"Brier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the village, And the house in the maple-gloom, And the porch with the honeysuckles And the sweet-brier all abloom. ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... pleading with me to accept them and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. I see the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbidden fields, and only regained my path after weary wandering, brier-torn, and none the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might have gladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have made happier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring its ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... to yonder howe, bonnie Peggie, O! Down ayont the gowan knowe, bonnie Peggie, O! When the siller burn rins clear, When the rose blooms on the brier, An' where there is none to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... river, would not go back the way he had come. He would travel upstream and mail his letter when he found the village. Kenny conversely had found the village first. Therefore he must travel downstream to find the wood; downstream through a disheartening tangle of bush and tree and brier ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... till their patrimonies be consumed, and that they have spent more in seeking than the thing is worth, or they shall get by the recovery." So that he that goes to law, as the proverb is, [516]holds a wolf by the ears, or as a sheep in a storm runs for shelter to a brier, if he prosecute his cause he is consumed, if he surcease his suit he loseth all; [517]what difference? They had wont heretofore, saith Austin, to end matters, per communes arbitros; and so in Switzerland (we are informed by [518]Simlerus), ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of us who were left alive and unhurt that shameful July day sat gloomily smoking our brier-wood pipes, thinking our thoughts, and listening to the rain pattering against the canvas. That, and the occasional whine of a hungry cur, foraging on the outskirts of the camp for a stray bone, alone broke the ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... blood; They hunt every man his brother with a net. Both hands are put forth for evil, To do it diligently. The prince asketh and the judge is ready for reward, And the great man, he uttereth the evil of his soul; Thus they weave it together. The best of them is as a brier; The most upright is worse than a thorn hedge. A man's enemies are the men of his ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... In the reports of Sherman's division this rivulet is treated as the main branch of Owl Creek, and called by that name. From the same rising ground, ravines, wet only after a rain, extend east and southeast to Lick Creek. From the same position extend the head ravines of Brier Creek,[1] a deep ravine with little water, which flows almost due north and empties into Snake Creek a little below the mouth of Owl Creek. The three principal creeks, Lick, Snake, and Owl, flow through swampy valleys, bordered by abrupt ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... meals, of books, of extra fees, the estimated allowances for clothing and spending-money dazed the poor shoe clerk and nearly sent Eric into business. But, fortunately, the brier pipe came to the rescue with an unexpected legacy from ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... a honeysuckle bough and brought it back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... butterfly-weed, like a coal of fire, Blurs orange-red through bush and brier; Where the pennyroyal and mint smell sweet, And ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... all hatched and gashed by the artillery, I made up my mind to one matter. "She must have clothes!" thought I, "and that's flat!" Perhaps not such as befitted her, but something immediate, and not in tatters—something stout that threatened not to part and leave her naked. For the brier-torn rags she wore scarce seemed to hold together; and her small, shy feet peeped through her gaping shoon in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... mother sat very close together as they drove through the familiar village streets. When they did speak, it was incoherently. There was an odor of brier roses in the air and the sun was setting in a "bed of daffodil sky." Kate felt waves of beauty and tenderness breaking over her and wanted to cry. Her mother wanted to and did. Neither trusted herself to speak, but when they were in the house Mrs. Barrington pulled the pins out of Kate's hat ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and through these set the sun, so that on the hottest days the garden was in sufficient shadow by the time the morning's work was done. There was a little grass-plot, large enough for a basket-chair and a rug. There was a hedge of Penzance sweet-brier opposite the backdoor and the window at which Langholm wrote, and yet this hedge broke down in the very nick and place to give the lucky writer a long glimpse across a green valley, with dim woods upon the opposite hill. And then there were the roses, planted by the last cottager—a retired ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... have lost communication with the front. A small cavalry raid cut the Savannah Railroad and telegraph, this morning, at Brier Creek, twenty-six miles from here. Gen. Wheeler was, yesterday, confronting the enemy's infantry at Sandersville. An officer, who left Macon on the 23d, states that one corps of the enemy was still confronting us there; our force not exceeding 5000, nearly all militia. The ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... a little patch of garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, where there are beautiful meadows and tall, flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern-filled ditches, ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... could be; but w'en dey wuz makin' de turn at de een' er de row, one er de plough-lines got under de mule's hin' leg. Dan retch' down ter git de line out, sorter keerless like, w'en de mule haul' off en kick him clean ober de fence inter a brier-patch on de ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... needle[obs3], bear grass [U.S.], tine, yucca. nib, tooth, tusk; spoke, cog, ratchet. crag, crest, arete[Fr], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille[obs3]; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, chevaux de frise[Fr], porcupine, hedgehog, brier, bramble, thistle; comb; awn, beggar's lice, bur, burr, catchweed[obs3], cleavers, clivers[obs3], goose, grass, hairif[obs3], hariff, flax comb, hackle, hatchel[obs3], heckle. wedge; knife edge, cutting edge; blade, edge tool, cutlery, knife, penknife, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Let him that is a true-born gentleman, And stands upon the honour of his birth, If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, From off this brier pluck a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... from couples freed, Dash through the bush, the brier, the brake While answering hound, and horn, and steed, The ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... direction of a distant cabin. When it came night and the hemlocks began to sob they had not returned. The little man sat close to his companion, the campfire, and encouraged it with logs. He puffed fiercely at a heavy built brier, and regarded a thousand shadows which were about to assault him. Suddenly he heard the approach of the unknown, crackling the twigs and rustling the dead leaves. The little man arose slowly to his feet, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... by the bracken bush, Beneath the blumin' brier; Let never living mortal ken That a ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... us at the end of the house beside the brier bush, where George was to sit on summer afternoons before he died, and a flash passed between Domsie and the lad's mother. Then she knew that it was well, and fixed her eyes on the letter, but Whinnie, his thumbs in his ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and beside it a photograph album, which had been subscribed for a few days previous by the persistent, efforts of an indefatigable canvasser. A white tidy covered the back of the rocking-chair, and another the back of the lounge. An old-fashioned pitcher filled with sweet-brier and some of the old-time flowers, such as bachelors' buttons, London pride, blue rocket and jump-up-johnnie stood on a kind of sideboard and showed a desire to make ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander ever where, Swifter than the moones sphere; And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green: The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... pondered, Grace Margaret called her attention to an alluring picture behind her. Under the shelter of a blossoming white hydrangea lay Genevieve Maud fast asleep. It was a dirty and an exhausted Genevieve Maud, worn with the heat and toil of the day, scratched by bush and brier, but wonderfully appealing in her helplessness—so appealing, that Helen Adeline's heart yearned over her. She conquered the ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... reared her head. She was like the wild sweet-brier roses which crowded alluvial strips of the island, fragrant and pink and bristling. "Yes, monsieur, that black feather—regard it. Me, I am sick of that black feather. You say I have concealments. I have. All winter I go lonely. The ice is massed on the ...
— The Black Feather - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... with a rose or a brier? Will it come with a blessing or curse? Will its bonnets be lower or higher? Will its ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... supreme and immaculate taste Has a paradise form'd from a wilderness waste; With his walks rectilineous, all shelter'd with trees, That shut out the sunshine and baffle the breeze, And a field, where the daughters of Erin{12}may roam In a fence of sweet-brier, and think they're ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... presented themselves; plots of ground raised on beds, each a few feet wide, with intervening trenches to carry off the boggy water, where potatoes had grown, and small fields where grew more ragwort than grass, enclosed by banks cast up and tipped here and there with a brier or a stone. It was the husbandry of misery and indigence. The ground had already been freshly manured by sea-weeds, but the village, where was it? Blotches of burnt-ground, scorched heaps of rubbish, and ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... her coming he knew nothing at all. She had appeared and, he supposed, disappeared. Of Winchester's attack upon him, and the subsequent chase, his memory was clearer. How he had escaped, however, at the foot of the brier-clad slope, he could not conceive. He could have sworn that for the last thirty paces the man was not three ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... spat and renewed the tobacco in a black brier, then proceeded to draw the parrallel between dogs and horses and Peter ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... could see nothing in the tangle of brier and saw-palmetto, but after a while he became aware of a wild-cat, tufted ears flattenend, standing in the shadow of a striped bush and looking at him out of the greenest eyes ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... you seen but a bright lily grow Before rude hands have touched it? Have you marked but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath smutched it? Have you felt the wool of the beaver Or swan's-down ever? Or have smelled of the bud of the brier, Or the nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? Oh so white, oh so soft, oh ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young girl before I died, and now was my chance. She never would know it, and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment! Would it wake her from her trance? and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph, and hate and despise me ever after? Or should I carry off my trophy undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked upon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wide and capacious Kaskaskia houses were but a single story high, Maria's bedroom was almost in the garden. Sweet-brier stretched above the foundation and climbed her window; and there were rank flowers, such as marigolds and peppery bouncing-betties, which sent her pungent odors. Sometimes she could see her stepmother walking the graveled paths between the vegetable beds, or her father and Rice strolling back and ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... down to the bend of the Valley River over a stretch of sandy land pre-empted by the cinque-foil and the running brier, the country of the woodcock and the eccentric kildee. We could hear the low, sullen roar of the river sweeping north around this big bend, long before we came to it. Under the stars there is no greater voice of power. We rode side by side in the deepening twilight, making ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... England in his political addresses, and had spoken more than once of going to find the cows at nightfall in the autumn evenings, and being glad to warm his bare feet in the places where the sleepy beasts had lain, before he followed their slow steps homeward through bush and brier. The Honorable Mr. Laneway had a touch of true sentiment which added much to his really stirring and effective campaign speeches. He had often been called the "king of the platform" in his adopted State. He had long ago grown used ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... became distinguished as leaders in that protracted and doubtful conflict, meeting in battle their kinsman in high command in the British army. On one occasion, when John McIntosh had surrendered at the battle of Brier Creek, a British officer, lost to every sentiment and feeling of honor, attempted to assassinate him, and was only prevented from doing so by Sir AEneas McIntosh, the commander of the English army, whose promptness arrested the blow by ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... be found upon Rose-trees and Brier bushes, little red tufts, which are certain knobs or excrescencies, growing out from the Rind, or barks of those kinds of Plants, they are cover'd with strange kinds of threads or red hairs, which feel very soft, and look not unpleasantly. In most of ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... chee: O where, what can that be? Weedio-weedio: there again! So tiny a trickle of song-strain; And all round not to be found For brier, bough, furrow, or green ground Before or behind or far or at hand Either left either right Anywhere in the sunlight. Well, after all! Ah but hark— 'I am the little woodlark. . . . . . . . To-day the sky is two ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... through the park, which, as we seemed respectable boys, she would allow us to do. We thanked her, entered, and went walking along a smooth road, through open sward, clumps of trees and an occasional piece of artful neglect in the shape of rough hillocks covered with wild shrubs, such as brier and broom. It was very delightful, and we walked along merrily. I can yet recall the individual shapes of certain hawthorn trees we passed, whose extreme age had found expression in a wild grotesqueness which would have been ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... nettles down, And cut away the brier, For deep they wound those lily arms Which you ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Aletes, born in lowly shed, Of parents base, a rose sprung from a brier, That now his branches over Egypt spread, No plant in Pharaoh's garden prospered higher; With pleasing tales his lord's vain ears he fed, A flatterer, a pick-thank, and a liar: Cursed be estate got with ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... quick and green with brier, From their sand the conies creep; And all the birds that fly in heaven ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... maybe she will feed you. She is tall and slim, her eyes are brownish purple and her hair is green, and by this you may know her—she has five fingers on one hand and seven on the other. Her house is in the brier thicket; she climbs to the roof and stands there all day waving her hands, and shouting out in wood-talk, 'There are ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... to counsel ye about that," said the schoolmaster. "She's as keen as a brier—the fox! She says, 'Keep away. Don't alarm him, or he'll bundle us off to Europe ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... woman, one to whom Heaven gave beauty when it grafted roses on a brier. You are the reflection of Heaven in a pond; and he that leaps at you is sunk. You are all white—a sheet of spotless paper—when you first are born; but you are to be scrawled and blotted by every goose's quill. I know you; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have been hungry; but now I shall get my food so easily, so pleasantly on mountains and in the fields. Oh, once I was thirsty; but now the dew is mine and the little springs. Once I traced my way painfully by forest paths through bog and brake and tangled brier. But now my pathways are in the bright, clear air, where never thorn can tear nor beast can follow. Farewell, dear ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... The farm yard, with the cowsheds, barn, and hay stack were close in front, with only a narrow strip of garden between, for there was not much heed paid to flowers, and few kitchen vegetables were grown in those days, only a few potherbs round the door, and a sweet-brier ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... From "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush." Illustrated from drawings made by Frederic C. Gordon. With a new portrait, and an introduction by the author. ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... birds, and was gay, through all its light-green depths, with the pink blossoms of the wild azalea. The hedges, on either side, were purple with young sprays, and a bright, breathing mass of sweet-brier and wild grape crowned the overhanging banks, between which the road ascended ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... always thought, of course, that I'm a pauper, and never dreamed of my poor little residuary nest-egg. I'd ordered a box of Okanagan Valley apples, and a gramophone and a dozen opera records, and a brier-wood pipe and two pounds of English "Honey-Dew," and a smoking-jacket, and some new ties and socks and shirts, and a brand new Stetson, for Dinky-Dunk's old hat is almost a rag-bag. And I ordered half a dozen of the newer novels and a set of Herbert Spencer which I heard him ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... unnecessary to pursue the subject of woods beyond the few kinds mentioned. Woods such as ebony, sandalwood, cherry, brier, box, pear-tree, lancewood, and many others, are all good for the carver, but are better fitted for special purposes and small work. As this book is concerned more with the art of carving than its application, it will save confusion ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Brevity mallongeco. Brew bierfari. Brewer bierfaristo. Brewery bierfarejo. Bribe subacxeti. Brick briko. Brick (fire) fajrsxtono. Bride novedzino. Bridge ponto. Bridle brido. Brief mallonga. Brier rozo sovagxa. Brigade brigado. Brigand rabisto. Brigandage rabado. Bright (clear) hela. Bright, to get heligxi. Brighten briligi. Brighten (polish) poluri. Brightness brilo. Brilliant brila. Brilliant (jewel) brilianto. Brimful ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... tobacco, the knotted threads of the blue vervain and the plantain, the miniature mandarin temples of the peppergrass—all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth's easter April mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of an eager, ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... somewhat difficult to find the precise spot of the day's occurrence, but he noticed that whenever he went in a wrong direction a crowd of fire-flies would start up and show him the right way, and thus he was enabled to find the sweet-brier bush. As he reached it he heard the same patter, patter, patter on the leaves of the bush, and looking up he saw what caused the sound. Troops of tiny creatures were fluttering from leaf to leaf. Each had little silvery wings like butterflies, and each carried sprigs and sprays ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... are twenty minutes' walk from the village, seem to be insignificant enough; they consist of the ridges of a few decrepit walls, from four to six feet high, which extend among the brier bushes. Archaeologists call them the aqueducts of Seranus, the Roman camp of Holderlock, or vestiges of Theodoric, according to their fantasy. The only thing about these ruins which could be considered remarkable is a stairway to a cistern cut in the ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... child, I trod thy sands, The sands unbuilded, rank with brush and brier And blossom—chased the sea-foam on thy strands, Young city of my love and my desire! I saw thy barren hills against the skies, I saw them topped with minaret and spire, On plain and slope thy myriad walls arise, Fair city of my love and my desire. With thee the Orient touched heart and ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of heredity, especially, understand all of their subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in that brier-patch, and have really explored it without coming to the end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying. Now I do not propose to rely merely on myself to tell them what they ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... nearly out of all shape. He had no coat, no waistcoat, no braces, and nothing round his neck. Round his waist there was a strap or belt, from the front of which hung a small pouch, and, behind, a knife in a case. And stuck into a loop in the belt, made for the purpose, there was a small brier-wood pipe. As he dashed his hat off, wiped his brow, and threw himself into a rocking-chair, he certainly was rough to look at, but by all who understood Australian life he would have been taken to be a gentleman. He was a young squatter, well known west of the Mary River, in ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... his swivel chair, his feet on the desk, a brier pipe in his mouth, as Hugh entered the cubbyhole of an office. Down came the feet with ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... much like vnto that which in England is called the China root brought from the East Indies. And we know not any thing to the contrary but that it may be of the same kinde. These roots grow many together in great clusters, and do bring foorth a brier stalke, but the leafe in shape farre vnlike: which being supported by the trees it groweth neerest vnto, will reach or climbe to the top of the highest. From these roots while they be new or fresh, being chapt into small ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... and thither looking vainly for some road to lead them out of the bushy trap. They could not go back; the fence was too solid to ride down, too high to leap; the carbineers faced about, trying to make a stand, firing from their saddles; Colonel Arran, confused but cool, turned his brier-torn horse and rode forward, swinging his heavy sabre, just as Hallam and Berkley galloped up through the bushes, followed by forty or more bewildered troopers, and halted fo'r orders. But ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... upon the bench they found a little old man, his legs extended, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and a look of calm meditation upon his round and placid face. Between his teeth was a black brier ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... season was spent in learning the lay of the land, and the bramble and brier mazes. And Rag learned them so well that he could go all around the swamp by two different ways and never leave the friendly briers at any place for more than ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a while at the old seat under the rowan-tree. We could only just reach it, the burn is so full. And look at all the flowers I found in the cottage-garden—heart's-ease, and daisies, and sweet-brier, and thyme. It seemed a pity to leave them, with nobody to see them. Give me something to put them in, Mrs Stirling, and I'll leave some of them for you. We will have time enough ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... hepaticas nodded on their slender stems, while the crimson and white wood-sorrel fairly ran wild, creeping in and out through bush and brier, like a host of ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... hunting began, with greater zeal than before. He was hungry now; his nose grew keen as a brier for every trail. A faint smell stopped him, so faint that the keenest-nosed dog or fox would have passed without turning, the smell of a brooding partridge on her eggs. There she was, among the roots of a pine, sitting ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... sweetened them to sugary jelly, and the black wild grape by the water-courses yielded an odour that was only less material than the flavour of its juices. Every angle of the rail fences became a parterre with golden-rod, cat-brier, and the red-and-yellow pied leaves of blackberries, while a fringe of purple and white asters thrust fragile fingers through the rails below, or the stout iron-weed pushed its purple-red blooms into view at the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... the dripping sedges, quit the bramble and the brier, Leave the fields of barley stubble, for we light the watching fire; Twinkling fires across the twilight, and a bitter watch to keep, Lest the prowlers come a-thieving where the flocks ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... bury me by the bracken bush, Beneath the blooming brier: Let never living mortal ken That ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... and scentless imitations of works of art. Here, in their season, flourished abundantly all those productions of Nature which are now banished from our once delighted senses; huge bushes of honey-suckle, and bowers of sweet-pea and sweet-brier, and jessamine clustering over the walls, and gillyflowers scenting with their sweet breath the ancient bricks from which they seemed to spring. There were banks of violets which the southern breeze always stirred, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... do; and the mile I ran for the doctor, when she snuffed that long brier up into her nose. I never saw father more alarmed. After he pulled the brier out, there was a whole pailful of blood, which frightened old Blackey so much that they were obliged ...
— Minnie's Pet Horse • Madeline Leslie
... erbout as fast as he can. An' byme-by somefin' grab' li'l' Mose by de aidge of he coat, an' he fight' an' struggle' an' cry out: "Dey ain't no ghosts. Dey ain't no ghosts." An' dat ain't nuffin' but de wild brier whut grab' him, an' dat ain't nuffin' but de leaf ob a tree whut brush' he cheek, an' dat ain't nuffin' but de branch ob a hazel-bush whut brush' he arm. But he downright scared jes de same, an' he ain't lose no time, 'ca'se de wind an' de owls an' de rain-doves ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... Charlotte, busy over a sturdy stock of eglantine. Guy, little changed in these two years,—not much taller, and more agile than robust,—was lopping vigorously with his great pruning-knife, Amabel nursing a bundle of drooping rose branches, Charlotte, her bonnet in a garland of wild sweet-brier, holding the matting and continually getting entangled in ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one end, but it don't give much air, and this August sun is apt to get a little warm on the clapboards. And I don't suppose it smells very well in there; but the coon can't help that; it's the way nature scented him; she hadn't any sweet brier handy at the time. And be careful not to step on him. He's not very good-tempered, but I reckon he won't bite you if you ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... ground with an abundance of skunk cabbage and a fairly dense growth of saplings, and near by a tangle of green brier and blackberry, and you will be pretty sure to have it tenanted by a pair of yellowthroats," says Dr. Abbott, who found several of their nests in skunk-cabbage plants, which he says are favorite cradles. No animal cares to touch this plant if it can be avoided; but have the birds themselves ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the bass, which was still kept up after thirty years, even as the memory of its lonely tenant lived on the lake where another generation of woodsmen had replaced his. But what was the old black brier-wood pipe doing on the head-rail between the two graves? I looked about me with an involuntary start as I noticed that the ashes of the last smoke were still in the bowl, expecting I hardly knew what in the ghostly ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Old Dick Neeland, ruddy, white-haired, straight as a pine, stood up in his old slippers and quilted smoking coat, his brier pipe poised ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook—he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... the bridge by the mill, long since deserted and now a thing of ruin and decay. A man in knickerbockers stood leaning against the rail, idly gazing down at the trickling stream below. The brier pipe that formed the circuit between hand and lips sent up soft blue coils to float away on ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... assembling neighbours meet, And tread departed friends beneath their feet; And new-brier'd graves, that prompt the secret sigh, Shew each the spot where he himself must lie. Midst timely greetings village news goes round, Of crops late shorn, or crops that deck the ground; Experienc'd ploughmen in the circle join; While sturdy boys, ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... also thought that the horses found in the morning in their pasture ground with tangled manes and tails, and bodies covered with mud, had been during the night used by Spirits, who rushed them through mire and brier, and that consequently they presented the appearance of animals who had followed the hounds in a long chase through a ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... interests of true sportsmanship, they must have those annual massacres I certainly should admire to see what execution a picked half dozen of American quail hunters, used to snap-shooting in the cane jungles and brier patches of Georgia and Arkansas, could accomplish among English pheasants, until such time as their consciences mastered them and they ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... noseless angel on the nearest tombstone. The loss of the nose had distorted the marble smile into a grimace, which gave a leer to the remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed suddenly, and his voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he sat up and glanced at his brier-scratched feet stretched upon the slab, and laughed again for the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... swinging on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his little dame, Over the mountain side or mead, Robert of Lincoln ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... spell of fine weather, very bright and serene, had been brooding over Lisconnel. It was the early spring of autumn, when leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness; the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April. The air was so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy globes unbereft of a ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... him into the right way, and when he got to the Castle it was full of folk and horses; so full it made one giddy to look at them. But Halvor was so ragged and torn from having followed the West Wind through bush and brier and bog, that he kept on one side, and wouldn't show himself till the last day when the bridal feast ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... the frush saugh wand! And wae betide the bush of brier! That bent and brake into his hand, When strength of man and ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... appetizing odor, that the meal was ready. The boys were nothing loath to fall to on the sea banquet the old salt spread before them, and so busy were they despatching the sailor's cooking, that it was not till after they concluded the meal and Bluewater Bill had his old brier pipe going that they came down to the discussion of what each of the boys had uppermost in his mind—namely, the history of Bluewater Bill's discovery of the lost treasure galleon of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of the United States, and the Statutes of Indiana. This last was a strange book for a boy to read, but Abe pored over it as eagerly as a lad to-day might read "The Three Guardsmen," or "The Hound of the Baskervilles." He made notes of what he read with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. If he did not have these handy, he would write with a piece of charcoal or the charred end of a stick, on a board, or on the under side of a chair or bench. He used the wooden fire shovel for a slate, shaving ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... was the brier-patch, with its secret chamber. By dint of long hours of toil and a purloined kitchen-knife they had tunneled into a clearing in the center of the thicket. Of all their retreats, this one alone had ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... at score through tangled cover, their merry peal ringing from brake and brier, clashing against the rocks, moaning musically away ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... wife, 'Where is my funny pipe?' and she hands him a long-handled affair with a weichsel-wood bowl and a cherry stem that has a kind of rakish, good-natured curve to it. Then he sits down and grinds out copy that will make an Englishman laugh at first sight. A big, dumpy brier, with a shorter stem and a celluloid end, is responsible for general descriptive work, sporting news, etc., while a trim little meerschaum with a carved bowl engenders excellent criticisms of music and drama. Occasionally, too, this bright fellow, who does considerable work on ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... old-fashioned stone mansion said to be modelled after the cocked hat of Peter the Headstrong. Its low stories were full of nooks and angles. There were roses and hollyhocks like rows of sentinels, and sweet brier clambering about. The little girl thought of it many a time afterward, when it had become much more famous, as Sunnyside. Indeed, she was to sit on the old piazza overlooking the river and listen to the pleasant voice that had charmed so many people, and study ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 13. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... I worry over an imprisoned woodchuck; but then I should never again try to destroy a woodchuck by walling up his hole, any more than Br'er Fox would try to punish the rabbit by slinging him a second time into the brier-patch. ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... During a heavy snow I have seen numbers of them feeding upon the seeds of various weedy growths in a large market-garden well into town.) "Pressing on, the walk became exhilarating. Followed a little brook, the eastern branch of the Tiber, lined with bushes and a rank growth of green-brier. Sparrows started out here and there, and flew across the little bends and points. Among some pines just beyond the boundary, saw a number of American goldfinches, in their gray winter dress, pecking the pinecones. A golden-crowned kinglet was there also, a ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... sign of resentment or of injured feelings in his face as he lit the gas in his own room. On the contrary, he grinned cheerfully at his reflection in the glass, and, pulling open his top drawer, took from the remote corner an unmistakably sophisticated brier and a package of Yale Mixture, and proceeded to light up. He grinned again as his teeth clamped on the stem, and jerked it into the corner of his mouth with a practiced twist of his tongue. Then he picked up a small and well-thumbed book ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... begin to enjoy more than ever the pure still characters which I meet. Intellect is not quite satisfying though so alluring. It is a scentless flower; but there is a purer summer pleasure in the sweet-brier than the dahlia, though one would have each in his garden. It is because Shakespeare is not solely intellectual, but equally developed, that his fame is universal. The old philosophers, the sheer intellects, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... the resemblance begins and ends, Mr. Gregory. I assure you I am a veritable Scotch brier. But here we are at our destination. I wonder if you will ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Apple seed and apple thorn, Wire, brier, limber lock, Three geese in a flock; Along came Tod, With his long rod, And scared them all to Migly-wod. One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.— Make your way ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the refuge he had found. "I 'xpect it's time for night prayers," she said, with a tremor in her voice; "and I always say them with mother or Joan." Now she knelt upon the damp mould, made the Sign of the Cross, and, clasping her brier-scratched hands, repeated the "Our Father" and "Hail Mary" more devoutly than ever before. When she came to the special little petition at the close, "Please, God, take care of Tilderee, and keep her and Fudge out of mischief," she broke down again, and, weeping convulsively, ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... as if determined not to listen to anything that would make her unwilling to complete her errand. So, clambering over fallen trees green with moss, and slipping upon the pine needles, and occasionally getting a scratch from a brier, went Lady Idleways and Laura, until they came to an opening in the forest where the blue sky again was visible; but so, also, was a great rock before them, too high for them to climb, and no way to get around it. Pausing a moment, Laura's mother picked ...
— The Princess Idleways - A Fairy Story • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... The sweet-brier blooms on Kittery-side, And green are Elliot's bowers; Her garden is the pebbled beach, The mosses are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... that from high Heaven first came Our light, from God Himself the rushing fire? For Moses erst, amid the prickly brier, Saw God ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... more sweet [2] to be The little life of bank and brier, The bird that pipes his lone desire And dies unheard ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... rose and went downstairs to the kitchen. There was hot water in the kettle. He fetched it back, bathed her feet, drew out from the cut and scratch the flakes of granite-grit and brier-points that ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... pathos of this last remark was added to by the sincere vehemence with which it was uttered, and the mute eloquence with which he lifted up a ragged flap in the rear of his person that some envious rail or brier had torn from its position of covering ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... journey, When thou drivest on the highway, Driving with the Rainbow-daughter, Fairest bride of Sariola, Do not lead her as a titmouse, As a cuckoo of the forest, Into unfrequented places, Into copses of the borders, Into brier-fields and brambles, Into unproductive marshes; Let her wander not, nor stumble On opposing rocks and rubbish. Never in her father's dwelling, Never in her mother's courtyard, Has she fallen into ditches, Stumbled hard against the fences, Run through brier-fields, nor ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... else in the way of precaution, Loring?" he presently asked, as he threw himself down beside him, puffing at his little brier-root. ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... spake Repentance. With the speed of fire Orlando followed where the enchantress fled, Rending and scattering tree and bush and brier, And leaving wide the vestige of his tread. Nearer he drew, with feet that could not tire, And strong in hope to seise her as she sped. How vain the hope! Her form he seemed to clasp, But soon as seized, she vanished from ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... looking from some heavenly hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow, And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod, Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak, The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... ruler, so they thought proper to make the offer of that honor to the vine; but when the vine was chosen, it made use of the same words which the fig-tree had used before, and excused itself from accepting the government: and when the olive-tree had done the same, the brier, whom the trees had desired to take the kingdom, [it is a sort of wood good for firing,] it promised to take the government, and to be zealous in the exercise of it; but that then they must sit down under ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus |
