"Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the wither'd leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrub the jay And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... head cool and his feet warm; and here again the noble enterprise of a newspaper has provided the exact desideratum in its happily-named Corkolio detachable soles, which are absolutely invaluable when roads are dark and ways are foul, when the reeds are sere, when all the flowers have gone and the carrion-crow from the vantage of a pollard utters harsh notes of warning to all the corvine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... as every collector knows, are among the most short-lived of all volumes. This is more especially true of those with illustrations, for their extra attractiveness serves but to degrade a comely book into a dog-eared and untidy thing, with leaves sere and yellow, and with no autumnal grace to mellow their decay. Long before this period, however, the nursery artist has marked them for his own, and with crimson lake and Prussian blue stained their pictures in all too permanent pigments, that in some cases resist every chemical the amateur ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... first sere leaves of the year were falling, I heard, with a heart that was strangely thrilled, Out of the grave of a dead Past calling, A voice I ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... have to ask," returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you pretty soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his head was like a baldness made up for the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat—its sole ornament—against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when everyone was rich, and all the women wore diamonds. The old ladies cackled over their memories, their ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... growing lighter outside. Stars faded in a paling blue and the desert showed faint colorings. He tied his necktie. A deep-toned keening set up off to the southward, over the sere and dreary landscape. It was a faraway noise, something like the lament of a mountain-sized calf bleating for its mother. Joe took a deep breath. He looked, but saw nothing. The noise, though, told him ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... acres, was a dense circular thicket composed of every sort of thorny bush and shrub, matted with cat-briers and wild vines, and overshadowed by a clump of tall and leafy ashes, which had not as yet lost one atom of their foliage, although the underwood beneath them was quite sere and leafless. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... possession; others are broader and easier to enter: a few are very capacious and might be legitimately licensed to carry a dozen inside with safety; nearly all or them are lined with green baize, much of which is now getting into the sere and yellow leaf period of life; many of them are well-cushioned—green being the favourite colour; and in about the same number Brussels carpets may be found. There is a quiet, secluded coziness about the pews; the sides are high; ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... here Of the yellow leaf and sere, Who are anxious, aye, and ready To respond unto Your call; Yet You pass them by unheeding, And You set our hearts to bleeding! "O," you mutter, "God, how cruel Do Your vaunted ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... window, knitting a quilt, just as she had been sitting one evening several years previously when Matthew Cuthbert had driven down over the hill with what Mrs. Rachel called "his imported orphan." But that had been in springtime; and this was late autumn, and all the woods were leafless and the fields sere and brown. The sun was just setting with a great deal of purple and golden pomp behind the dark woods west of Avonlea when a buggy drawn by a comfortable brown nag came down the hill. Mrs. Rachel peered at ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... denied—they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the leaves were thin and sere and scanty—that the sun shone through them—that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always so—its fruits were never better—its foliage ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds; Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses, Insatiable summer oppresses Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses, And faint ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Rome lay open my face, yea, wide open as the lips of a crying child. And on my back, most noble mistress, thou mightest hide thy white fingers in the welts cut by the stinging thong. And seest thou my arm? Here is flesh cooked sere as the shell of a tortoise. Thus have blade and thong and branding iron of Rome marked me with wounds and commanded my lips to silence. Yet have these scars each one a thousand silent tongues crying ever 'Hate! Hate! Hate!' But here," ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... Guahutemallis, Dec. VIII C. 5. Habemus Matec Zungam et Mat Ingam, qui cur Madoc Camber esse nequeat quem in eos partes delatum domestica evincunt Monumenta, ratio nulla reddi potest. Ad antiquitatem, quinque illa Secula sussiciunt quousque altissima Americanorum Memoria, nec sere ultra, adscendit.[k] ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... pale land, before my sight In devious tracery that Passage lay; Mocking me with its undeveloped truth, Wealth unappropriated, glory lost! Cruel is she who took from me that substance With which I might have conquered an escape, Leaving me, a forlorn old spirit, sere and grey. Musing through barren hours upon the past, I think with bitterness on those who once Were friends and lovers—Queen, companions, Wife! Forgotten! yes, forgotten by them all! The luxuries of the world-taxing city, The kisses of their children, smiles of men Renowned of ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... public games, on colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of the world, and— ominous subject—a sort of comprehensive history of Greek literature, with a careful classification of all authors, each under his own heading. Greek literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing about it. But still, he is an encyclopaedic man, and, moreover, a poet. He writes an epic, "Aitia," in four books, on the causes of the myths, religious ceremonies, and so forth—an ominous sign for the myths also, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... cradle. For the gentle, domestic old man was often now, as in his docile childhood, charged to "mind the baby," and one of the quiet pleasures of his latter days was the sight of the little floweret, that grew so sweetly beside his sere and withered life. An uncultured sense of beauty within him was appealed to by the rounded limbs, the silent, dimpled laugh, the tottering feet feeling their unknown way, and all the sweet curves and softnesses, the innocent surprises and naive desires, which made ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... replying: "Nah![20] I breathe upon the forests, And the leaves fall sere and yellow; Then I shake my locks and snow falls, Covering all the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... while the winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading trees; which bids us seek Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment; Or, by collision of two bodies, grind The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock, Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine; And sends a comfortable heat from ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... who had no rest that night. An upper window of the house of Morelos looked out upon a court in which two palm trees grew. They had been tall and flourishing. One might see them from the court-room. But for a year they had been shedding their leaflets and turning sere. Tonight their yellow stems had clashed and whispered until the wind was down, leaving the night sullen, brooding, thick, starless, with dashes of rain and a raw chill on the ground that brought out all the malefic odors of the pavement. The window ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... airy, fresh, and spring-like as yourself. And for you, aunt, I will arrange an autumn arraying,—a costume soft, yet bright, like the autumn days which the Americans call 'Indian summer,'—something which will almost make one wish to fall into the sere and yellow leaf of life in the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... guides her must protect their new evolving creatures. A too sudden revelation and they might perish from sheer wonder.... Yes, truth must come softened, as a dream, to the man child's brain. Its naked light would sere and blind him forever.... But to me it has been given to see—to hear—and keep sane in the light. Oh, from what planet is the call? From what one of the hundred million spheres? How many centuries ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... would pause in a rift of the hills and look wistfully upon the bed of sere leaves and feathery snow, tempting her to sink down and die, with the grim hemlock boughs, plumed with snow wreaths drooping over her, and lulled by the gurgle of unseen waters wandering to the river, under their jewelled network of ice, ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of lyrics. In his latest and longest production, Don Juan, he tells us that his 'sere fancy has ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the still form ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... rustles by the crisp leaf sere, Sadly wail the lonely night-winds, sweeping sea-ward, chill and drear, Sullen dash the restless waters 'gainst a bleak and rock-bound shore, While the sea-birds' weird voices ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white walls, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... vellemus morari in terra? Ego dixi, Si bene intellexistis literas domini regis, potestis scire, quod sic. Tunc dixit, quod oporteret nos esse patientes multum, et humiles. Sic discessimus ab eo illo sere. In crastino mane misit vnum sacerdotem Nestorinum pro bigis, et nos duximus omnes quatuor. Tunc occurrens nobis frater ipsius Coiacis, separauit omnia nostra ab ipsis rebus quas tuleramus pridie ad curiam, et ilia ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... the door: a frosty rime Is branching over it, and drifts are deep Against the wall. He knocks, and there is time,— (For none doth open),—time to list the sweep And whistle of the wind along the mere Through beds of stiffened reeds and rushes sere. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... sere The heavy herbage of the ground, Gathers his annual harvest here, With roaring like the battle's sound, And hurrying flames that sweep the plain, And smoke-streams gushing up the sky: I meet the flames with flames again, And at my door ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... sure, are the brown stems of the pasture goldenrod standing stiffly as if to state with grim definiteness that all rainbow hopes are folly and there will be no more blossoming for them. Their leaves are dun and sere where they have not already fallen and their tops that in early September were such soft cumulus clouds of golden yellow are but scrawny clots of brown, draggled by the tears in which the sudden sun has drowned the pasture. Yet these least of all should ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled her with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that sang when ye were here, Are singing in another clime; Have left the hedge and forest sere, And gone where all is summer-time. The frail bright flowers that bloom'd around, When ye were blooming bright as they, Lie crushed and withered on the ground, Their fragrance heavenward ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... formerly! The great man denies, ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the East, to add a glorious crimson to the scene; this was given by shrubs, not by trees. The tints were certainly, in the larger growths, less delicate here than there; the poplar's chrome was darker, the willow's mottled chrome more sere. But there was the exquisite pale canary of the birch, the blood-red and yellow of the wild rose, which glows in both hues, the rich crimson of the red willow, with its foil of ivory berries, and the ruddy ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... his bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a lustrous blur ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... much as common men can love a flower Unto Lanciotto was Francesca dear, 'Tis not on such Love wields his jealous power; And therefore Paolo moved him not to fear, Though he so green with youth and he so sere. Nor yet indeed was wrong, the hidden thing Grew at each heart, unknown of each, a year,— Two eggs still silent in the nest through spring, May draws so near to June, and not yet time ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... stately dinner parties grow dim, Masters of Horses and Hounds go to battle, the plate is melted down, and all is sad and sere. The young lord is sent by King Charles abroad, and Parliamentary Fairfax comes thundering at the gate, where admittance is refused by the venerable old marquis. Fairfax besieges boldly and is gallantly attacked by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bloom, and fragrance, and the ruby fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... still the memory, never sere, But fresh as after fallen rain, Of those who learned their lesson here And may not ever come again, Gives to this garden, bruised and browned, A greenness as of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... you young beast—I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that forty's just the right age for me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... down utterly. These figures—kings, princes, duchesses, queens—all are real to me now, and all are infinitely pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. With what inalienable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded silks, flaunting sere ruffles of point-lace, which at a touch now would be shivered like cobwebs! My heart goes out to them through the glass that divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them company, always. I think ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the sere And autumn leaves decayed, The mournful forest tells how quickly fade The glories of the year! When in the silent tomb oppressed, Frail man, with weight of days, Sinks to his tranquil rest; Contented nature but obeys Her everlasting law,— The general doom awakes no shuddering awe! But, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... which we passed did not seem so very unlike that which I had left, except that it was more level and less wintry. In summer time the wide fields would have shown me new sights, and the way-side hedges blossomed with new flowers; now, everything was sere and sodden, and a general air of shiftlessness prevailed, which would have caused a New England farmer much disgust, and a strong desire to "buckle to," and "right up" things. Dreary little houses, with chimneys built outside, with ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... dump in the depe as all drowne wolde. Was no stightlyng with stere ne no stithe ropes, Ne no sayle, at might serue for unsound wedur. But all the buernes in the bote, as hom best liked, Besoght unto sainttes & to sere goddes; (p.65) ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... now, at the beginning of spring, in this part of Africa it was already pushing. Even if it were not, the beasts could live upon what herbage remained over from last summer and on the leaves of trees, neither of which in this winter veld ever become quite lifeless, whereas on the sere and fire-swept plains beyond the mountains they might find nothing at all. So we determined to risk the savages and the lions which followed the game into these hot districts, especially as it was not yet the fever season or that of the heavy rains, so that ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... sere and the rain dishevels One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. Only the wind here hovers and revels In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply, of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... one rival—Fear; Who follows ever on his footsteps, sent By jealous Fate who calls great joy a crime. While in far ways 'mong leaves just turning sere, With gaze serene and placid, walks Content. No heart ere held these ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after him another ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped in more than the darkness of the night, you saw in the pulsations of the lightning, before "the speedy gleams the darkness swallowed," ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the inner shut space. It was a large light room with windows on Charter Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Lord Jasper continued, coming over to Henry and taking hold of his arm. "Thirty-one. I'm getting on in years, ole f'la, that's what I'm doing ... sere and yellow, so to speak ... and a chap my age doesn't want to be bothered with a damn play. He wants something ... something substansl!..." He fumbled over the word "substantial" and then fell on it. "Something substansl," he repeated. "Now, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... sustained his sorrows in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... vale is yellow and sere, The ancient elms seem withered and bare, The river asleep in its rushy bed, The waters are green, and the grass is red, The roses are dead in the sylvan bowers, Where oft in the dewy evening hours, Ere yet the fairies had sought the dell, And the merle was singing her day-farewell, The Lady Etheline ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... in far days Of Music's dim beginning—even so, Truth was at full within thee long ago, Alive as now it takes what latest shape May startle thee by strangeness. Truths escape Time's insufficient garniture; they fade, They fall—those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine And free through March frost: May dews crystalline Nourish truth merely,—does June boast the fruit As—not new vesture merely but, to boot, Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall Myth after myth—the husk-like ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... when her love lay cold in death, Sunk in the black and silent tomb, All sere and withered was the wreath That ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... truly that we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... onehead to our Lord that lieth in knowing and loving of God, in light and ghostly brenning of Him, in transforming of the soul in to the Godhead; but also many other comforts, savours, sweetnesses, and wonderful feelings on sere[160] or sundry manners, after that our Lord vouchethsafe to visit His creatures here in earth, and after that the soul profiteth and waxeth in charity. Some soul, by virtue of charity that God giveth it, is so cleansed, that all creatures, and all that he heareth, or seeth, or feeleth by any ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... with fair remembrances of summer, and the earth was golden and red; and the sky was folded in lawny clouds, which the breeze was lifting, revealing beautiful spaces of blue. All the abundant hedgerows were red with the leaf of the wild cherry, and the oak woods wore masses of sere and russet leafage. Spreading beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood. Sprays trembled on naked rods, ferns ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... little flickering patches of morning sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss or over the sere pine-spills. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... poverty of its occupant, who put it to the additional use of sitting-room and study, made the lack of space particularly noticeable. The window afforded a prospect pleasant enough to eyes such as theirs. Above the lower houses on the opposite side of the way appeared tall trees, in the sere garb of later autumn, growing by old Westminster School; and beyond them, grey in twilight, rose the towers of the Abbey. From this point of view no vicinage of modern brickwork spoilt their charm; the time-worn monitors stood alone against a sky of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... long parched, long lifting to the blue Of summer's brilliant sky but russet hue Of sere grass shivering in the trade-wind's sweep. Soon, with light footfalls, from their tranced sleep The first rains bid the poppies rise anew, And trills the lark exultant summons, too. How swift at Fancy's beck those gay crowds leap To glowing life! The eager green ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of a gal—runned arter the gypsies! But she'm sobered now. Funny to think her mother, as seemed like a woman robbed of her right hand when Chris went, an' beginned to graw into the sere onusual quick for a widow, took new life as soon as her gal comed back. Just shaws what strength lies in a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... "The sere wounded one, O sweetest Dulcinea of Toboso, sends thee the health which he wants himself. If thy beauty disdain me, I cannot live. My good Squire Sancho will give thee ample account, O ungrateful fair one, of the penance I do for love of thee. Should it be thy pleasure ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the beautiful Central Park—the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered maze of brick and iron monstrosity—he saw his life lying sere and yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... now led in triumph from town to town through the winter woods. The James was behind him, the Chickahominy also; he was upon new great rivers, the Pamunkey and the Rappahannock. All the villages were much alike, alike the still woods, the sere patches from which the corn had been taken, the bear, the deer, the foxes, the turkeys that were met with, the countless wild fowl. Everywhere were the same curious, crowding savages, the fires, the rustic cookery, the covering ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... the winter! When the snow is all about; It may seem a time of trouble for the blossoms peeping out, And the sere leases of the forest and the dead grass of the hills Bring a set-back to the roses and the lilies have the chills; But the world is rolling onward! and the spring is drawing nigh, When the birds will spill their music through the blossoms ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... summer floweret charms, The leaves will soon be sere, And Autumn folds his jewelled arms Around the dying year; So, ere the waning seasons claim Our leafless groves awhile, With golden wine and glowing flame We 'll ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... my memory. If they'd come from somebody else they mightn't have meant so much. But from one's own husband—Wow!—they go in like a harpoon. And they have given me a great deal to think about. There are times, I find, when I can accept that intimation of slipping into the sere and yellow leaf without revolt. Then the next moment it fills me with a sort of desperation. I refuse to go up on the shelf. I see red and storm against age. I refuse to bow to the inevitable. My spirit recoils at the thought ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... in 't: Like mistletoe on sere elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... few soldiers remaining busied themselves over their mess fires. Jacques looked down a cove not quite as steep as the rest of the cliff, yet as nearly perpendicular as any surface on which trees and bushes can take hold. It was clothed with a thick growth of sere weeds, cut by one hint of a diagonal line. Perhaps laborers at a fulling mill now rotting below had once climbed this rock. Rain had carried the earth from above in small cataracts down its face, ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... summer passed away, and the forest put on the sere and sombre robes of autumn, and yet no visible change—none at least more favorable to the wishes of William Hinkley—took place in the character and conduct of the maiden. Her mind, on the contrary, seemed to take something ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... oppressed her; she put on her thickest wrappings, and took the street leading to the nearest park. A steel-grey sky, with slowly-trailing clouds, looked down on her, and the keen, chilly wind wafted a fine snow-powder in her face as she pressed against it. The trees were bare, and the sere grass grew hoary as the first snow-flakes of the season came down softly and shroud-like. The walks were deserted, save where a hurrying form crossed from street to street, homeward bound; and Electra passed slowly along, absorbed in thoughts colder than the frosting that gathered on shawl ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Shall win man's praise and woman's love; Shall be a wisdom that we set above All other skills and gifts to culture dear, 215 A virtue round whose forehead we enwreathe Laurels that with a living passion breathe When other crowns are cold and soon grow sere. What brings us thronging these high rites to pay, And seal these hours the noblest of our year, 220 Save that our ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Before her lay sere, brooding fields sloping down to a sandy shore, where long foamy ripples were lapping with a murmur that threaded the hushed air ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is a deeper story of what may be performed by brave hearts when they leave the fruitful fields behind them and turn with all their hearts to woo the desert that turns her forbidding face to them at their coming, and holds, closely hidden within her sere ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... eventful future. Mary Queen of the Scots was a tiny infant in swaddling clothes. The labors of Rafael Sanzio were still fresh in the memory of his surviving pupils. Michael Angelo was in the zenith of his fame, bending his energies to the beautifying of the great cathedral. Martin Luther was in the sere old age of his life, waiting for the command of the Master, which should bid him lay down his armor. A hundred years were to elapse before Charles I. of England must pay with his life the price ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... life is called a jaunt, In sadness rife, in sunshine scant, Though mundane joys, the wisest grant, Have no enduring basis: 'Tis something in this desert drear, For thee so fresh, for me so sere, To find in Puss, our daughter dear, ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... to redeem his forlorn failure. Mitchel, who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. A man, who cannot be crushed, or bowed, or broken; anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splendors of heaven and earth, and calmly waiting for the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... hopeless desolation of the approach of minter. The hard, wiry grass that thinly covered the once and sand, the occasional stunted weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish undergrowth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some great iceberg; ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... low by autumn's wind and rain, Through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, Shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed 5 In many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light The pumpkin's sphere ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... you could not come on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... So from his barren poll one hoary lock Over his wrinkled front fell far adown, Well nigh to where his frosty brows did frown Like jagged icicles at cottage eaves; And for his coronal he wore some brown And bristled ears gather'd from Ceres' sheaves, Entwined with certain sere and russet leaves." ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of a great, rambling, old house, set in the midst of a wide lawn, brown and sere now with approaching winter, and surrounded by huge, knotted, gnarled, old oaks, whose dry leaves still clung to the twisted branches and rustled in the crisp air. A fat, sleek, black Tabby lay asleep on the warm porch-rail; a gaunt, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Maiesty shall haue Tribute of mee: [Sidenote: on me,] the aduenturous Knight shal vse his Foyle and Target: the Louer shall not sigh gratis, the humorous man[6] shall end his part in peace: [7] the Clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a'th' sere:[8] and the Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke Verse shall halt for't[9]: [Sidenote: black verse] what Players ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... right in saying that charges of any kind were difficult of digestion: Yet, even at that moment, Elizabeth had no more attached subjects in England than sere the burghers of the Netherlands; who were as anxious ever to annex their territory ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was mild, yet somewhat overcast by tho mists which announce coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere's house. Many leaves were yet left on the boughs; but they were sere and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady Lansmere had received her kindly, but with a certain restraint; and the loftiness of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... jetted steam, dead clouds awoke And quivered on the Western rim. Then the singing started: dim And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds That whistle as the wind leads. The South whispered hard and sere, The North answered, low and clear; And thunder muffled up like drums Beat, whence the East wind comes. The heavy sky that could not weep Is loosened: rain falls steep: And thirty singing furies ride To split the sky from side ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... season when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of this. In the contemporary gloss which an anonymous friend of Spenser's furnished to his Shepherd's Calendar, first published in 1579, "for the exposition of old words", as he declares, he thinks it expedient to include in his list, the following, 'dapper', 'scathe', 'askance', 'sere', 'embellish', 'bevy', 'forestall', 'fain', with not a few others quite as familiar as these. In Speght's Chaucer (1667), there is a long list of "old and obscure words in Chaucer explained"; including 'anthem', ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the blue horizon to the shore, Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor, Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence, When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill And autumn winds are still; To watch the East for some emerging sign, Wintry Capella or the Pleiades Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; Ravished in hours like these Before thy universal shrine To feel the invoked presence hovering near, He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... look'd hot and like to fade. Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries, Sere with September, droop'd the chestnut-trees. 'Twas dawn; a brougham roll'd through the streets ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... friend hast thou found in me, And rest in my little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower lay Beneath ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... sufficiently small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the change ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the conscientious studies of our old associates in the great work of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to assist us: such as those of Emile Begin, Elzear Blaze, Depping, Benjamin Guerard, Le Roux de Lincy, H. Martin, Mary-Lafon, Francisque Michel, A. Monteil, Rabutau, Ferdinand Sere, Horace de Viel-Castel, A. de ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... too, of woodlands lover, Dusk October, berry-stained; Wailed about of parting plover,— Thou then, too, of woodlands lover. Fading now are copse and cover; Forests now are sere and waned. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... the year is new, Nor changes, when its frosts appear: For the star still shines in its ground of blue, And the pine tree lives when the rest are sere. From the pine my thoughts ascend above To the Tree of LIfe that Heaven adorns; From the star to the Star of my Saviour's Love, That grandly shone ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... of the Coulee.—The grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in. This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest of the day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed it, for I did not, but because I dreaded to dismount. I hated to get off in pieces. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Sere'na, allured by the mildness of the weather, went into the fields to gather wild flowers for a garland, when she was attacked by the Blatant Beast, who carried her off in its mouth. Her cries attracted to the spot Sir Calidore, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... bad, Colonel! But to tell the truth, I wouldn't miss what we used to call the shindy, and these boys of yours term the 'scrap' for a pile of Kruger sovereigns. And—I can shoot better than most men, if I am in the sere and yellow sixties." The Mayor was slightly ruffled; the diplomatic touch smoothed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Whalley] in Lancashyre, by the mene of a blacke monke of Abyngtone [Abingdon] in a wode called Cletherwode [the wood of Clitheroe], besyde Bungerly hyppyngstones, by Thomas Talbott, sonne and heyre to sere Edmunde Talbot of Basshalle, and Jhon Talbott, his cosyne, of Colebry [i.e. Salebury, in Blackburn], withe other moo; which discryvide [him] beynge at his dynere at Wadyngton halle: and [he was] carryed to London on horsebake, and his leges bownde ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... branches whined in the light night breeze; You led me down to the water's brink, "The Spring where the Panthers come to drink At night; there is always water here Be the season never so parched and sere." Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men? I fain would have ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... spite of the flowers scattered round it having been withered black! Of all the things in the room their greeting strikes me as sincere. They are still here simply because it was not felt worth while even to remove them. Never mind; let me welcome truth, albeit in such sere and sorry garb, and look forward to the time when I shall be able to do so unmoved, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the bearers bore him across the sere plateau towards a stone that lay almost in its centre. Presently they halted, and, pointing to this mass, the ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... "Sol-monath," from the returning sun. March "Rhede, or Rhede monath," rough, or rugged month. April "Easter monath," from a favourite Saxon goddess, whose name we still preserve. May was "Trimilchi," from the cows being then milked thrice in the day. June "Sere monath," dry month. July "Maed monath," the meads being then in their bloom. August was "Weod monath," from the luxuriance of weeds. September "Haerfest monath." October they called "Winter fylleth," from winter approaching ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... the reason. So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,—then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished. He stood by the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... if she Autumn were, Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown, For whom should she have waked the sullen Year? To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear, 5 Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both Thou, Adonais; wan they stand and sere Amid the faint companions of their youth, With dew all turned to ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... them; and on reflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, going off in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, would care for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he were to take ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... bright, bleak skies, sere leaves tossing, sad winds sobbing, and rains that wept for days and nights together, on dead flowers and dying grasses, moaned itself away at last, and December swept into its place with a good rousing snow-storm, merry sleigh-bells, and bright promises of coming Christmas. ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... continued—and something of the pathos which belongs to deep emotion vibrated in the eloquent voice, accustomed to command and persuade—"we strip not the green leaves for our yulehearths—we gather them up when dry and sere. Leave youth on the bough—let the bird sing to it—let it play free in the airs of heaven. Smoke comes from the branch which, cut in the sap, is cast upon the fire, and regret from the heart which is severed from the world while the world ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Philanor, verily even the glory of thy fleet feet would have fallen into the sere leaf unrenowned, abiding by the hearth of thy kin, as a cock that fighteth but at home, had not the strife of citizen against citizen driven thee from Knosos ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... in Sloane Square is really a Home for Superannuated Horses. It is a sort of equine Athenaeum. No horse is ever seen there till it has passed well into the sere and yellow. A Sloane Square cab-horse may be distinguished by the dignity of its movements. It is ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... obliged. I do not think I shall take any arsenic; shall send partridges to Mr. Yarrell; much obliged. Ask Edward to BARGAIN WITH Clemson to make for my gun—TWO SPARE hammers or cocks, two main-springs, two sere-springs, four nipples or plugs—I mean one for each barrel, except nipples, of which there must be two for each, all of excellent quality, and set about them immediately; tell Edward to make inquiries about prices. I go on Sunday per packet to Plymouth, shall stay one or ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin |
