"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to hear you say so, my dear Mary," said the literal-minded Grizzy. "Certainly nothing can be prettier than the heather when it's in flower; and there is something very manly—nobody can dispute that—in high cheek-bones; and besides, to tell you a secret, Lady Maclaughlan has a husband in her eye for you. We none of us can conceive who it is, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... cried the Nightingale, "and Life is very dear 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
... tempest broke, and the building wrought by a strong man's labours, and toils, and hopes, and joys, and dolours had been lifted, and torn, and rent, and scattered as a hill-bothy of poles and straw-bundles, or a moorland shelter of heather and bushes is scattered by the fury of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... white streamer of its smoke trailing towards the sun. We turned away from the sea, got into the carriage that was waiting for us, and set our faces inland. The ocean was blotted out by the low grass and heather-covered banks that divided the fields. Presently we plunged into woods. The road descended sharply. A village, an abruptly winding ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... great king was not to enjoy for long the fruits of his victory. His hardships in the wilderness when flying from his enemies, and his great suffering and lack of food when he fled in the Scotch heather like a hunted animal, had made him fall prey to a terrible malady—the disease of leprosy. So great was the love in which the Scots held him that even this did not make them shun him with the fear that is shown toward ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... stormy and rainy day. Walked from the Court through the rain. I don't dislike this. Egad, I rather like it; for no man that ever stepped on heather has less dread than I of catch-cold; and I seem to regain, in buffeting with the wind, a little of the high spirit with which, in younger days, I used to enjoy a Tam-o'-Shanter ride through darkness, wind, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... picked up on the heather And there I put inside my breast A moulted feather, an eagle-feather! Well, I ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... enjoyment wealthy, Blithe as a 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! Go search the world and search the sea, Then come you home and sing with me There's no such gold and no such pearl As a bright and beautiful ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... sweeter than all Earth's melodies, "If thou wilt wander with me for ever, "And naught have power our true hearts to sever, "I shall forget all that earth calls fair, "And all that I fondly treasured there, "The meadows and hills and sunny dells, "And the birds and fragrant heather-bells, "And I will follow thee through the deep, "Where waves shall rock us to tender sleep; "All powers of ocean I will defy, "And follow thee though it be but to die!" Neptune then, "Youth thou hast bravely said, "And meet ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... 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 shots, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... 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, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... "There is scarcely any heather in my native county. No," said Peter, "no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It is an ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... above a subtle invigorating odour of marjoram, rosemary, lavender, growing wild like heather, comes down to mingle with the more languid breath of tropic plant ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Waisford parted company. "Wanmeeting is my plain road," thought he, "but plainer still it is that of Galors—and not of Galors alone. I think the longer going is like to be my shorter. I will go to Waisford." He did so. After a patch of woodland was a sandy stretch of road fringed with heather and a few pines. A man was sitting here, by whose side lay his dead young wife with a handkerchief over her face. Prosper asked him what all this misery meant; for at High March, he added, they had no conception ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... me there lay school, the place that had never brought me anything but sorrow and humiliation. I went on, but as I slid on the cobbles, my mind caught an echo of peace, the peace of pine-woods and heather, the peace of the library at home, and, my body trembling with revulsion, I leant against a lamp-post, deadly sick. Then I turned on my heels and walked away from the Meat Market and the school for ever. As I went I cried, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... solace and her curse; she flew to it for relief as the drunkard to his cup, sparkling and intoxicating for a while, but its dregs were bitterness and despair. Soon her world of imagination began to quicken; and, as the wind came sighing through her dark ringlets, or rustling over the dry grass and heather bushes at her side, she thought a spirit spoke, or a celestial messenger crossed her path. The unholy rites of the witches were familiar to her ear, but she spurned their vulgar and low ambition; she panted for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... | gloamin comes, Low in the | heather blooms. Sweet will thy | welcome and | bed of love | be. Emblem of | happiness, Blest is thy | dwelling-place; O! to a |-bide in the | desert ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... when forests are rended, Come as the waves come, when navies are stranded: Faster come, faster come, faster and faster, Chief, vassal, page and groom, tenant and master. Fast they come, fast they come; see how they gather! Wide waves the eagle plume, blended with heather. Cast your plaids, draw your blades, forward each man set! Pibroch of Donuil Dhu, knell for the onset! ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... was to form a footpath of ling or heather along the proposed road, on which a man might walk without risk of sinking. A single line of temporary railway was then laid down, formed of ordinary cross-bars about 3 feet long and an inch square, with holes punched through them at ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... boasted farms and fishing stations, the majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the very heart ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the banks of the Orne, in a rent, pieces of rock raising their slanting surfaces between some poplar trees and heather; or else they were grieved by meeting, for the entire length of the road, nothing but layers of clay. In the presence of a landscape they admired neither the series of perspectives nor the depth of the backgrounds, nor the undulations of the green surfaces; but that which was not visible ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... in some sheltered hollow of the hills more fitting for an eagle's nest than for the occupation of a young lady, trying to paint those ever-varying, unpaintable mountain peaks, which change their hues with every change of the sky—swimming, riding, roving far and wide over hill and heather—pleasures all more or less masculine in their nature, and which were a subject of regret with ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... a famous meeting-place for the fairies, this haunt at the foot of the mountain by the stream, for the Little Folk from the heather above used nightly to foregather in the meadow with the Little Folk from the woodland below, and there they danced the long night through among the shamrocks. But although Nora had heard about the fairies from her grandmother, who sat all day tending ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... Lambert, rising from the heather on which they had seated themselves, "it will be best to face Mother Cockleshell and Kara in order to learn what ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... the power to release us momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is a child's hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled with the remembrance of those whom we have loved. For did we not in their company walk abroad into a new world, breathe a new air, while Self, the dingy turnkey, for once slept at ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... clinging billow's clasp, From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather, The British oak with rooted grasp Her slender handful holds together; - With cliffs of white and bowers of green, And Ocean narrowing to caress her, And hills and threaded streams between, - Our little mother isle, God ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... there out of the bushes, pouring forth their caroling to the clear ether; and Marsa, spurring her thoroughbred, would dash in a mad gallop toward a little, almost unknown grove of oaks, with thickets full of golden furze and pink heather, where woodcutters worked, half buried in the long grass peppered with blue ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... round That all men will wonder where 620 Things so excellent are found. And Manteigas will prepare A store of milk for years twice seven, By Covilham much fine cloth be given That is manufactured there. 625 From the houses in the heather High upon the mountain-top, For pillows shall be sent a crop All of royal eagles' feather That men there are wont to gather. 630 From the Penados vale below And the hills where three roads meet That through rough mountain country go They will send as present meet Three ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... those wha wull compile the nation's annals, And guide oor thochts in strict historic channels; Ma Muse prefers, far fra these dull morasses, To laud the purrrple heather and the lassies." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... the moors and morasses of Glen Aline into less melancholy neighbourhoods. The very sheep seemed scarcer here than elsewhere; grouse-disease had devastated the moors, sportsmen consequently did not visit them; and only a few barren pairs, with crow- picked skeletons of dead birds in the heather now and then, showed that the shootings had once perhaps been marketable. My shepherd's cottage was four miles from the little-travelled road to Dalmellington; long bad miles they were, across bog and heather. Consequently I seldom saw any face of man, except in or about the cottage. My work went ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... After 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. He makes a point ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... shining through the empty windows. Beyond the houses, again, lie successive lines of hills, at this moment lit up by shafts of sunlight that lend a glowing warmth and richness to the fine colors of a late autumn. The hills are red and brown with rusted bracken and heather, and here and there the smooth waters of the bay catch a tinge of other and varied hues. In one of the fishing-smacks that lie almost underneath the shadow of the tall crag on which the castle ruins stand, an artist has put a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... untenanted, for on the uplands the soil was poor and water scarce. Over Crooksbury Common he passed, and then across the great Heath of Puttenham, following a sandy path which wound amid the bracken and the heather, for he meant to strike the Pilgrims' Way where it turned eastward from Farnham and from Seale. As he rode he continually felt his saddle-bag with his hand, for in it, securely strapped, he had placed ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brain whose functions have long been in latency. The Anastatica hierochuntica, commonly called the Rose of Jericho, is a wonderful example of functional latency. The plant will remain for ages rolled up like a ball of sun-dried heather, but if placed in water it will immediately open out and spread forth its nest of mossy green fronds, the transition from seeming death to life taking place in a few minutes. The hygrometric properties of the plant are certainly exceptional. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... linnet in the rocky dells, The moor-lark in the air, The bee among the heather bells ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... ours—there had been a considerable depth of water over the fen, and that it was very soft. The result was, that while the lads stopped short, and then began to pick their way from tussock to tussock, and heather patch to patch, Solomon blundered on, made a splash here, a bit of a wallow there, and then a bound, which took him in half-way up his back; and as he plunged and struck out with fore-legs and heels, he churned up the soft bog and made it softer, so that he sank ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... 