"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about 12.30 but there was still another wounded to be brought in. She had chosen the bottom of a heathery slope and took some finding. It was the C.O. She feigned delirium and threw her arms about in a wild manner. The poor bearers were feeling too exhausted to appreciate this piece of acting, and heather is extremely slippery stuff. When we had struggled back with her the soi-disant doctor asked for the diagnosis. "Drunk and disorderly," replied one of them, stepping smartly forward and saluting! This somewhat broke up the proceedings, and ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... gone! Everything was going, but I kept on running. Once more I stumbled. There was something about my feet that impeded me, tall grass or heather, but I could not see what it was, only this smoke that eddied about my knees. There was a noise and spinning in my brain, a vain resistance to a dark green curtain that was falling, falling, falling, fold upon fold. Everything grew ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... this brushing is a most rudimentary and wasteful operation. It consists of passing a brush of heather or broom twigs over the floating cocoons in such manner that the ends of the brush come in contact with the softened cocoons, catch the floss, and drag it off. In practice it happens that the brush catches the sound filaments on the surface ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... 1867 the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near Haslemere, at that time not a centre of literary Londoners. "Sandy soil and heather-scented air" allured them, and the result was the purchase of land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the architect. In autumn Tennyson visited Lyme Regis, and, like all other travellers thither, made ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... search of rest and shelter. Then but a comparatively few downward steps and you find that the tempestuous wind has ceased to wrangle with you; already you are beneath the shadow of the great rock. Descending further, the bleak aspect of Nature is transformed. The heather gives place to dwarf shrubs; the bare, weather-beaten rocks are clothed with blackberry bushes, or hidden amid luxurious bracken. Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... the Englishman goes to Scotland to shoot the grouse, the gillie, the heather cock, the niblick, the haggis and other Scotch game. Thus appareled he ranges the preserves of his own fat, fair shires in ardent pursuit of the English rabbit, which pretty nearly corresponds to the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the turf, pared up on the distant moors, and left out to dry, to be carried home and stacked; the brown fern was to be stored up for winter bedding for the cattle; for straw was scarce and dear in those parts; even for thatching, heather (or rather ling) was used. Then there was meat to salt while it could be had; for, in default of turnips and mangold-wurzel, there was a great slaughtering of barren cows as soon as the summer herbage failed; and ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... The darkness merged into a faint daybreak. Then Abbot Hans saw that the snow had vanished from the ground, as if some one had removed a carpet, and the earth began to take on a green covering. Then the ferns shot up their fronds, rolled like a bishop's staff. The heather that grew on the stony hills and the bog-myrtle rooted in the ground moss dressed themselves quickly in new bloom. The moss-tufts thickened and raised themselves, and the spring blossoms shot upward their swelling buds, which already ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... a dolefu' dream; I fear there will be sorrow! I dream'd I pu'd the heather green, Wi' my true love, ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... Ingram, or listened to old Mackenzie, who turned from time to time from the driving of the horses to inform the stranger of what he saw around him. It was the most brilliant of mornings. The sun burned on the white road, on the green moorland, on the gray-lichened rocks with their crimson patches of heather. As they drove by the curious convolutions of this rugged coast, the sea that lay beyond these recurring bays and points was of a windy green, with here and there a streak of white, and the fresh breeze blowing across to them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... harmony meetings in which the collegians at the Marshalsea[18] used to indulge. Occasionally a vocal strain more sonorous than the generality informed the listener that some boastful bass was in blue water or the hunting field, or with the reindeer, or on the mountain, or among the heather, but the Marshal of the Marshalsea knew better, and had got him ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... How could he enjoy himself with the thought of Sylvia in her room, made ill by his brutality! The vision of her throat working, swallowing her grief, haunted him like a little white, soft spectre all through the long drive out on to the moor, and the picnic in the heather, and the long drive home—haunted him so that when Anna touched or looked at him he had no spirit to answer, no spirit even to try and be with her alone, but almost a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... quarters, and comprehends within it the whole of the picture. High up in the snow the very pebbles seem to lie so distinctly that, but for the space between, a boy might pick them up; lower down, from among the brown heather thin blue streaks stream aloft from some cottage chimney, winding along the brae-side till melted into air. We half expect to see some human figure traverse those white fields and mark the footprints he leaves behind, some shepherd ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... him from the bracken, Leave him lying where he fell— Better bier ye cannot fashion: None beseems him half so well As the bare and broken heather, And the hard and trampled sod, Whence his angry soul ascended To the judgment-seat of God! Winding-sheet we cannot give him— Seek no mantle for the dead, Save the cold and spotless covering Showered from heaven upon his head. Leave his broadsword, as we found it, Bent ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... game: he spurred his horse in order to free himself, and tried to strike the ploughman's hands with his stick and make him relax his hold; but Germain eluded the blow, and, taking him by the leg, unhorsed him and brought him to the heather, where he knocked him down, although the farmer was soon upon his feet ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... could not successfully resist the influence of Nature's sadness. She sat comparatively alone; a covering had, indeed, been thrown over some thick poles, which interwove with brushwood, and with a seat and couch of heather, which was still in flower, formed a rude tent, and was destined for her repose; but until night's dark mantle was fully unfurled, she had preferred the natural seat of a jutting crag, sheltered from the wind by an ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... free lines covers a great deal of ground. Nothing is smoothed off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches are full of water, frogs are tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the woodland flowers bloom, and the heather is as beautiful as that I have seen on your mantle-shelf in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by Florine. This mystery is intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The forest odors, beloved of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight in the tiny mosses, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... or air, little Marian stood on the threshold. She had been in the fields with Janet, who had woven for her breeze-blown hair a wreath of the wild gerardia blossoms, whose purple beauty had reminded the good Scotchwoman of her own native heather. In her arms the child bore, like a little gleaner, a great sheaf of graceful golden-rod, as large as her grasp could bear. In all the artist's visions he had seen nothing so aerial, so lovely; in all his passionate portraitures ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... minutes longer the men lay resting in the heather, their eyes drinking the colour and varied lights and lines of the vast horizon. The downs rose like cliffs, and the dead level of the weald was freckled with brick towns; every hedgerow was visible as the markings on a chess-board; ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... the water when there is a catch of fish aboard. We ran in high upon a sea. Willing hands hauled the Cock Robin up the beach: we had fish to give away for help. The mackerel made elevenpence a dozen to Jemima Caley, the old squat fishwoman who wears a decayed sailor hat with a sprig of heather in it. "Yu don' mean to say yu've a-catched all they lovely fish!" she said with a rheumy twinkle, in the hope of getting them ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... herself. "Some day we'll go—you and I together, Katie. We'll cross the sea, and wander through the countries that we read about in books, and among the great cities that have stood for hundreds and hundreds of years. Wouldn't you like to see Scotland, Katie, and the heather hills that grannie tells us about; and the great castles that they used to hold against all comers in the old times, and the parks, and the deer, and the gardens full of wonderful flowers, and the lakes and the mountains—only ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... knew she would ask no questions and she dully felt that the blows which were falling on everybody every day must have stunned her also. What she herself was thinking as she seemed to gaze at the sodden heather was a thing of piteous and helpless pain. She was achingly wondering what Dowie was thinking—what she knew and what she thought of the girl she had taken such care of and who was being sent away to be hidden in a ruined castle whose existence ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Bill, I am afraid, will do no good. People want Access to Mountains when they cannot get it; when once they can, they will stay where the beer is, and not go padding the wet and weary hoof through peat-hogs, over rocks, and along stupid and fatiguing acclivities, rugged with heather. Oh, preserve me from Deer-stalking; it is a sport of which I cherish only the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... discovered that primrose banks are lovely, but there are other things grow wild besides primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... asperities, it is decided by the two Captains to dispense with the aid of the telephone proper, and communicate by bell alone. Captain Wagstaffe's tall figure strides back across the heather; the red flag on the butts flutters down; and ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... there," he said, smiling; "only I had first to settle Lady Temple, little guessing who was her treasure of a governess! Last night I had nearly opened, on another false scent; I fell in with a description that I could have sworn was yours, of the heather behind the parsonage. I made a note of the publisher in ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the list extends from the imposing and sometimes gigantic oaks, elms, beeches, and willows to shrubs and heather growth of ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... in the Village of the Warrior, a lonely little place, left all by itself on a great rough moorland—if you can call a patch of bare land "moor" which is destitute of heather, and grows palms and scrub in clumps instead. It took us rather a long time to get to it, over very broken ground on a very hot day; but when we did get there we found such a good opening that we ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... men in the open country, but encountered them in scattered and scanty companies, at the entrance of all the defiles, on the heights commanding pathways, and wherever men could hide themselves and await the moment for appearing unexpectedly. The Franks heard them, from amid the heather and the brushwood, uttering shrill cries, to give warning one to another or to alarm the enemy. The Franks advanced cautiously, and at last arrived at the entrance of the thick wood which surrounded Morvan's abode. He had not yet set out with the pick of the warriors he had about him; but, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... sunny bedroom, in the south-east corner of the house; one of its windows looking to the south front of the college and the chapel with its slender spire; the other window looking over the garden and a waste of heather beyond, to the fir-crowned hill of Ambarrow. My father had been Headmaster for twelve years and was nearing the end of his time there; and I was myself nine years old, and shortly to go to a private school, where my elder brother Martin already was. My two sisters, Nelly and ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Shepherds came there from far and near to try their skill against each other,—young men in their prime mostly, with brown, ruddy faces, and eyes of that bright blue lustre which is only gained by a free, open-air life. The hillside was just turning purple with heather bloom, and along the winding, stony road the yellow asphodels were dancing in the wind. Everywhere there was the scent of bog-myrtle and wild-rose and sweetbrier, and the tinkling sound of becks babbling ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... having a dirty copybook Esau Klaster, for drawing caricatures of the master Paul Bhool, for letting a bird loose in school Jabez Breeding, for not knowing the place at reading Levi Stout, for stopping too long when let out Guy M'Gill, sharpening a knife on the window-sill Duncan Heather, pinning two boys' coat-tails together Ezekiel Black, pinning paper on another boy's back Patrick O'Toole, for bursting a paper-bag in school Eli Teet, for putting cobbler's ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... also in divers places. Also they said: "One of the great brazen pillars which stand at the bridge head is bent awry, and the clean bronze denied with blood, and it was at the foot of that pillar we found the dog." So saying, they laid the body upon the heather in front of Culain's high seat, that it might be full in his eye, and when they did so and again sat down, there was a great silence in ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... who overtook them, however, recognised the capabilities of the man when he noticed the way he lifted his feet and how he set them down. This, he decided, was one accustomed to walking among the heather, but he was wrong; for it was the trick the bushman learns when he plods through leagues of undergrowth and fallen branches, or the tall grass of the swamps; and it is a memorable experience to make a day's journey with such a man. For the first hour ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... was a king, And oft the Autumn, in his car of gold, Had pass'd them, merry at the vintaging: And scarce they felt the breath of the white wing Of Winter, in the cave where they would lie On beds of heather by the fire, till Spring Should crown them with her buds ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... land. It has something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery of Edinburgh, which is ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest gray hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year I ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the gloaming comes, Low in the heather blooms, Sweet will thy welcome and bed of love be! Emblem of happiness, Blest is thy dwelling-place. Oh, to abide in the desert ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... not Irish, but for the moment I am of the turf, turfy. Francesca is really as much in love with Ireland as I, only, since she has in her heart a certain tender string pulling her all the while to the land of the heather, she naturally avoids comparisons. Salemina, too, endeavours to appear neutral, lest she should betray an inexplicable interest in Dr. La Touche's country. Benella and I alone are really free to speak the brogue, and carry ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... above the level of the land on either side. On the left, the self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The ground below them is bare but for tussocks of coarse grass and ruddy beds of fallen fir needles. On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather—that shows a purple-brown against the gray of the reindeer moss out of which it springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay flew off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the Scotch heather and he might think it had been brought by the loving hand of some Scotchman were it not for the fact that the earliest settlers found it here. They came, these earliest settlers, in 1659, Thomas Macy and his wife, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... brown hair braided plainly, gave her a little air of dignity, of reserve which sat piquantly upon her youth. In one ungloved hand, that was brown from the sun, but very beautiful, she held an old parasol, the other played occasionally with a bit of purple heather. Presently she began to speak, using English just coloured by a foreign accent, that ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... he was, out on the great grouse moors, which the country folk called Harthover Fell—[Footnote: FELL is the name given, in parts of England, to moors, or stretches of high, open country of any sort.] heather and bog and rock, stretching away and up, up to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... almost as thick as the heather in places on the steep, rocky hills that overlook the Exe. Feeding on these berries when half ripe is said to make the heath poults thin (they are acid), so that a good crop of whortleberries is not advantageous to the black game. Deep in the hollow the Exe winds and bends, finding a crooked ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... joy, and dashed with tears, O'er us have glided almost sixty years Since we on Bothwell's bonny braes were seen, By those whose eyes long closed in death have been: Two tiny imps, who scarcely stooped to gather The slender harebell, or the purple heather; No taller than the foxglove's spiky stem, That dew of morning studs with silvery gem. Then every butterfly that crossed our view With joyful shout was greeted as it flew, And moth and lady-bird and beetle bright ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... directions the moor extended for a distance of nearly a mile. On this two or three score of cattle, and a dozen shaggy little horses, were engaged in an effort to keep life together, upon the rough herbage that grew among the heather and ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... became known to whoever might be in or about the house. To obviate this publication of what it might be desirable to keep secret, Miss Bronte used to take her out for a walk on the solitary moors; where, when both were seated on a tuft of heather, in some high lonely place, she could acquaint the old woman, at leisure, with all ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... town. I made her a few evening visits, and we talked love affairs over muffins and a cup of excellent congou. Then what a variety of jams and jellies! I never returned without a disordered stomach, and wishing Highland heather-honey at the devil. Yet, after all, to prove a hoax!—for even when I was on the point of popping the question, and had fastened my silk Jem Belcher with a knowing leetle knot to set out for that purpose, I learned from Francie, the stable-boy, that she had the evening before eloped with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... this fruitful countryside. The traditions of their native land were tenderly cherished by them all, and many were the stories they related of the old days in Scotland and of the day whereon they looked their last upon the unforgotten heather. ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... hunting, foraging, building in close proximity. Besides, should we wish to vary the scene of observation, the mountain [Ventoux] is but a few hundred steps away, with its tangle of arbutus, rock roses and arborescent heather; with its sandy spaces dear to the Bembeces; with its marly slopes exploited by different wasps and bees. And that is why, foreseeing these riches, I have abandoned the town for the village and come to Serignan to weed my turnips and water ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... woodlands and plunge in the waters, ramble and scramble through tangle-hedged lanes, Fish in the pools with youth's primitive tackle, breathe quickening vigour through bosoms and brains. Picture the boys "camping out" on the commons, and gipsying gaily in tents midst the heather, Armed with their canvas and blankets and boilers and pannikins well against hunger and weather. Picture them—CALLOT'S free brush might have managed it—gathered in pow-wow around the camp-fire, Sun-tanned and wind-browned, in picturesque raiment, with wisp of the wild hop or trail ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... to a halt. She started violently, and for an instant her heart leapt with a wild glad hope. It was not Erskine Fanshawe who confronted her, however, but a girl clad in a tweed costume with a cloth cap to match, on the side of which a sprig of heather was fastened by a gold brooch fashioned in the shape of a thistle. In bewildered surprise Claire recognised the brown eyes and round freckled face of Janet Willoughby, whom she had believed to be hundreds of miles away, in ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to run to the stream, all suddenly she was startled by the sound of a heavy thud upon the heather at her feet. She looked round and saw that a large capercailzie had fallen there. The bird was dead, and there was ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... father and mother did not care anything about him. But because they could not sell him nor give him away they tried to lose him. They wrapped him in a piece of cloth and took him up on the mountain-side, and there they left him lying all alone on a bush of heather. ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... been a handsome girl once, and her fine, high-bred face was still almost beautiful. It was covered with innumerable tiny wrinkles, but her dark eyes were bright, and her cheeks bore a fixed pink flush, the birth-mark of the land of heather. Her hair, glossy black, with not a thread of gray, was parted in the middle and lay on either side in perfectly even waves. Her figure was slim and stiffly straight, her hands long and slender. She looked every inch a woman of refinement, and also ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... Kelts of Galloway, guided by a tall spear, wreathed with heather blossom, and shouting, "Albin! Albin!" with harsh, dissonant cries like the roar of a tempest, fell headlong on the English ranks, and at first their fury carried them on so that they burst through them as if they had been a spider's web. But the Norman chivalry round the standard stood ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... beautiful bird she sings, For body and mind are hale and healthy. Her eyes they thrill with right goodwill— Her heart is light as a floating feather— As pure and bright as the mountain rill That leaps and laughs in the Highland heather! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the wild-bee in the thyme, Here glows the royal heather; And youth comes back upon the breeze, And ...
— Landscape and Song • Various
... Folks' Day in the Vale of Newlands. The summer was at its height; the sun shone brightly; the lake to the north lay flat as a floor of glass, and reflected a continent of blue cloud; the fells were clear to their summits, and purple with waves of heather. It was noontide, and the shadows were short. In the slumberous atmosphere the bees droned, and the hot air quivered some feet above the long, lush grass. The fragrance of new-mown hay floated languidly through a ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... Ronan, in North Rona; and the Beehive Cells, in Eilan na Naoimh (Nun's Island.) These old Strathearn churches would seldom be larger than 12 feet wide by 20 long, built of undressed land stones (like a field dyke), and thatched with heather, bracken, or sedge. The great storehouse of reliable material with minimum of controversy relative to the early Christianity of Scotland is Warren's Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. (Clarendon ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... clear-shining blue, save where in some more distant sweeps it shone a silver-white; on the other side of the broad strath rose a range of hill fringed along its base with wood, but terminating in the west in far altitudes of bare rock and heather; while now and again he could catch a glimpse of some still more distant peak or shoulder, no doubt belonging to the remote and mountainous region of Assynt. And there, in the middle of the plain, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... tear will start, and let it flow; Thou "poor Inhabitant below," [C] 50 At this dread moment—even so— Might we together Have sate and talked where gowans blow, Or on wild heather. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... sometimes at this hour," said a third, "as the boar comes to Heather Pool at sunset. But not always. None ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... claim on you, and we mean to insist on it. What, just after all this grief of separation, you would go away from us again? No, no! I tell you, Violet, we shall never find you your real self until you have been braced up by the sea breezes. I mean the real sea breezes. You want a scamper among the heather—I can see that; for I have been watching you of late, and you are not up to the right mark. The sooner we all go the better. Do you ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Liverpool, and his earliest recollections are of life in his grandmother's cottage of Ballavolley, Ballaugh, in the Isle of Man, a house set in a wooded plain surrounded by high mountains which glow, here yellow with the gorse, there purple with the heather. In the foreground is the beautiful old church of Ballaugh, in the cemetery of which many generations of Caines lie at rest; and between the old church and the village lies the curragh land, full of wild flowers and musical with the notes ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... countree." Her husband, at her request, came east and settled with her in sight of the Atlantic where she could see the waters that washed the Scotland shore. But she still pined, and finally to save her life, John Macduff took her back to the heather hills of the mother-land, where she soon recovered ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... around her the land lay brown and still; dead heather, and sometimes dead bracken, a shade paler, and, more rarely, gorse bushes, nearly brown, too, in their sober winter dress. It was almost flat, a wonderful illimitable place, very remote, very silent, unbroken except for occasional pine-trees. These were not scattered ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... pause 'twixt the sad to-day and grim to-morrow. The Sun and the Sea are not given to me, nor joys like yours as you flit together Away to the woods and the downs, and across the endless acres of purple heather. But I've love, thank Heaven! and mercy, too; 'tis for justice only I bid you hark To the tale of a penniless man like me—to the wounded cry ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Beaverkill and Neversink and Swiftwater, of Saranac and Raquette and Ausable, of Allegash and Aroostook and Moose River. "Whene'er I take my walks abroad," it shall be to trace the clear Rauma from its rise on the fjeld to its rest in the fjord; or to follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the heather. The Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the Tyrol; the Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England. My sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the wooded stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... armed party to halt, and to lie couched in the heather where it was thickest. "Do you and your son," he said to the oldest Lowlander, "go boldly over the hill;—you will see beneath you, in a glen on the other side, your master's cattle, feeding, it may be, with others; gather your own together, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... human creatures to the door. A third came—an old gipsy woman—still stout and hearty, with green fresh brooms to sell. We bought some brooms—one of them was left on the kitchen floor, and the tame rabbit nibbled it; it proved to be heather. The true broom is as green and succulent in appearance in January as June. She would see the 'missis.' 'Bless you, my good lady, it be weather, bean't it? I hopes you'll never know what it be to want, my good lady. Ah, well, you looks good-tempered ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood—though if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here—had trodden this road almost daily ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... and to this hour I know as little where we went. Perhaps it was near Guildford. Perhaps some Arabian-night magician, opened up the place for the day, and shut it up for ever when we came away. It was a green spot, on a hill, carpeted with soft turf. There were shady trees, and heather, and, as far as the eye could see, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... neither hills nor valleys, neither heather nor ling: he had no thoughts but only that of finding the Queen his cousin. At times the tears ran down his begrimed face, at times he waved his sword in the air and, spurring his horse, he swore great oaths. How he fared, where he rested, by what roads he went ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... "Isabel, my sweet! Red whortle-berries droop above my head, And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet; Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed 300 Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat Comes from beyond the river to my bed: Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom, And it shall comfort me ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... stone's throw from his grave, for fifty years, and the approaching change of habitat will cost him nothing. He will still lie at the foot of his beloved hills, and the purple moorland will spread around him for all eternity, and the smell of the gorse and heather will fill his nostrils as he sleeps. He is a bit of a pagan, old McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter Catechism. I should not wonder if he were the original of the story of the minister who prayed for the "puir Deil." He planted a rowan tree by his porch ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... seemed to bloom unceasingly in the windows of her room. I recall, too, with gratitude, a trifle which gave her a pleasure out of all proportion to what I had dreamed it would do. She had expressed a longing for some English heather, "not the hot-house variety, but the kind that blooms on the hills," and I had succeeded in getting a bunch for her by writing ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... were dyed with bark of alder for black, bark of willow for flesh colour. A lichen growing on stones supplied their violets and crimson.[311] The lichen on the birch-tree gives a good brown; heather ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... thin-stemmed feathery grass. Here and there was a clump of scrub oaks; sparsely scattered about were small pines. We found great numbers of Opuntia Missouriensis, called by the Mexicans nopal; small mesquite shrubs, too, are seen everywhere, while the resurrection plant covers great areas, like the heather on the Scotch hills. Here are also found century plants, or agaves, and many species of small ferns, such as the graceful maidenhair. In the larger water-courses are poplars and maples, now presenting their most brilliant ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to his nine months' prison. The countryman, who needs no such change of air and scene, will prefer more homelike, though more homely, pleasures. Dearer to him than wild cataracts or Alpine glens ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... vain. The noises, meanwhile, were precisely those which he had heard ascribed to the Cwn Wybir, and would have been truly appalling to a superstitious imagination. His quick ear at length caught the rush of pinions, and, in a short time, a large flight of curlews came sweeping down to the heather, so near his head, that some of their wings brushed his hat. They were no sooner settled, than the Cwn Wybir ceased to be heard. Mr. Young then recollected having noticed similar nocturnal cries from the curlew, but had ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... with oak woods and brown open heaths which stretch away, hill after hill, down towards the southern coast. I could greedily fill a long chapter with the well-loved glories of Cleeve Hill; but it may be that we must press its heather with our feet more than once in the course of our present task, and if so, it will be well to leave something for ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... as he stole a glance now and then up at the steep white slope above him, or at that beneath, beyond which the pines among which they had slept the past night now looked like heather. ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood— Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney— But ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... eyne did the glamour of Faerie pass And the Rymour lay on Eildon grass. He lay in the heather on Eildon Hill; He gazed on the dour Scots sky his fill. His staff beside him was brash with rot; The weed grew rank in his unthatch'd cot: "Syne gloaming yestreen, my shepherd kind, What hath happ'd this cot we ruin'd ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... glad and grateful tongue to join The lark at his matin hymn, And thence on faith's own wing to spring And sing with cherubim! To pray from a deep and tender heart With all things praying anew, The birds and the bees and the whispering trees, And heather bedropt with dew.— To be one with those early worshippers, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... had just before he spoke thrown himself down to rest. He had gone out alone, his mood pleasing itself best with solitude, and had lost his way and found himself crossing strange land. Being wearied and somewhat out of sorts, he had flung himself down among the heather and bracken, where he was well out of sight, and could lie and look up at the gray of the sky, his hands ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... questions follow, and they, with their attendant answers, have been duly memorized. But they have failed to hold his thought. This one, however, refuses to be shaken off. He has, quite involuntarily, repeated it to himself a hundred times as he pushed his way through the heather to the mossy abbey. It sounds in his ears like a claim, a challenge, an insistent and ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... the preceding enthusiast, the voice of Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up and down. Mr. Cowes' tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... before her father's men Three days we've fled together, For should he find us in the glen, My blood would stain the heather. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and Holyrood were still tenanted by the upper classes, and such extension as had been was towards the Meadows. The new town had not been projected even, and on the slopes, now occupied by its spacious streets and squares, copse-woods and grass and heather grew. In the hollow at the foot of these green braes, and by the side of the Water of Leith, a chain of little hamlets—Dean, Stockbridge, and Canon-mills—nestled, and in the mid-most of these Robert ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... Street, George, Mabel and Philippa. It is the beginning of September and anything more dreary and deserted than the parks could not be imagined. No one is in London. Who would be when the seaside is everything delightful and the moors are covered with heather and grouse? Philippa shudders as she looks out of her bedroom window into the mews, even that is deserted, a canary in a very small cage and a lean cat are the only living creatures to ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... horses whinnying, and men touting. "Very nice sandcarts—very nice camels! Take ladies and gentlemen quick to Pyramids and Sphinx or Petrified Forest!" Farther on, the big, modern hotel, rather like an overgrown Swiss chalet built by Arabs—a vast, confused building the colour of sand or brown heather honey, with carved mushrbiyeh work lending an Eastern charm to windows, balconies, and loggias, and enough green, flowery garden to give a sensational effect of contrast with the tidal wave of desert poised ready, it would seem, to overwhelm palms and roses. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... your face is different. The mouth has grown rugged and harsh; there are lines under your eyes, and your lips are firm, not full. It is as if a storm had burst on a young birch, and torn it from its bank amid the grass and the heather, and an oak had grown up in its place, brought into life by the ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... was awake that night, and throughout Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the countryside like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... timber here, as on Captain Falkenberg's land; the ground was stony and barren, covered with heather and pine needles for miles round. They had felled too freely here; the sawmills had taken over much, leaving next to no young wood. It was a melancholy country to ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... top by wind and rain into those fantastic lichen-covered pillars and tora and logans in which antiquarian fancy used so long to find the visible monuments of Druidical worship. All around, a wide brown waste of heather undulates and tosses wildly to the sky; and on the summit of the rolling moor where it rises and swells in one of its many rounded bosses, the antlered heads and shoulders of the red deer may often be seen etched in bold relief against the clear sky-line to ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... ice-fields, but outside these are river valleys and lake districts affording pasturage, and arable land capable of producing root crops. The climate is changeable, mild for the latitude, but somewhat colder than Scotland. There are few trees, and these small; cranberries grow among the heather, and Iceland moss is a plentiful article of food. The island exports sheep and ponies; the fisheries are important, including cod, seals, and whales; sulphur and coal are found; the hot springs are famous, especially the Great Geyser, near Hecla. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... And draw the smile Of peace from those Who wept their woes Yet when the love Of Christ above To guilty men Was shown him—then He left the joys Of worldly noise, And humbly laid His drooping head Nor heather-bell Is there to tell Of gentle friend Who sought to lend A sweeter sleep To him who deep Beneath the ground Repose has found. No stone of woe Is there to show The name, or tell How passing well He loved his God, ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... strip of road along which he had travelled over the moors from the station, Tallente leaned forward and watched the unfolding panorama below with a little start of surprise. He had passed through acres of yellowing gorse, of purple heather and mossy turf, fragrant with the aromatic perfume of sun-baked herbiage. In the distance, the moorland reared itself into strange promontories, out-flung to the sea. On his right, a little farm, with its cluster of out-buildings, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... emerald isle rising out of the sea, I beheld a succession of cold, purplish mountains, stretching along the northeastern horizon, but I am bound to say that no tints of bloom or verdure were ever half so welcome to me as were those dark, heather-clad ranges. It is a feeling which a man can have but once in his life, when he first sets eyes upon a foreign land; and in my case, to this feeling was added the delightful thought that the "devil's hole" would soon be cleared and my long ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... to the house); and early before breakfast this morning I walked along the banks of the stream, and then knee deep up its bright waters, and then over the breezy hills, "O'er the hills, amang the heather," whence I watched its gleaming course between red-colored rocks, like walls of porphyry or Roman tufa, and through corn-fields, and by tufted woods, and felt for an hour as if there was ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... cultivated antagonism to the world and to his fellows had slipped very easily from his unresisting shoulders. The glory of a perfect English midsummer lay like a golden spell upon the land. The moors were purple with heather, touched here and there with the fire of the flaming gorse, the wind blew always from the west, the gardens were ablaze with slowly bursting rhododendrons. Every gleam of coloring, every breath of perfume, seemed to carry him unresistingly back to ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the grim, bald rock. The ethereal, unfathomable sky, Hung over him, the valley lay beneath, Dotted with yellow hayricks, that exhaled Sweet, healthy odors to the mountain-top. He breathed intoxicate the infinite air, And plucked the heather blossoms where they blew, Reckless with light and dew, in crannies green, And scarcely saw their darling bells for tears. No sounds of labor reached him from the farms And hamlets trim, nor from the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... to it, though cold be the weather, And if, by mischance you should happen to fall, There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather, For life is itself but a game at ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... even to destitution. No smoothly hewn stones, no carved windows, no decoration of any kind distinguished it from the houses of the people. It was a small, low building of rough stone, unplastered, even inside, and roofed by a heather thatch. There was a single door in the side wall. The roof within was open to the rude, unvarnished beams which upheld the thatch. The floor was of beaten clay, and there were rough benches for the people to sit upon during the ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... Europeans, and it is certainly grand and interesting and in a certain sense beautiful, but not the calm, sweet, warm beauty of our own fields, and there is none of the brightness of our own flowers; a field of buttercups, a hill of gorse or of heather, a bank of foxgloves and a hedge of wild roses and purple vetches surpass in beauty anything I have ever seen in the tropics. This is a favourite subject with me, but I ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... mile-long common of Barnard's Green, with the geese, and the hay-stacks, and the little cottages on either side, and always in front the steep ridge of hills with the grey Priory where Piers Plowman saw his vision, nestling at their feet; or to pull the heather and the wild strawberries in Cowleigh Park, from which every vestige of its great house has departed. She might have been a privileged visitor at Madresfield, where some say Charles II. slept the night before the battle of Worcester, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... it is, I suppose, that gives to the Black Forest home its distinctive scent. It is not a scent you can liken to any one thing. It is as if you took roses and Limburger cheese and hair oil, some heather and onions, peaches and soapsuds, together with a dash of sea air and a corpse, and mixed them up together. You cannot define any particular odour, but you feel they are all there—all the odours that the world has yet ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... him to see his way, and once he left the path to take a short cut, but his foot slipped into a boghole and he had to come back to it. And how long he was going he did not know, or what way he went, but at last he was up on the bare mountain, with nothing but the rough heather about him, and he could neither hear the hounds nor any other thing. But their cry began to come to him again, at first far off and then very near, and when it came quite close to him, it went up all of ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... grander in the bold contours of its cloud-capped tors, but the wildness of Exmoor is blended with a sweet and gentle charm which is all its own. It presents us with a panorama of misty woods, gleaming water, and glowing heather; a combe-furrowed moorland clothed with scrub oaks and feathery larches. After leaving this forest shrine the Exe enters Devonshire, where, after flowing through richly wooded and fertile valleys, it sweeps past the ancient town of Tiverton, where it is swelled by ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... an hour the child and he Joy'd o'er the vale together; It was a lovely thing to see That child among the heather. The vale is pass'd, the mountains rear Their rugged cliffs in air, He must ascend to view more near His ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... on the chimney-piece, as indeed they were, where she drank a whole tumbler of new milk before we lifted her to carry her back, we came upon a wide high moorland country the roads through which were lined with gorse in full golden bloom, while patches of heather all about were showing their bells, though not yet in their autumnal outburst of purple fire. Here I began to be reminded of Scotland, in which I had travelled a good deal between the ages of twenty and five-and-twenty. The further I went the stronger I felt the resemblance. The look of the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... will assuredly come when this "life in the woods" will be no more, when huge inns will supersede the canopy of the skies, and down beds will make the memory of birch twigs and heather blossoms pass away, we give from authority the proceedings of an evening's rest, which the next generation will study with somewhat of the feeling of reading Tacitus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... every hollow, But the purple hillocks enjoyed fine weather As we marched with our fiddles over the heather - How it comes back!—to their ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... doleful dream, I fear there will be sorrow! I dreamed I pu'd the heather green With my ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... song in "Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of sculpture and the charm of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of the loch's dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the heather, and the wet tresses of ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... freely deliver his soul. His mind was stored with the legends of his country, its romance and poetry, and, strong Covenanters as were the Watts for generations, tales of the Martyrs were not wanting. The heather was on fire within Jamie's breast. But where got you all that perferidum Scotorum, my wee mannie—that store of precious nutriment that is to become part of yourself and remain in the core of your being to the end, hallowing and elevating ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... bottom of which as Eleanor said was almost filled up with the road, and the brook which rushed along its course to meet the river; itself almost as large as another river. Where the people could be found to go to a church in such a region, she could not imagine. Heather clothed the hills; fairy cascades leaped down the rocks at every turning, lovely as a dream; the whole scene was wild and lonely. Hardly any human habitations or signs of human action broke the wild reign of nature all the valley through. Eleanor was sure of a charming ride at ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... easily," she said, glancing down with a faint smile at my empty pages, "what I see by my side—a very lazy man. And," she continued, crumpling a little ball of heather in her fingers and throwing it with unerring aim at Allan, "another one ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as he debated and determined in his mind, he was hastening through a country that in another mood would be demanding his attention almost at every step of the way. Ladyfield is at the barren end of the glen—barren of trees, but rich in heather, and myrtle, and grass—surrounded by full and swelling hills. The river, but for the gluttonous sea that must be sucking it down, would choose, if it might, to linger in the valley here for ever, and in summer it loiters on many pretences, twining out ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... leather Gaed through the heather, Through a rock, through a reel, Through an auld spinning-wheel, Through a sheep-shank bane. Sic a man was never seen. Wha had he been? ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... myself. "No," thought I. "It is too far off"—so on I walked till I lost sight of it, when I repented and thought I would go and see what it was. So I dashed down the moory slope on my right, and presently saw the object again—and now I saw that it was water. I sped towards it through gorse and heather, occasionally leaping a deep drain. At last I reached it. It was a small lake. Wearied and panting I flung myself on its bank ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... known as the Dryhope Burn. It is deeply buried in the hills. Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top. There, however, where the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision, from which the flocks are carefully guarded. It is the practice of the country for the shepherds to be within touch of them all night, lest some, feeding upward (as sheep always do) should reach the summits and ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the first night of their stay. During the succeeding nights, however, he was continually roused from his slumbers by the most terrific noises, and want of sleep would cause him to become drowsy when out shooting on the moor, and would tempt him to make a bed of the purple heather ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... suspended in favour of the insurgent multitudes, amounting to 30,000, or 40,000 at the highest, who, on the different hill summits, posted their nightly sentinels, and threw themselves down on turf and heather to snatch a short repose. The kindling of a beacon, the lowing of cattle, or the hurried arrival of scout or messenger, hardly interfered with slumbers which the fatigues of the day, and, unhappily also, the potations ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... that the proceedings were on a more extended scale, and led us far among wilder and more varied scenery. As before, the stations of the hunters were assigned at about seventy or eighty paces apart, with the horses tethered in the rear. The line of shooters was first formed among the heather on the easy slope of a glen, lightly sprinkled with wood. The exhilarating sounds of the men and dogs breaking the silence of the woods as they drove the game before them, the minutes of eager expectation, the sharp look-out, the ringing ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the St. Regis Hotel a supper-table was laid for three people. It was decorated with some lilies-of-the-valley and white heather, which Jacob Crayford had sent in the afternoon to the "little lady." On a table near stood a gilded basket of tulips, left by Gillier with a formal note. The elderly German waiter, who looked like a very respectable butler, placed a menu beside the lilies ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... bread with wisdom and with song for wine Clear as the full calm's emerald hyaline. And from his grave glad lips the boy would gather Fine honey of song-notes goldener than gold, More sweet than bees make of the breathing heather, That he, as glad and bold, Might drink as they, and keep his spirit from cold. And the boy loved his laurel-laden hair As his own father's risen on the eastern air, And that less white brow-binding bayleaf bloom More than ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... for Clara's society as a healthy impulse towards higher things—at least, he told her so as he led her out through the orchard and up the stony path, down which trickled a little stream, to the crag that dominated the house and garden. It was covered with heather and winberries, and just below the summit grew two rowan-trees. So bright was the moon that the colour of the berries was almost perceptible. Sir Henry stood moon-gazing and presently heaved a ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... moor, cloven by that one ribbonlike stretch of uneven road, broken here and there with great masses of lichen-covered grey rock, by huge clumps of purple heather, long, glittering streaks of yellow gorse. The morning was young, and little shrouds of white mist were still hanging around. His own clothes were damp. Little beads of moisture were upon his face. But below, where the Atlantic billows came thundering in upon a rock-strewn ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I picked up on the heather And there I put inside my breast A moulted feather, an eagle-feather! ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... straight across the heather towards the light, risking quags and pitfalls. Nay, so heartening was the chance to hear a fellow creature's voice, that I broke into a run, skipping over the stunted gorse that cropped up here and there, and dreading every moment to see ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nephew for the campaign, and greatly consoled by the prospect of beholding him blaze in complete uniform. Edward Waverley himself received with animated and undefined surprise this most unexpected intelligence. It was, as a fine old poem expresses it, 'like a fire to heather set,' that covers a solitary hill with smoke, and illumines it at the same time with dusky fire. His tutor, or, I should say, Mr. Pembroke, for he scarce assumed the name of tutor, picked up about Edward's room some fragments of irregular verse, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... that loneliest of eves when afar and benighted we stood, She who upheld me and I, in the midmost of Egdon together, Confident I in her watching and ward through the blackening heather, Deeming her matchless in might and with ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... lightning connected with it; yonder was the spot where he had shown Lucilla a herd of deer; here the rising ground whence the whole scene could be viewed, and from force of habit he felt exhilarated as he gazed down the slope of heather, where the fine old oaks and beeches, receding, had left an open space, now covered with the well-known tents; there the large one, broadly striped with green, containing the show; there the white marquees for the eaters; the Union Jack's gay colours floating ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him like a flock of sheep. We paused a moment at the Isthmic sanctuary of Poseidon, passed through the village of Kalamaki, whence steamers run to Athens, then continued along the shore between Mount Geroneia and the sea, through a low, uneven country, well grown with pine, heather, arbute, gorse in the full splendor of its yellow blossoms, and sweet-smelling thyme. The afternoon was warm and bright. Here and there were flocks of long-haired sheep and sturdy black goats, cropping ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... town on my way to their snug lodgings in the vale of Hampstead heath—and the time is twilight. And first I meet the children, neatly dressed, clean, and wholesome looking, jumping and leaping about the heather at no particular sport, but in the very joy and healthiness of their young blood—and they catch sight of me, and rush to greet me, one and all. They lead me to their mother. How beautiful she has become in the subsidence of mental tumult, in quiet, grateful labour, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... farther into the wood, there was a rustling in the tops of the trees, and looking through them, a leaden-colored sky was seen; but below, the sultriness was undisturbed, the birds sat supinely on the branches, and the beetles had crept into the heather. ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... sight of him, gave up, for the time, all thought of affairs, and found in the beauty of the spectacle sufficient compensation. The bright dresses and waving feathers of the party showed to the greatest advantage, as the long cavalcade wound through the heather and rocks of the valley below the Apremonts; and whether I looked to front or rear—on the huntsmen, with their great horns, or the hounds straining in the leashes—I was equally charmed with a sight at once joyous and gallant, and one to ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... moor. Inlets of green grass forked into purple heather. Green streamed through purple, lapped against purple, lay on purple in pools ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... sides, but also by its borders of grass of a darker green and greater luxuriance than the pale, short, sickly verdure of the Campagna; just as you can trace the course of a moorland stream along the heather by the brighter vegetation which its own waters have created. Myriads of flowers gleam in their own atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so that the feet can hardly be set down ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... view of it, and my fair friends, the young ladies, offered to accompany me; so off we started down the winding paths, which were cut among the banks overhanging the Esk. The ground was starred over with patches of pale-yellow primroses, and for the first time I saw the heather, spreading over rocks and matting itself around the roots of trees. My companions, to whom it was the commonest thing in the world, could hardly appreciate the delight which I felt in looking at it; it was not in flower; I believe it does not blossom till some time in July ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... bleak north-wester. When she disappeared into a sheltered hollow, the wind, hushed and non-plussed for a minute, paused to meditate further mischief; then, with regathered rage, it tore across country, and boomed, with sullen roar, into a valley shut in by brackened and heather-covered hills. ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... side the wide hills, with Snowdon towering over all like a dome. The hillside land had but a prairie value. It had never been cultivated. A few sheep strayed over it; but for months together no human foot trod its heather, or wandered by its vociferous cascades. One would have supposed that had any one offered to build a house on these solitary hillsides, the owner of the land would have been only too glad to have fostered a folly that would have proved remunerative to himself. On ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... King of the truth and reasonableness of the doctrine of the Trinity by the illustration of the shamrock leaf, and had overthrown the great idols and purified the land. Therefore the fair shores and fertile vales of Erin, the clustered islets, dropped like jewels in the azure seas, the mist-covered, heather-clad hill-sides, even the barren mountain-tops and the patches of firm ground scattered in the solitudes of fathomless bogs, were homes of pious Culdee or lonely hermit. There was still strife in Ireland, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... more Passion than the Frenchman; which is not Genius either, but a great Part of the Lyric Poet still. What Beranger might have been, if born and bred among Banks, Braes, and Mountains, I cannot tell: Burns had that advantage over him. And then the Highland Mary to love, amid the heather, as compared to Lise the Grisette in a Parisian Suburb! Some of the old French Virelays and Vaux-de-vire come much nearer the Wild Notes of Burns, and go to one's heart like his; Beranger never ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... monastery. It was in his own Tyrconnell, but a few miles from that home by Lough Gartan, where he first saw the light, and from his foster home amid the mountains of Kilmacrenan, that, rising with their green belts of trees and purple mantles of heather over the valleys, seemed like huge festoons hung from the blue-patched horizon. Then the very air was redolent of sanctity. If he turned to the south, the warm breezes that swayed his cowl reminded him that away behind those ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... great harm done. [Going off into a passionate dream] But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! [Savagely] No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... us, but our limbs are palsied, and our feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death. Higher up among the rocks and cliffs ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... were gone I laughed again, with a glance at Nat who lay with closed eyes and white still face where Marc'antonio and Stephanu had made a couch of fern and some heather for him under the chestnut boughs. The sight of the heather gave me an idea, and I walked back to where, at the end of the chestnut wood, a noble clump of it grew, under a scarp of rock where the pines broke off. With my knife I cut an armful of it and returned to the hut, pausing on my way ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... beginning of questioning. Scotland, Braemarnie, Donal's mother, even the Manse and the children in it, combined to form a world of enchantment. There were hills with stags living in them, there were moors with purple heather and yellow brome and gorse; birds built their nests under the bushes and Donal's pony knew exactly where to step even in the roughest places. There were two boys and two girls at the Manse and they had a father and a mother. These things were enough for a new heaven and ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a reputation for tireless agility among the fox-hunters of the Roman Campagna. He still deserves it. In twenty strides he left me behind. I saw him jumping over the heather, knocking off with his cane the young shoots on the oaks, or turning his head to look at me as I struggled after, torn by brambles and pricked by gorse. A startled pheasant brought him to a halt. The bird rose under his feet and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Llandudno much later than November. All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... went to Paris to study. There his spirit among his books was like fire among heather, so indefatigable was it and ardent. One day as Pantagruel was taking a walk without the city he met a man of a comely stature and elegant in all the lineaments of his body, but most pitifully wounded, and clad in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... of a moorland parish, far out of the sight of any house, there stands a cairn among the heather, and a little by east of it, in the going down of the brae-side, a monument with some verses half defaced. It was here that Claverhouse shot with his own hand the Praying Weaver of Balweary, and the chisel of Old Mortality has clinked on that lonely ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... After his day the "back-to-nature" idea became more popular and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature becomes more and more aware of an American background. Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. Nature ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the little earl, and watched with wistful eyes the tall Highlander striding across brushwood and heather, leaping dikes and clearing fences—the very embodiment ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... them as they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert |
