Travels" (greatly abridged, 1815), "Mother Gum" (1805), "Anecdotes of a Little Family" (1795), "Mirth without Mischief," "King Pippin," "The Daisy" (cautionary stories in verse), and the "Cowslip," its companion (with delightfully prim little rhymes that have been reprinted lately). The thirty illustrations in each are by Samuel Williams, an artist who yet awaits his due appreciation. A large number of classics of their kind, "The Adventures of Philip Quarll," "Gulliver's Travels," ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... the honour of asking me for my "Castle of Otranto," for your library at Cowslip Green. May I, as a printer, rather than as an author, beg leave to furnish part of a shelf there? and as I must fetch some of the books from Strawberry Hill, will you wait till I can send them all together? And will you be ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... when you rifle a rose and drink, as it were, its fragrance, the refreshment is the same to the old man as to the boy. Sounds recal the past in the same manner, but they do not bring with them individual scenes like the cowslip field, or the corner of the garden to which we have ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip's bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly After summer, merrily: Merrily, merrily, shall I live now, Under the blossom that hangs ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... balanced shell. She might assist her eyes in trimming the boat with a red or yellow parasol, or a large fan, but it appeared that her gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat, must be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink, lest any turmoil of colors in it should be too much for the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleidoscope's ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... rude and a reckless boy, And she a brave and a beautiful child, I was her page, her playmate, her toy— I have crown'd her hair with the field-flowers wild, Cowslip and crow-foot and colt's-foot bright— I have carried her miles when the woods were wet, I have read her romances of dame and knight; She was my princess, my pride, my pet, There was then this proverb us twain between, For the glory of God ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... drink barley wine, and eat their trout or chub. They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never cease their praises of the angler's life, of rural contentment among the cowslip meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Meadow Buttercup, Tall Crowfoot or Cuckoo Flower; Tall Meadow Rue; Liver-leaf, Hepatica, Liverwort or Squirrel Cup; Wood Anemone or Wind Flower; Virgin's Bower, Virginia Clematis or Old Man's Beard; Marsh Marigold, Meadow-gowan or American Cowslip; Gold-thread or Canker-root; Wild Columbine; Black Cohosh, Black Snakeroot or Tall ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... Youth of Hannah More Her accomplishments Teaches school Intimacy with great men Shines in society Wearied of it Her ridicule of fashionable gatherings called society Retirement to Cowslip Green Her patrons and friends Labors in behalf of the poor Foundation of schools Works on female education Their good influence Their leading ideas Christian education Removal to Barley Wood Views of society Her distinguished visitors "Coelebs in Search of a Wife" "Christian Morals" Her ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... the mad Clytie, Whose head is turned by the sun; The tulip is a courtly quean, Whom therefore I will shun; The cowslip is a country wench, The violet is a nun; But I will woo the dainty rose, The queen ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... flowers, and twined them hastily with deft and well-wont fingers into chaplets and garlands for their heads and bodies. Thus indeed they covered their nakedness, till the lowering faces and weather-beaten skins of those hardly-entreated thralls looked grimly out from amidst the knots of cowslip and oxlip, and the branches of the milk-white blackthorn bloom, and the long trumpets of the daffodils, of the hue that wrappeth round the quill which the webster takes in hand when she would pleasure her soul with the sight of the yellow growing ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... time, before the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, Before King Oberon's bright diadem, Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem, Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns, The ever-smitten Hermes empty left His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft: From high Olympus had he stolen light, On this side of Jove's clouds, to escape the sight 10 Of his great ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie: There I couch, when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly, After summer, merrily: Merrily, merrily, shall I live now Under the blossom, that hangs on ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... our yearly festivals, our cowslip gatherings, our blackberry huntings, our hay makings, and all the delights so pleasant to country children. Our five birthdays were each signalized by simple presents and evening parties, in the garden or the house, as the season permitted. Herbert and Margaret's birthdays came in the sunny ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... once adorn My garden, stored with pease, and mint, and thyme, And rose and lilly for the sabbath morn? The sabbath bells, and their delightful chime; The gambols and wild freaks at shearing time; My hen's rich nest through long grass scarce espied; The cowslip-gathering at May's dewy prime; The swans, that, when I sought the water-side, From far to meet me came, ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... I call: who do ye call? The maids to catch this cowslip ball: But since these cowslips fading be, Troth, leave the flowers, and, maids, take me. Yet, if that neither you will do, Speak but the word and ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... was about to come off, and the queen of the fairies sent six of her pages to Dooros Wood to catch fifty butterflies with golden spots on their purple wings, and fifty white without speck or spot, and fifty golden, yellow as the cowslip, to make a dress for herself, and a hundred white, without speck or spot, to make dresses for ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... the bee sucks, there lurk I; In a cowslip's bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily: Merrily, merrily, shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... the House of Prayer! I to the woodlands bend my way And meet RELIGION there. She needs not haunt the high-arch'd dome to pray Where storied windows dim the doubtful day: With LIBERTY she loves to rove. Wide o'er the heathy hill or cowslip'd dale; Or seek the shelter of the embowering grove, Sweet are these scenes to her, and when the night Pours in the north her silver streams of light, She woos Reflexion in the silent gloom, And ponders ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... order, the primroses (Primulinae), is principally represented in the cooler parts of the world by the true primrose family (Primulaceae), of which several familiar plants may be mentioned. The genus Primula includes the European primrose and cowslip, as well as two or three small American species, and the commonly cultivated Chinese primrose. Other genera are Dodecatheon, of which the beautiful shooting-star (D. Meadia) (Fig. 117, A) is the best ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... flower must be a spring flower—there is no doubt about that. You have your choice, then, of the daffodil, the violet, the primrose, and the crocus. The bluebell comes too late, the cowslip is but an indifferent primrose; camelias and anemones and all the others which occur to you come into a different class. Well, then, will you choose the violet or the crocus? Or will you follow the legendary Disraeli and have ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... There's the cowslip, narcissus, and sweet mignonette, The asters, verbenas, the fuschias; and yet, As much as I love them in Summer array, It's the white and the pink I dream of to-day, And I walk 'neath the branches that just interlace And shower their blossoms right down in my face When the breeze that is laden with ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... whatever I can pay. Oft have I proved the labors of thy love, And the warm efforts of the gentle heart Anxious to please. O! when my friend and I In some thick wood have wander'd heedless on, Hid from the vulgar eye, and sat us down Upon the sloping cowslip-covered bank, Where the pure limpid stream has slid along, In grateful errors through the under-wood, Sweet murmurings, methought the shrill-tongued thrush Mended his song of love; the sooty blackbird Mellow'd his pipe, and soften'd every note; The eglantine smell'd ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... so many bottles," said the doctor with a humorous look in his eyes. "It wouldn't have mattered if it had been aunt's cowslip wine, but it always chose my best port ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... natural connection with the time and place to which they were assigned. In the poetry of our enlightened times, the characteristics of all seasons, soils, and climates may be blended together with much benefit to the author's fame as an original genius. The cowslip of a civic poet is always in blossom, his fern is always in full feather; he gathers the celandine, the primrose, the heath-flower, the jasmine, and the chrysanthemum all on the same day and from the same spot; his nightingale sings ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... close of a most lovely spring day—and such a lovely one, to my fancy, has never beamed from the heavens since—I carelessly plucked a cowslip from a copse side, and gave it to Constance. 'Twas on that beautiful evening when she told me all her heart! as, seated on a mossy bank, she dissected, with downcast eyes, every part of the flower; chives, pointal, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... Robins and sparrows sang ecstatically, and violets, dandelions, and various kinds of berries were in odorous bloom. A vine with a blue flower, new to me, attracted my attention, also a yellow blossom of the cowslip variety. This latter had a form ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... to pistils.—The stamens also may be united to the pistils, as in gynandrous plants. Moquin speaks of such a case in a Scabious; M. Clos in Verbascum australe.[38] I have seen cases of the same kind in the Wallflower, Cowslip (Primula veris), Tulip, Orange, in the garden ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... shallow in the cowslip marshes Floods the freshet of the April snow. Late drifts linger in the hemlock gorges, Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow Where the Mayflower, Where the painted ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... over, ah, sad disgrace, The teacher, seeing an empty place, Marked "truant" against his name; While he, forgetful of book or rule, Sought only a tree to climb: For where is the boy who remembers school When the cowslip blows by the marshy And it's ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... my arms across the walk. The troops obey the sign, And bring me shimmering shadow-robes And cups of cowslip-wine. ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... half leaning upon an old crooked apple tree, had his hands full of cowslips—though what he was doing with them Faith could not tell. Only from a fluttering end of blue ribband that appeared, she could guess their destination. The two friends were talking busily and merrily, with little cowslip interludes, and the yellow blossoms sprinkled the grass all about the tree, some having dropped down, others been tossed off as not worthy a place in the ball. For that was the work in Mr. Linden's hands—something ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... short young velvety grass, a starry daisy, or a sly little cowslip, peeps up here and there, but nothing else disturbs the lawn-like smoothness, save a tiny mound of green moss near the centre of the hollow, ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... the ice and snow of February, the spring season opens in the Southern woods and pastures. The fragrant yellow jessamine clusters in golden bugles over shrubs and trees, and the sward is enameled with the white, yellow and blue violet. The crocus and cowslip, low anemone and colts-foot begin to show, and the land brightens with waxy flowers of the huckleberry, set in delicate gamboge edging. Yards, greeneries, conservatories breathe a June like fragrance, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... pink and white, scenting the air over your head, and primroses and violets dappling the turf beneath your feet; it means lambs frisking around their tranquil mothers in the meadows, and children returning at evening with hands and pinafores full of the scented cowslip and the voluptuous woodbine; it means the pouring of wine-blood into empty veins, and the awakening of torpid faculties, and the deeper, stronger pulsations of the heart, and the fresh buoyancy of drooping and submerged spirits, and white clouds full of bird-music, as the larks ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do.... I will go to the meadows, the beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste! ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early and is very pretty. Cowslip and oxlip are familiar names of varieties of the same plant, and they bear so close a resemblance that it is hard to tell them apart. Hence Tennyson, in ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honoring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynoegirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays [the weekly half-holiday in French schools], to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... maculosa, floribus tubulosis longis pulcherrimis caeruleis, in panicula pendula congestis, foliis teneribus glabris latis obtusis, ad margines aequalibus, pediculis dilute purpureis infidentibus, radice crassa instar symphyti. Mountain Cowslip. Clayt. Gron. Fl. ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. V - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... bits of May-bud, and see if we cannot gather a pretty handful of wild flowers for May to take home to mamma. Here are a few cowslips with their drooping golden bells and delicious scent; I am afraid we shall not find enough to make a cowslip ball. Here is cuckoo-flower, which, as old Gerarde says, "doth flower in April and Maie, when the cuckoo doth begin her pleasant notes without stammering." Old Gerarde, by the way, ought to have said "his pleasant notes," for it is the male bird alone that ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... That lean from the fragrant hedge, Coquetting all day with the sunbeams, And stealing their golden edge; Not for the vines on the upland, Where the bright red berries rest, Nor the pinks, nor the pale, sweet cowslip, It seemeth to me ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... dreaming, sexless spirits of air and wood, to go back to his tiresome dukedom, and his petty court, and all the dull chatter and business of life. I am sure that Shakespeare thought of his art as an Ariel—that dainty, delicate spirit, out of the reach of love and desire, that slept in cowslip-bells and chased the flying summer on the bat's back, and that yet had such power to delude and bemuse the human spirit. After all, Ariel could not come near the more divine inheritance of the human heart, sorrow and crying, love and hate. ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Desley and her four children led in their rural home. The sound of their cheerful voices, the patter of their little feet, the laugh, the shout, and the song, had been heard from morning till night. I will not stop to tell of all the daisy-chains and cowslip-balls made by the children under the big elm-tree that grew on their mother's lawn; or how they gathered ripe blackberries in autumn; or in the glowing days of summer played about the hay-cocks, and buried one another in the hay. Their lives ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... strawberry," which from an imminent temperate zone overlook the torrid plains. So did this active modern life have even then a foothold and lurking-place in the midst of the stateliness and contemplativeness of those Eastern plains. In another era the "lily of the valley, cowslip, dandelion," were to work their way down into the plain, and bloom in a level zone of their own reaching round the earth. Already has the era of the temperate zone arrived, the era of the pine and the oak, for the palm and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... last week contained such interesting information in regard to the appearance of the first cowslip in Kensington Common that I trust that I may, without fatiguing your readers to the point of saturation, narrate a somewhat similar and I think, sir, an equally interesting experience of my own. While passing through Lambeth Gardens yesterday towards the hour of dusk I observed a crow with one ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... you will be able to see Valentine in the morning. You had best take a little diacodion and cowslip-water, and lie upon your back: maybe ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... snare for artless young men entering the medical profession. Each of the little yellow things in the centre of the daisy is a flower in itself,—if you look at one with a lens you will find it not unlike a cowslip flower,—and the white rays outside are a great deal more than the petals they ought to be if the Innocence theory is to hold good. There is no such thing as an innocent flower; they are all so many deliberate advertisements to catch the eye of the undecided bee, but any flower almost ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours; I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every Cowslip's ear. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... unflinching manner that was a little tantalizing, I suspect, to poor Traddles and the rest. Peggotty's promised letter—what a comfortable letter it was!—arrived before 'the half' was many weeks old; and with it a cake in a perfect nest of oranges, and two bottles of cowslip wine. This treasure, as in duty bound, I laid at the feet of Steerforth, and begged him ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... secretly. His work was to be neglected. He was to be threatened with a nervous breakdown. He was to confide his sorrow to the paternal bosom of his Bishop. When Aunt Aggie was in her normal state it was the Bishop in whom the Archdeacon was to confide. But sometimes in the evenings after a glass of cowslip wine, her imagination took a bolder flight. The Archbishop himself was to be the confidant of the distracted cleric. This presented no real difficulty after the first moment, for the Archbishop was in the flower of his age—the Archdeacon's age—and might easily have been at school ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... dress. Carps, to stew. Cellars, which are best. Cowslip-Wine. Cheese, spoiled. Ditto what concerns its Goodness. Ditto why bad in Suffolk. Ditto Good from one sort of Cattle. Ditto preserv'd in Oil. Ditto Marygold. Ditto Sage. Ditto Sage in figures. Ditto ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... dwindling hourly; we reach the top of the Col du Lautaret, which Murray must describe; I can only say that it is first-class scenery. The flowers are splendid, acres and acres of wild narcissus, the Alpine cowslip, gentians, large purple and yellow anemones, soldanellas, and the whole kith and kin of the high Alpine pasture flowers; great banks of snow lie on each side of the road, and probably will continue to do so till the middle of July, while all around ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... far than those which he was now so fond of, etc., etc.; but he did not wish to die, and was glad when he got better, for there were no kittens in heaven, and he did not think there were cowslips to make cowslip tea with. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... paigle, or larger kind of cowslip. Bents: tall, coarse, rushy stems of grass. Blea: high, exposed. Bleb: a bubble, a small drop. Clock-a-clay: the ladybird. Daffies: daffodils. Dithering: trembling, shivering. Hing: preterite of hang. Ladysmock: the cardamine pratensis. Pink: ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... a blooming Boy in robe of green; On his fair brow a flowery crown was seen, Where the pale Primrose with the Cowslip vied, And fragrant Violets shone in purple pride. Upon a Bull he rode, whose horns were gay With many a golden flower and budding spray. Around him every vernal Songster fled, While the Lark soar'd and whistled o'er his head. And now he smil'd ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... going away. But he turned again at the door and said, "But you'd better come, you know. There's the dessert,—nuts, you know, and cowslip wine." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Against the rush of the air in the prone swing, Made blossom-ball or daisy-chain, arranged Her garden, sow'd her name and kept it green In living letters, told her fairy-tales, Show'd here the fairy footings on the grass, The little dells of cowslip, fairy palms, The petty marestail forest, fairy pines, Or from the tiny pitted target blew What look'd a flight of fairy arrows aim'd All at one mark, all hitting: make-believes For Edith and himself: or else he forged, But that was later, boyish histories Of battle, bold adventure, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... song; or perhaps it was the clasp of a baby's hand on his finger. He noticed the spring beauty round him as he had not noticed such things for many a day, stooping to pick a big, tasselled, gold-freckled cowslip, and stopping to let a newly-fledged, awkward, young bird hop clumsily out of the way, with a sort of tenderness and consideration for ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... her little form swaying lightly to and fro, with the undulations of the lily-stem against which she more perceptibly rested. It is well for Root and Collins and Plumbe that the royal daguerreotyper was laid up in a cowslip, with a broken skylight which he had received in a rough-and-tumble with a gnat, about the ownership of a particular ray of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... in every hour's recall, And the last cowslip in the fields we see On the same day with the first corn-poppy. Alas for hourly change! Alas for all The loves that from his hand proud Youth lets fall, Even as the beads of ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... primula, blue gentian, and yellow dog pansies. And on a perfect carpet of these sat three dark figures! Never in his life was Roy so overjoyed. He forgot his fatigue, and ran on until he could plainly see Princess Bakshee Bani Begum making cowslip balls out of the pink primulas, the Heir-to-Empire contentedly munching a cold hearth cake, and giving bits of it to Tumbu, who, with his head cocked on one side, had evidently heard Roy's distant step. ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... I am never nervous about danger. I was not startled from self-possession when Mr. Wynne's great red bull rose with a bellow before my face, as I was crossing the cowslip lea alone, stooped his begrimed, sullen head, and made a run at me; but I was afraid of seeing Mrs. Gill brought to shame and confusion of face. You have twice—ten times—my strength of mind on certain subjects, Caroline. You, whom no persuasion can induce ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... ocean's bosom may espy, Though near two furlongs thence it lie. The pleasant way, as up those hills you climb, Is strewed o'er with marjoram and thyme, Which grows unset. The hedgerows do not want The cowslip, violet, primrose, nor a plant That freshly scents: as birch, both green and tall; Low sallows, on whose blooming bees do fall; Fair woodbines, which about the hedges twine; Smooth privet, and the sharp-sweet eglantine, ...
— 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)
... it is nicknamed "Lusmore," while the Cuscuta epithymum is known in Jersey as "fairies' hair." Their raiment was made of the fairy flax, and the wood-anemone, with its fragile blossoms, was supposed to afford them shelter in wet weather. Shakespeare has represented Ariel reclining in "a cowslip's bell," and further speaks of the small crimson drops in its blossom as "gold coats spots"—"these be rubies, fairy favours." And at the present day the cowslip is still known in Lincolnshire as the "fairy cup." Its popular German name is "key-flower;" and no flower has had in that country so ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... roughness, and what has astonished me, the pollen of the so-called female plant, though very abundant, is more transparent, and each granule is exactly only 2/3 of the size of the pollen of the so-called male plant. Has this been observed? I cannot help suspecting [that] the cowslip is in fact dioecious, but it may turn out all a blunder, but anyhow I will mark with sticks the so-called male and female plants and watch their seeding. It would be a fine case of gradation between an hermaphrodite and unisexual condition. Likewise a sort of case of balancement ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... about Venus and Hebe, and a great many more nonsensical comparisons. "If I do," returned she, "it will do me no harm. A woman is not more beloved for being handsome. There is our dear aunt Mellicent; her face, you know, is the colour of a cowslip, and all seamed and puckered, yet we could not love her better than we do, if she were ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... and by her side a girl and boy, the one sickly and poorly clad, the other with bright inquiring eyes, striving to compensate for the want of other faculties. She was teaching them to form that delight of childhood, a cowslip ball, the other children supplying her with handfuls of the gold-coated flowers, and returning a pull of the forelock or a bobbed curtsey to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the May Day of 1259, one of the brightest days of the calendar. The season was well forward, the elms and bushes had arrayed themselves in their brightest robe of green; the hedges were white and fragrant with may; the anemone, the primrose, the cowslip, and blue bell carpeted the sward of the Andredsweald; the oaks and poplars were already putting on their summer garb. The butterflies settled upon flower after flower; the bees were rejoicing in their labour; their work glowed, and the sweet ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... though thine eyes Shine with hoary mysteries, Canst thou tell what in the heart Of a cowslip blossom lies? ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... Virgil's Tityrus and his Meliboeus did under their broad beech-tree. No life, my honest scholar, no life so happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams, which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, " Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... Where's Dorothy?" From morn to even fall, There's not a lad on Cowslip Farm Who joins not in the call. It's Dolly here and Dolly there, Where can the maiden be? No wench in all the ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... because our vulgar luxury depreciates objects not fitted to adorn our dwellings. These yellow flowers will not bear being token out of their places and brought home to the centre-table. But, when enamelling the ground, the cowslip, the king-cup,—nay, the marigold and dandelion even,—are ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... moved; but smaller couches and abundant bedding were quickly collected, and the room began to glow with the masses of flowers that Freda brought in from the garden and woodland beyond. The place was fragrant with the breath of cowslip and primrose, whilst, as the light faded from the west, the dancing flames of the log fire on the hearth gave a cheery air ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... biography and appreciation of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at last come. I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read, determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood. ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... as that which had in its mythology the latter of the figures was a maritime nation, the figure was spread abroad and perpetuated. Next, in the North we see the imagination that placed a colony of trolls under every hill, a tiny creature under every "cowslip's bell," and a separate spirit in every little stream, peopling also the outer ocean with its creatures; and here the perfect idea of the Mermaid, with its various beneficent or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... down on the grass under the shadow of the oak, by a maple bush, and taking a cowslip, began to count the spots inside it. It was always five in all the cowslips—five brown little spots—that he was sure of, because he knew he had five fingers on each hand. He lay down at full length on his back, and looked up at the sky through ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... great many kinds, and there are pictures of most of them. She had the Common Field Cowslip, the Primrose Cowslip, the Single Green Cowslip, Curled Cowslips, or Galligaskins, Double Cowslips, or Hose-in-Hose, and the Franticke or Foolish ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... inflexions of foreign tongues. The hue of his plentiful and curly hair, indistinguishable to Mary and Cynthia, now stood revealed as neither black, nor red, nor auburn, nor brown, nor golden, but just, and rather surprisingly, a plain yellow, the color of a cowslip or thereabouts. Altogether rather a rum-looking fellow! This had been Alec Naylor's first remark when the Rector of Sprotsfield pointed him out, as a possible fourth, at the golf club, and the rough justice of the description could ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... forward, and met Sister Katrina, a robust dame of forty years, blond as Gerda; with the "light of the glowworm's tails" in her golden-lashed violet eyes, and the "ruby spots of the cowslip's leaves" on ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... visited all the beautiful tents, and the great ballroom where there was to be a ball that night, and the princes whispered to the maidens that they would dance with no one else. When they had tasted the cowslip wine from the fountains and eaten lots of wonderful sweets the daffodils declared they were quite tired; so the princes put them into hammocks with little monkeys to swing them, and the happy hours wore on ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... with significance is that one word, "patiently!" All too eager before, that was the lamb's fault, "and grievously hath [he] answered it." He has turned over a new leaf, and wandering aimlessly about, now nibbling a cowslip, now rolling in the young grass to still the remorse gnawing at his heart, we can imagine him resolving to be a better lamb in the future,—to ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... throng, Hand-coupled urchins in restrained talk, And anxious pedagogue that chastens wrong, And posied churchwarden with solemn stalk, And gold-bedizen'd beadle flames along, And gentle peasant clad in buff and green, Like a meek cowslip in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne |
