"Heathery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were rushing down the side, and many of the wild breed of black Highland cattle were grazing around. After climbing up and down one or two heights, occasionally startling the moorcock and ptarmigan from their heathery coverts, we saw the valley of Loch Con; while in the middle of the plain on the top of the mountain we had ascended, was a sheet of water which we took to be Loch Ackill. Two or three wild fowl swimming on its surface ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... the Dane! The heathen Dane Is wasting Hampshire's coast again— From ravaged church and plundered farm Flash the dread beacons of alarm— Fly, helpless peasants, fly! Ytene's green banks and forest shades, Her heathery slopes and gorse-clad glades Re-echo to the cry— Where is the King, whose strong right hand Hath oft from danger freed the land? Nor fleet nor covenant avails To drive aloof those pirate sails, In vain is Alfred's sword; Vain seems in every sacred fane The chant—'From ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ruin. Far away, a sea of mountains, with all their billowing summits distinct in the sky, and now uncertain and changeful as the clouds. Yonder Castle stands well on the peninsula among the trees which the herons inhabit. Those coppice-woods on the other shore, stealing up to the heathery rocks and sprinkled birches, are the haunts of the roe. That great glen, that stretches sullenly away into the distant darkness, has been for ages the birth and the death-place of the red-deer. The cry of an Eagle! There he hangs poised in the sunlight, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... and again at work. She, however, allowed the children to sleep on as long as they would. "They will weary up here in this sma' room, the poor bairns, instead of running about on their aine free heathery hills, and I must na' spare the time to take them out on the links just now till their clays are ready, and I ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... and the guard knew where he had to take them up. Long before the coach appeared, the notes of his horn, as like the colour of his red coat as the blindest of men could imagine, came echoing from the side of the heathery, stony hill under which they stood, so that Robert turned wondering, as if the chariot of his desires had been coming over the top of Drumsnaig, to carry him into a heaven where all labour was delight. But round the corner in front came the four-in-hand red mail instead. She pulled up gallantly; ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the lake in the low bottom, surrounded by the heathery hillocks; there it lay quite still, the hot sun reflected upon its surface, which shone like a polished blue shield. Near the shore it was shallow, at least near that shore upon which I lay. But farther on, my eye, practised in ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... fiercest of radicals and kindest of men, expresses his scorn for monarchical institutions (and his invincible love for his native Scotland) by tenanting, summer after summer, a famous castle among the heathery Highlands. There he proclaims the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that grows more broadly Scotch with every week of his emancipation from the influence of the clipped, commercial accent of New York, and casts contempt on feudalism by playing the part of lord of the manor to ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... an embankment upon the edge of the bog at the Manchester end. Moss as dry as it could be cut, was brought up in small waggons, by men and boys, and emptied so as to form an embankment; but the bank had scarcely been raised three or four feet in height, when the stuff broke through the heathery surface of the bog and sank out of sight. More moss was brought up and emptied with no better result; and for weeks the filling was continued without any visible embankment having been made. It was the duty of the resident engineer to proceed to Liverpool every fortnight ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... Mantuan bard, the oaten reed, Philomela and her songs, Hymen, Ganymede, Bacchus, and all the Olympian band disport themselves in his other verses: but The Gentle Shepherd is void of those necessary adjuncts of the eighteenth-century muse. The wimpling burn is never called Helicon nor the heathery braes Parnassus, and nothing can be more genuine, more natural, and familiar than the simple scenery of Habbie's Howe—in which the eager critics identified every scene, and the sensible poet enhanced his art by a perfect truth to nature. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... stood on the site of the eastern corner of Everton church. It was a square tower of two stories, and approached from the present Church-street by a little lane. Church-street was then a sandy winding road, having on one side the open heathery-hill, and on the other a low turf wall which enclosed the fields called "the Mosses," which were indeed little better than marshes. The Beacon was constructed of the red sandstone taken from the vicinity. I am no antiquarian, so that I can give but a poor opinion of its original date of erection. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... soul never dwelt in a queerer or stancher body; see her huddled up, and you would think her a bundle of hair, or a bit of old mossy wood, or a slice of heathery turf, with some red soil underneath but speak to her, or give her a cat to deal with, be it bigger than herself, and what an incarnation of affection, energy, and fury—what a fell ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... The inhabitants of this valley are so notable for their love of music, that they are known all through the vales of Rosendale as "Th' Deighn Layrocks," or "The Larks of Dean." In the twilight of a glorious Sunday evening, in the height of summer, I was roaming over the heathery waste of Swinshaw, towards Dean, in company with a musical friend of mine, who lived in the neighbouring clough, when we saw a little crowd of people coming down a moorland slope, far away in front of us. As they drew ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... noticed, coming over the hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to be a human figure, running with great rapidity. The form flitted on, heedless of the rain which had caused Stephen's halt in this place, dropped down the heathery hill, entered the vale, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the Misses Honeywood, the blooming daughters of the rector's only sister; and they have come from the far land of the North, and are looking as fresh and sweet as their own heathery hills. The roses of health that bloom upon their cheeks have been brought into full blow by the keen, sharp breeze; the shepherd's-plaid shawls drawn tightly around them give the outline of figures that gently swell into the luxuriant line ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... of harder rock showed me a likely way. I remembered that the cliff hereabouts was of no great height and scalable in a score of places. Very cautiously, and sometimes sitting and straddling the ridge while my fingers sought a new grip, I mounted to the edge of a heathery down; and there, after pricking myself sorely among the furze-bushes that guarded it, found a passage through and cast myself at full length on the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Chief, who hears his warder call, 'To arms! the foemen storm the wall,' The antlered monarch of the waste Sprung from his heathery couch in haste. But ere his fleet career he took, The dew-drops from his flanks he shook; Like crested leader proud and high Tossed his beamed frontlet to the sky; A moment gazed adown the dale, A moment ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... something wonderful, a little, low, red beast with a yellowish tail, that went rushing across the road before him. It was the first weasel he had ever seen in his cockney life. There were miles of this, scores of miles of this before him, pinewood and oak forest, purple, heathery moorland and grassy down, lush meadows, where shining rivers wound their lazy way, villages with square-towered, flint churches, and rambling, cheap, and hearty inns, clean, white, country towns, long downhill stretches, where one might ride at one's ease (overlooking a jolt or ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... dinners at Long's and the Clarendon—our nights at Offley's and the watch-house—our glorious runs with the Beaufort hounds, and our exhilarating runs from the sheriffs' officers—our month's sporting on the heathery moors, and our day rule when rusticating ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... when he wrote to Mr Frampton that he did not know and did not care where he was going next. When he awoke in his heathery bed next morning, he lay indolently for a whole hour for no other reason than because he did not know whether to walk north, south, east or west. He lacked the festive imagination which helps many people under similar circumstances. It did not occur to him ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... miles) is chiefly across beautiful heathery commons; from Wokingham the road is more enclosed with hedges. Eversley Church and rectory stand almost alone, save for a farmhouse and barns, being nearly a mile from the other portions of the ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... books, and to make him turn from his best-loved authors as from a friend who has outstayed his welcome, whose carriage we wish were at the door. In these unhappy moments we are apt to call to mind the shrewd men we have known, who have been our blithe companions on breezy fells, heathery moor, and by the stream side, who could neither read nor write, or who, at all events, but rarely practised those Cadmean arts. Yet they could tell the time of day by the sun, and steer through the silent night by the stars; and each of them had—as Emerson, a very bookish person, has ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... in the long Arno valley, which is here precipitous and narrow. The river is far below—if you slipped you would slide into it—fed by tumbling Apennine streams from both walls. The top of the mountain is heathery like Scotland, and open; but not long will it be so, for everywhere are the fenced parallelograms which indicate that a villa is to be erected. Nothing, however, can change the mountain air or the glory of the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the laborious search after 'local colour' with which we are familiar to-day. The bulk of the work was done in his study at Eversley, executed rapidly, some of it too rapidly; but the subjects were those of which his mind was full, and the thoughts must have been pursued in many a quiet hour on the heathery commons or beside the streams of ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... him. He recalled his younger brother in a score of tender situations: the schoolhouse in which they had studied cheek to cheek over one book; the little stream in which they had paddled and fished on holidays, the fir-wood, the misty corries, and the heathery mountains of Argyle; above all, he remembered the last time that he had ever seen the bright young face marching at the head of his company down Buchanan street on his way to India. David's mother was a still tenderer memory, and John Callendar's eyes grew misty as his heart forced ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... got away from the tumbling torrents below. But when they reached the Long Pool no fishing was possible; the afternoon sun struck full on the calm surface of the water; there was not a breath of wind to stir the smooth-mirrored blue and white; they could do nothing but choose out a heathery knoll on the bank, and sit down and wait ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... down in mile on mile of heather from the Mere Marches on the top to the fringe of the Silver Mere below. In all that waste of moor the only break is the quaint-shaped Giant's Chair, puzzle of geologists, looking as though plumped down by accident in the heathery wild. The ground rises suddenly from the uniform grade of the Brae; up it goes, ever growing steeper, until at length it runs abruptly into a sheer curtain of rock—the Fall—which rises perpendicular some forty feet, on the top of which rests that tiny grassy bowl—not ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... admirals, that came flitting into the sandy bottom, and settled on the face of the sandy cliff, but always sailed away before we got near. Then we went out on to the wild heathery waste to the south, and chased lizards in the dry short growth. Then Shock uttered an excited cry and drew back Juno, who was sniffing, and struck two or three rapid blows at something, ending by stooping and raising a little writhing serpent by ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... running fast and fiery to the beating of Black Darnaway's feet as he climbed the heathery slopes which led towards Douglasdale. Day was breaking as he rode down to the town of Lanark yet asleep and smokeless in the caller airs of the morn. At the gates of this frontier town he delivered his first summons of feudality. For the burghers of Lanark were liegemen of the Douglases ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... no longer. He must see what was going on, and he mounted the rough sides of the little heathery knoll called quaintly Ben Rathan. Patsy would not be left behind and he found her at his side. She could, in fact, have been ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... and waved his stick, and from the light of his eyes and his gallant bearing, and the spring of his step across the heathery turf, we knew instinctively that trouble had come upon him. He always rose to meet it with that look and air. It was the old Norse blood in his veins, I suppose. So, one imagines, must those godless old Pirates have sprung to their ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... demean itself by accepting the title of inn—a police barrack, a few minor public-houses, a good many dirty cottages, and an unrivalled collection of loafers. The stretch of salmon river that gleamed away to the distant heathery hills afforded the raison d'etre of both hotel and loafers, but the fishing season had not begun, and the attention of both was therefore undividedly bestowed on Mrs. Naylor and Major Booth. The former's cigarette and the somewhat Paradisaic dimensions of her apron skirt would indeed at ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... reached the stream, just clearing from the last night's showers. A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies,—sight delicious to ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the glass veranda on to the terrace outside. The hotel certainly had a most beautiful situation. As its name implied, it stood on the crest of a hill, surrounded by woods and grounds that stretched to the beach. A little noisy Devonshire river raced past it through the glen, and behind it lay the heathery waste of a great moorland. Below lay the gleaming waters of the bay, with small boats bobbing about, and a distant view of the crags and headlands of a rugged coast line. The terrace was planted with a border of trailing pink ivy-leaved geraniums, and the bank that sloped below was a superb ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... Young as she was, she soon learnt to do without the leading-rein, and the gentle white pony was discarded as too quiet for little Miss Tempest. Before her eleventh birthday she rode to hounds, rose before the sun to hunt the young fox-cubs in early autumn, and saw the stag at bay on the wild heathery downs above the wooded valleys that sink and fall below Boldrewood with almost Alpine grandeur. She was a creature full of life, and courage, and generous impulses, and spontaneous leanings to all good thoughts; but she was a ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... who hears his warder call, "To arms! the foemen storm the wall," The antlered monarch of the waste 40 Sprung from his heathery couch in haste. But ere his fleet career he took, The dew-drops from his flanks he shook; Like crested leader proud and high, Tossed his beamed frontlet to the sky; 45 A moment gazed adown the dale, A moment snuffed the tainted gale, A moment listened to the cry, That thickened as the chase drew ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... remember how you went every day to meet a timid little brother coming from school along a lonely moorland road, where there were broomy braes in June and heathery braes in September? What a convenient custom it was for me, since the little brother, unlike little monsters of the same kind, had neither eyes nor ears but for his own avocations, and trotted on obediently in front ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of people had a far narrower escape than mine. Only the fact that a hummock of heathery sand intercepted the lower part of the Heat-Ray saved them. Had the elevation of the parabolic mirror been a few yards higher, none could have lived to tell the tale. They saw the flashes and the men falling ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... had been born in bonnie Scotland, and all of them, even those who had never seen their ancestral home, spoke and lived and thought as though they had just come from the heathery hills. They were sprung from the loins of heroes, the stalwart pioneers from Roxburghshire and Ayrshire and Dumfries, and many another noble spot whose noblest sons had gone forth to earth's remotest bound, flaming with love of liberty and God. Seventy ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... sweet the dewy bell is spread Where Spango's mossy streams are lavin' The heathery locks o' deepenin' red, Around the mountain brow aye wavin'! Here, on the sunny mountain side, Dear lassie, we 'll lie down thegither; Where Nature spreads luve's crimson bed, Among the bonnie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... dreams of the outer islands, Firths and forths of the Far-Away; I have dreams of the heathery highlands ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and manoeuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his garden is known to the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... lovely Sunday afternoon in the early summer of the year 1690. The graceful and heathery path that winds its way along the banks of the Tweed, from the stately ruins of Melrose to the crumbling gables of Dryburgh, is in its glory. The wooded track by the waterside is luxuriating in bright sunshine, glowing colors and soft shadows. We are ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... and breakfasted in receptive and responsive mood. I recall that trudge along the highway and how I stepped across patches of sunlight from the shade of one regularly planted tree into that of another. The twelfth of August.... It set me thinking of heathery moorlands and grouse, and of those legions of flies that settle on one's nose just as one pulls the trigger. It all seemed dim and distant here, on this parching road, among southern fields. I was beginning ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... but then in another moment he took them into the thick of some ancient battle, where the brave-hearted "nobly conquering lived or conquering died;" or it was to some fair, pastoral scene, and then the preacher seemed to know so well all the delights of heathery hills and pleasant mossy glades, that Grace thought he certainly must have been at Kirklands and wandered among its woods and braes. And into each of his wonderful photographs he wove many holy, stirring thoughts of God, and of those "ways" of his ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oatmeal, who rode so swiftly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of distance, because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or gray. It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale color will more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark color nearness; but even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually give a pale and tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far away; the rose color of sunset on snow is pale on the snow at your feet, deep and full on the snow in the distance; and the green of a Swiss lake is pale in the clear waves on the beach, but intense as an ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... answer, but sits silent for a moment; then she points over the upland.] Look there, Arnold,—now the sun is going down behind the peaks. See what a red glow the level rays cast over all the heathery knolls ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... fancied that I had run athwart a tree, but for the recollection, as I was reeling to the ground, of a hulk of a fellow suddenly fronting me, and he did not hesitate with his fist. I went over and over into a heathery hollow. The wind sang shrill through the furzes; nothing was visible but black clumps, black cloud. Astonished though I was, and shaken, it flashed through me that this was not the attack of a highwayman. He calls upon you to stand and deliver: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Scotland's heathery hills The sweet-brier and the clover; With Ayr and Doon, my native rills, Their wood-hymns ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various |