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, ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... the underwood. A scene of almost unrivalled beauty here burst upon the view. For nearly a mile, a verdant walk led along, amidst the choicest evergreens, by the side of a magnificent breadth of water. The opposite shore was rich with the heather-bloom; and plantations of the most graceful trees—the larch, the ash, and the weeping birch ("the lady of the woods"), broke the line of the wide lake, and carried the imagination on, in the belief that some mighty river lay beyond ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... who wears the painted feather And may not turn about To dusks when muses romped the dewy heather In unrestricted rout And dawns when, if the stars had sung together, The ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... no armed 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 amidst 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 ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the lip of a heather-edged bluff which fell sheer for perhaps two hundred feet into a pinewood. Beyond, by mammoth terraces, the glory of the forest sank step by colossal step into the purple distance, from which distant in turn a thread of silver argued the ocean. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the haze, which gave the hillocks of gorse and heather and the slight eminences of the ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... dream last night," she says, "I wish it binna sorrow; I dreamt I pu'd the heather green Wi' my true ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... to Braeside. It was a pretty walk across a bit of moorland, through the heather and bracken, here and there a moss-grown rock, here and there across the path a tiny trickling ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... the bonny bells of heather They brewed a drink long-syne, Was sweeter far than honey, Was stronger far than wine. They brewed it and they drank it, And lay in a blessed swound For days and days together In the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... dark over the moors. The solitary lights of a cab crawling almost at a foot pace along the lonely road shone like a will-o'-the-wisp through the snow. It had been snowing for hours, steadily, thickly, and the cold was intense. The dead heather by the roadside had long been completely hidden under that ever-increasing load. It lay in great billows of white wherever the carriage lamps revealed it, stretching away into the darkness, an immense, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the benefit of seeing by a blue blaze from the zenith, and the tone of infinite scorn, in which he slowly repeated the words, "custom-house officers," were incomparable. "Afraid of them!" said he, as he rose from the wet heather, "as much afraid as the cat is of the mice. No, those are the dragoons ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the air is damp and warm from the S.E., and we smell Spain—true bill—several of us noticed the aromatic smell. Scents at sea carry great distances. "I know a man" who smelt burning wood or heather, 250 nautical miles from land, and said so and was laughed at; but he laughed last, for two or three days after his vessel beat up to some islands, from which towered a vast column of brown and white ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... and the 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 a new ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were in yon muir, Amang the heather, in my plaidie; Yet happy, happy would I be, Had I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... backbone 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
... and stockings for the whole day. She confessed afterwards, that, "besides the wastrife, it was lang or she could walk sae comfortably with the shoes as without them; but there was often a bit saft heather by the road-side, and that helped her weel on." The want of the screen, which was drawn over the head like a veil, she supplied by a bon-grace, as she called it; a large straw bonnet like those worn by ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... rustling Before I could see her shape, Rustling through the heather That wove the common's drape, On that evening of dark weather When ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... the islands on our starboard bow a little wind awoke and brought with it the scent of heather and moist earth. It was a good smell—just such a smell as our nostrils had hungered for for many months—and it stirred a host of vagrant memories as it went sighing ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... among desolate moors and bogs, and fully six miles from the nearest village. 'The house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands with the scanty fields attached as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed either by grace or grandeur, mere undulating hills of grass and heather with peat bogs in the hollows between them.' So Froude describes the home where the Carlyles were to spend six years, the wife in domestic labours, in solitude, in growing ill-health, the husband in omnivorous ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather. Up to 1807 my grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave up the idea—'such,' he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital letters, 'is the Plague of Baiting.' He was a good pedestrian; at the age of fifty-eight I find him covering ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when 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
... neighbourhood. They visited Melrose Abbey, the Tweed, and Dryburgh Abbey, not very remote from Melrose, where Scott was himself to lie; they ascended the Eildon Hills, Scott on his sheltie often stopping by the way to point out to Murray and Heber, who were on foot, some broad meadow or heather-clad ground, as a spot where some legend held its seat, or some notable deed had been achieved during the wars of the Borders. Scott thus converted the barren hillside into a region of interest and delight. From the top of the Eildons he pointed out the scene ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... head, my dear,' said grandmother; 'I believe if I could put you down on the top of the moors, and if you could get the breezes off the heather, why, my lass, I believe you'd ...
— Poppy's Presents • Mrs O. F. Walton
... although wounded, I should have done—when the branch he clung to, slowly yielded with his weight, and the round, plump figure of my poor friend rolled over the little cleft of rock, and, after a few faint struggles, came tumbling heavily down, and at last lay peaceably in the deep heather at the bottom—his cries the whole time being loud enough to rise even above the vociferous ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... be noted is the impression of open air given by nearly all the branches of this romance, in spite of the brevity of the descriptions. We are in the fields, by the hedges, following the roads and the footpaths; the moors are covered with heather; the rocks are crowned by oaken copse, the roads are lined with hawthorn, cabbages display in the gardens the heavy mass of their clustering leaves. We see with regret the moment when "the sweet time of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... sleek coats and full stomachs. Nature abhors a vacuum,—therefore has nought to do with empty bellies. Happy are the men whose fate, or better philosophy, has kept them from the turnips and the heather—fortunate mortals, who, banned from the murder of partridges and grouse, have for the last few days of our contemporary, been dwellers in merry London! What exulting faces! What crowds of well-dressed, well-fed Malvolios, "smiling" at one another, though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... interest in visiting Ambleside was to see the venerable poet, Wordsworth, who lived about a mile from the village. I happened, just before supper, to look out of the window of the traveller's room and espied an old man in a blue cloak and Glengarry cap, with a bunch of heather stuck jauntily in the top, driving by in a little brown phaeton from Rydal Mount. "Perhaps," thought I to myself, "that may be the patriarch himself," and sure enough it was. For, when I inquired about Mr. Wordsworth, the landlord said to me, "A few minutes ago he went by here ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the partridge on the wing; When the tewit an' the moorgam, Up fra the heather spring, From the crowber an' the billber, An' the bracken an' the whin; As from the noisy tadpole, We hear the crackin' ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... bricks, or washed the linen, her heart sung proudly within her a joyous song because she shared a secret — a perilous secret — of which the elder woman knew nothing. Any night a stray shot might strike her as she ran over the moors, or through the heather; any night a false step might pitch her headlong into a ravine or a pool; any night, returning through the shallows of the ford, she might miss her footing and fall into one of the bottomless holes that the river hid in its depths: but ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... impressive when it is quite clear as when it contains and supports great clouds, and large blue spaces are seen between them. On the hillsides the fields here and there are yellow and the corn is in sheaves. The birds are mostly dumb, the glory of the furze and broom has passed, but the heather is in flower. The trees are dark, and even sombre, and, where they are in masses, look as if they were in solemn consultation. A fore-feeling of the end of summer steals upon me. Why cannot I banish this anticipation? Why cannot I rest and take ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... no injury." And indeed they could not, for Carmichael, except on Sundays and at funerals, wore a soft hat and suit of threadbare tweeds, on which a microscopist could have found traces of a peat bog, moss of dykes, the scale of a trout, and a tiny bit of heather. ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... We walked also to a clear mountain torrent which comes thundering down among great boulders and dense tropical vegetation at the foot of the mountains, as clear and cold as if it were a Highland stream dashing through the purple heather. [*Since my visit there have been three fatal outbreaks of this epidemic, three thousand deaths having occurred among the neighboring miners and coolies. So firmly did the disease appear to have established itself, that a large permanent hospital was erected ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... white birds, the crane and gull The fields are full, while cuckoos cry— No mournful music! Heath-poults dun Through russet heather sunward fly. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... sheep pasture on the short, fine, elastic turf. You look down on Combehurst and its beautiful church-spire. After the field is crossed, you come to a common, richly colored with the golden gorse and the purple heather, which in summer-time send out their warm scents into the quiet air. The swelling waves of the upland make a near horizon against the sky; the line is only broken in one place by a small grove of Scotch firs, which always look black and ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and the slope grown steeper was covered with heather and ling; and looking up, he saw before him quite near by seeming in the clear even (though indeed they were yet far away) the snowy peaks flushed with the sinking sun against the frosty dark-grey eastern sky; and below them the dark rock-mountains, and ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... twenty miles of the castle was varied in character and rich in beauty. In the purple distance, to the west of the castle, there was a range of heather-clad hills; and between those hills and the village of Raynham there flowed a noble river, crossed at intervals by quaint old bridges, and bordered by little villages, nestling amid ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... at St. Fillans, and again cheered the heart of the Maid with unaccustomed corn—the S. Q. N., Duchie, and myself, going up to the beautiful rising ground at the back of the inn, and lying on the fragrant heather looking at the Loch, with its mild gleams and shadows, and its second heaven looking out from its depths, the wild, rough mountains of Glenartney towering opposite. Duchie, I believe, was engaged in minor business close ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... that sheddest Its beautiful leaves, in the Spring time may bloom, But of cold things the coldest, of dead things the deadest, Love buried once, rises not from the tomb. Green things may grow on the hillside and heather, Birds seek the forest and build there and sing. All things revive in the beautiful weather, But unto a dead love ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... broom, blue-flowering flax, and the contrasting green of lupines, beans, Indian corn, and potatoes. There is not a spire of genuine grass on the island, except on the Consul's lawn, but wilds covered with red heather, low faya-bushes, (whence the name of the island,) and a great variety of mosses. The cattle are fed on beans and lupines. Firewood is obtained from the opposite island of Pico, five miles off, and from the Caldeira or Crater, a pit five ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... 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 case ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many months had not elapsed since that brown creature had kicked up its little heels, and twirled its tail, and shaken its shaggy mane in all the wild exuberance of early youth and unfettered freedom on the heather hills of its ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... however, the lake, or loch, as the Scotch call it, contracts in breadth, and the land rises higher and higher, until at length you see before you a narrow sheet of water, shut in on either hand with dark and gloomy mountains, the sides of which are covered every where with ferns and heather, and seem entirely uninhabited. They descend, moreover, so steep to the water that there seems to be not even room for a path between the foot of the ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... worse for his visits. Not only was his coat a mere rag, but his breeches, clawed by the dog, were slashed into yawning gaps, while his yellow hair waved over the top of the crownless beaver, like a lonely tuft of heather on ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Moore, knew the birthdays of all the royal family, and was otherwise meekly romantic. From this source she gathered much curious sentiment relating to some visionary world where young girls were held aloft in the sunshine of luxury and love and happiness. One day she was lying on her back on the heather of the Peel hill, with her head on her arms, thinking of a story that Aunt Rachel had told her. It was of a mermaid who had only to slip up out of the sea and say to any man, "Come," and he came—he left everything ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... stroller through life, a vagabond without any definite place or people. I am trying to teach myself the simplest forms of philosophy. To-day the sky is so blue and the wind blows from the west and the sun is just hot enough to draw the perfume from the gorse and the heather. Come and walk with me over the moors. We will race the shadows, for surely we can move quicker than those fleecy little morsels ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... brightest mornings of late summer shone upon her. The heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the grasshoppers chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like little engines, and Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease upon Pansy, in her orthodox riding-habit and nondescript hat, she looked ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... was also considered a means of keeping away evil spirits. Joseph Train, writing in 1814, refers to another practice common in some parts of Scotland. Whenever the corpse is taken from the house, the bed on which the deceased lay is taken from the house, and all the straw or heather of which it was composed is taken out and burned in a place where no beast can get at it, and in the morning the ashes are carefully examined, believing that the footprint of the next person of the family who will die will be seen. This practice ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... dashing descriptions of sporting scenery. Unhappily, the melancholy which Gordon's friends had with pain observed increased daily, and in the full flood of his success, with congratulations pouring upon him from every side, he was found dead in the heather near his home with a bullet from his ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... must leave some for to-morrow!" After having washed his in a stream and carefully covered them with field-sorrel and rowell, to keep them fresh; after having wound up his line and bathed his hands and face; a sense of drowsiness tempted him to take a nap in the heather. The heat was so excessive that he preferred to wait until the shadows lengthened before reclimbing ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the sands from Porthcurnow Cove; but we ascertained that what we thought was white sand was in reality a mass of extremely small shells. The surface of the rocks above abounded with golden furze, which in summer, mingled with purple heather, formed a fine contrast. In the background was a small and dismal-looking valley known locally as the "Bottoms," which was often obscured by mists rising from the marshes below, and which few people cared to cross after nightfall. It was near the "Bottoms" that a mysterious ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... nearer hills too, sugaries, and thick pine groves, and a circle of them round the margin of the pond. Over all the great Magician of the season had waved his wand, and decked them in colours dazzling to the eyes accustomed to the grey rocks and purple heather, and to the russet garb of autumn in their ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... sprinkle the ground, the petals exquisitely varied on the reverse side, and the stamens of bright salmon color; the large double anemones have come forth, certain that it is spring; on the higher crags by the wayside the Mediterranean heather has shaken out its delicate flowers, which fill the air with a mild fragrance; while blue violets, sweet of scent like the English, make our path a perfumed one. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... much time as their duties of Court and State allowed them. It was indeed a splendid and beautiful estate, the stately tower being built upon an eminence, and there rolling out before it the most lovely land in England, moorland and hills, thick woods and broad meadows, the edge of the heather dipping to show the soft silver ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... was certainly a restful place, a regular wilderness of rocks and heather and junipers, enclosed on two sides. Far in the distance could be seen a ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... motion, went out of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to the hills. The brilliant day had become overcast, spots of rain were falling. He wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young firtrees, budding with soft paws. It was rather wet everywhere, there was a stream running down at the bottom of the valley, which was gloomy, or seemed gloomy. He was aware that he could not regain his consciousness, that ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... cried the women, and the procession passed on along the road that led past Dos d'Ane. The steamy haze lay thicker here. The wind drove it past in slow coils, but its skirts seemed to cling to the heather and bracken as though reluctant to loose ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... wave's mounting, flowing side, With stroke on stroke we rack; As down the sinking slope we slide, She cleaves a talking track— Like heather-bells on lonely steep, Like soft rain on the glass, Like children murmuring in their sleep, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... an 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 ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... over specially from England or Scotland. It has always been found impossible to rear grouse in the country. In the neighbourhood of Spa there are great stretches of moorlands reaching almost to the German frontier, covered with heather, which look as if they would be the ideal home of the grouse. Here M. Barry Herrfeldt, of the Chateau du Marteau at Spa, a real good sportsman, has tried his very utmost to rear grouse; first he laid down thousands of eggs and set them under partridges, ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... nobility which smouldered in the French peasantry. Cobbett looked back as fondly to the surroundings of his youth as any nobleman could look back to Eton or to his country mansion. He remembered the 'sweet country air' round Crooksbury Hill, the song of birds, and the rambles through heather and woodland. He loved the rough jovial sports; bull-baiting and prize-fighting and single-stick play. He had followed the squire's hounds on foot, and admired without jealousy the splendid gardens of the bishop's palace at Farnham. Squire and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer had been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always more quaint, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... moon Blown over the cold crags and fens: A little white thistle moon Blown across the frozen heather. ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... only gather broom, heather, shamrock, and edelweiss, they would be able to see clover, alfalfa, arbutus, and mignonette when they came back home. If they could see black robins in Wales and Germany, the robin redbreast here at home would surely be thought ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... appeared again, followed by Tom and the gipsy-woman; and they all bobbed curtseys to Tom once more before he left them and came across the heather towards Una, carrying something very carefully ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle |
