"Buttercup" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... longing reminiscence of an English April and May, with their young leaves and their blossoms, their sunshine and their dew, their song of the chaffinch and their rapturous music of the thrush. Appreciation is heightened by contrast; and the buttercup—England's gift to her little children—is pronounced far brighter than the "gaudy melon-flower" which the exiled Englishman has ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... in your own bright gown; The little children love you: Be the best buttercup you can, And think no ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... join in the grateful song resounding over every land; in homage to the blessing-laden blossoms? Lips long used to wailing swell that chorus loudest, for it was the sunshine caught in buttercup or dandelion that turned so many darkened faces in sudden smiles to heaven. Ah! they are the forms wasted and bowed down by anguish, that stoop most meekly, thankfully, only to lie where the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... lifts the head Of many a columbine; And, taken from their rocky bed, They in our wreaths shall twine. Saxifrage, so small and sweet, Grows in plenty at our feet; From the grass we gather up, Golden bright, the buttercup. ...
— Cousin Hatty's Hymns and Twilight Stories • Wm. Crosby And H.P. Nichols
... world green almost universally colours the leaves, yellow has more to do with the flowers. The flowers we love best are yellow: the cowslip, the daffodil, the crocus, the buttercup, half the daisy, the honeysuckle, and the loveliest rose. Yellow, too, has its turn even with the leaves; and what an artist he shows himself when, in autumn, he 'lays his fiery finger' upon them, lighting up the forlorn woodland with splashes—pure ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... her doll in a month or two more. Sweet Fern has learned to read and write, and has put on a jacket and pair of pantaloons—all of which improvements I am sorry for. Squash Blossom, Blue Eye, Plantain, and Buttercup have had the scarlet fever, but came easily through it. Huckleberry, Milkweed, and Dandelion were attacked with the whooping cough, but bore it bravely, and kept out of doors whenever the sun shone. Cowslip, during the autumn, had either the measles, or some eruption ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... glossy black. Hops climb the ash and hang their clusters, which impart an aromatic scent to the hand that plucks them; broad burdock leaves, which the mouchers put on the top of their baskets to shield their freshly gathered watercresses from the sunshine; creeping avens, with buttercup-like flowers and long stems that straggle across the ditch, and in autumn are tipped with a small ball of soft spines; mints, strong-scented and unmistakable; yarrow, white and sometimes a little lilac, whose flower is perhaps almost the last that the bee visits. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... road, the traction engine was not in sight, so they sat in the bank and waited, Mrs. Marston regal in the chair; and Hazel held a buttercup under Edward's chin to see ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... was showing the Ashland dairyman the bull calf, child of Red Rover VII and Buttercup IV, Mrs. Egg saw her oldest daughter's motor sliding across the lane from the turnpike. It held all three of her female offspring. Mrs. Egg groaned, drawling commonplaces to her visitor, but he stayed a full hour, admiring ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... gift, such as, for example, a nice potted geranium. Great care should be taken, however, that it is a plant of the correct species, for in the etiquette of courtship all flowers have different meanings and many a promising affair has been ruined because a suitor sent his lady a buttercup, meaning "That's the last dance I'll ever take you to, you big cow," instead of a plant with a more tender significance. Some of the commoner flowers and their meaning in courtship ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... struck terror to the sad-eyed aesthete, but an artist who liked to see colors burn and glow on the canvas would have been glad to paint her: a little frock of buttercup yellow calico, bare neck and arms, full of dimples, hair that put the yellow calico to shame by reason of its tinge of copper, skin of roses and milk that dared the microscope, red smiling lips, one stocking and ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... it is to be candid! And after a voyage across the seas They came to an island of flowers and trees. And, wishing to feel rather more at ease, They anchored their craft and landed! A bright little Fairy cried out from the strand, "You're welcome my darlings, to Buttercup Land!" ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... meet her on the dusty street, And daisies spring about her feet; Or, touched to life beneath her tread, An English cowslip lifts its head; And, as to do her grace, rise up The primrose and the buttercup! I roam with her through fields of cane, And seem to stroll an English lane, Which, white with blossoms of the May, Spreads its green carpet in her way! As fancy wills, the path beneath Is golden gorse, or purple heath; And now we ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Squire had been breeding a herd of Jerseys. There were sixteen of them: Jersey First, Canary, Jersey Second, Little Queen, Beauty, Buttercup, and all the rest. Each one had her own little book that hung from its nail on a beam of the tie-up behind her stall. In it were recorded her pedigree, dates, and the number of pounds of milk she gave at each ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... thistle, Nightshade, Burdock, Buttercup, Yellow dock, Dandelion, Wild carrot, Wild mustard, Ox-eye daisy, Shepherd's purse, Chamomile, St. John's-wort, Mullein, Chickweed, Dead-nettle (Lamium), Purslane, Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis), Mallow, Elecampane, Darnel, Plantain, Poison hemlock, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... now to print the lea, In freak and dance around the tree, Or at the mushroom board to sup, And drink the dew from the buttercup;— A scene of sorrow waits them now, For an Ouphe has broken his vestal vow; He has loved an earthly maid, And left for her his woodland shade; He has lain upon her lip of dew, And sunned him in her eye of blue, Fann'd her cheek with his wing of air, Played in the ringlets ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... from her native bole Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge, To a slow river at whose silent verge Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll, Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup, Bend till thine image from the pool beam up Arched with blue heaven like an aureole. See how adorable in fancy then Lives the fair face it mirrors even so, O thou whose beauty moving among men Is like the wind's way on the woods below, Filling all nature where its pathway ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... precincts of the Abbey before the tale was resumed. A flat "throuch" stone sustained the narrator, while the four disposed themselves on the sunny grass, in the various attitudes of severe inattention which youth assumes when listening to a story. Sweetheart pored into the depths of a buttercup. Hugh John scratched the freestone of a half-buried tomb with a nail till told to stop. Sir Toady Lion, having a "pinch-bug" coralled in his palms, sat regarding it cautiously between his thumbs. Only Maid Margaret, her dimpled chin on her knuckles, sat looking upward in rapt attention. ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... was really almost more than semi-detached. It had been but lightly wedged between two buttercup stalks. The two eggs in it were at once unseated, and one was broken. Sarah Brown ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... latitude, the pledge of May. It comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its "ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it bloom with the buttercup ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... brooks a-babbling tell Where the cheery daisy grows, And where in meadow or woodland dwell The buttercup ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Stingy spun it was Greenie's business to fold and put away carefully in the centre of a buttercup. He would get it and be back before it was time for Stingy to dance. He measured his way quickly over to the buttercup, his little back fairly popped into the air every other half second as he went furiously humping himself along. He found the cobweb covered with the gold dust of the ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... the Buttercup, "I Have not been at all shy In impressing that rule On each child of ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... Spring cheered her eyes and calmed the unrest of her heart, as she rode. Among the dead leaves of the woods, the snowy blossoms of the blood-root had already burst forth in starry clusters; the anemones trembled between the sheltering knees of the old oaks, and here and there a single buttercup dropped its gold on the meadows. These things were so many presentiments of brighter days in Nature, and they awoke a corresponding faith ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... Some cultivated anemones and crowfoots (Ranunculus) are of this character, and even the marsh-marigold (Caltha palustris) has a petalomanous variety. I once found in a meadow such a form of the meadow-buttercup (Ranunculus acris), and succeeded in keeping it in my garden for several years, but it did not make seeds and finally died. Camellias are known to have both types of double flowers. The petalomanous type is highly regular in structure, so much so as to be too uniform in all its parts ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... her for a short visit. When she kissed her grandmother there was gold everywhere: the gold of the heart in that holy kiss; it was a golden morning; there was gold in the beaming sunlight, gold in the leaves of the lowly flower, and on the lips of the maiden. There, that is my story," said the buttercup. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... flowers whisper; "Since thus he hath arrayed The buttercup and daisy, How canst thou ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... was a nice baby and daintily cared for, even though her home was only a stone-floored cottage. She was number one in the first place, which says a good deal, and she was an extremely healthy and satisfactory baby in herself—and altogether as sweet and fresh and loveable as a wee baby buttercup under a hedge. ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... sharp spines. Dear mother was very proud of him, and she was always hoping he would blossom, but he never did. He lived in the house in winter, but in spring Mother set him out in the flower-bed, just beside the double buttercup. So when the buttercup blossomed, with its lovely yellow balls, I played that Old Moneybags, who was an odious old miser, was counting his gold. Then, when the petals dropped, he piled his money in little ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... plan. Instead of losing his head, and standing wringing his hands 'cause the prize roses have got bugs on 'em he sets to work and kills the bugs; sprays the plants same's he would ordinary bushes, and they go to growing again like any other civilized flowers. An orchid ain't no more to him than a buttercup. He's too used to 'em. He's used to dogs as well, and with the shifting fashions he's seen during his fifty years with the family he's had experience with most every kind of dog that ever was. For there's fashions in dogs, you know, as well as in coats and hats. ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... Columbine, and Clownish fun with Pantaloonish wisdom and chuckles. When you were young, you used, I think, to enjoy a butterfly's kiss; and that, you remember, was when your mother brushed your cheek with her eye-lashes. And also when you were young you held a buttercup under other children's chins to see if they liked butter, and they always did, and the golden glow showed and the world was glad. And you held a shell to your ear to hear the sound of the sea, and ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... my dear, if you can only kick them all about in the air when you tumble? Legs are meant to walk with, you know. Now, don't be cross about it, and don't begin putting out your wings yet; I've some more to say. Go down to the frog that lives behind that buttercup—give him my compliments—Sylvie's compliments—can ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... we substitute familiar flowers for the notation, then YR7 becomes the buttercup, and B3 is the wild violet. But, in comparing the two, the eye is more stimulated by the buttercup than by the violet, not alone because it is lighter, but because it is stronger in chroma; that is, farther away from the neutral axis of the sphere, and in fact out ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... of their own cows. He could shut his eyes and see how each one looked. Clover was red, Teenie black, and Buttercup had white ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... till about the 1st of April that many wild flowers may be looked for. By this time the hepatica, anemone saxifrage, arbutus, houstonia, and bloodroot may be counted on. A week later, the claytonia or spring beauty, water-cress, violets, a low buttercup, vetch, corydalis, and potentilla appear. These comprise most of the April flowers, and may be found in great profusion in the Rock Creek and ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... beliefs seem to be peculiarly indubitable. One might instance the belief that two and two are four, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, nor one thing in two places, or that a particular buttercup that we are seeing is yellow. The suggestion we are to examine is that such: beliefs have some recognizable quality which secures their truth, and the truth of whatever is deduced from them according to self-evident principles of ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... what a flower really is. Take, for example, a buttercup, cotton, tobacco, or plum blossom (see Figs. 31 and 32). You will find on the outside a row of green leaves inclosing the flower when it is still a bud. These leaves are the sepals. Next on the inside is a row ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... more distant airdromes, there was some good fighting in the air, some of it at close quarters with collisions barely avoided. Twenty enemy machines were accounted for in the fighting, some flopping about until they broke up in the air and others being driven down on their noses in yellow buttercup fields so far back of the fighting line that no shell had ever marred the symmetry ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... that is interesting in the relations of one species to another. Many plants are parasitic upon others. The foliage of the Beech is so thick that scarcely anything will grow under it, except those spring plants, such as the Anemone and the Wood Buttercup or Goldilocks, which flower early before the Beech is ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... turn turtle, unless, by the blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed eyelids at a very beautiful coast. The waves dance, and glimmer, and shine in the sunlight, the long stretch of sand is yellow as a buttercup, and the fringes of graceful casuarina trees quiver like aspens in the breeze, and shimmer in the heat haze. The wash of the waves against the boat's side, and the ripple of the bow make music in your drowsy ears, and, as you glide through cluster after cluster of thickly-wooded ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Buttercup, n. The familiar English flower is represented in Australia and Tasmania by various species of Ranunculus, such as R. lappaceus, Sm., ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... opening downward to the Lake of Constance, which now shimmered afar through the gaps, were left behind us, and we passed westward along a broken, irregular valley. The vivid turf was sown with all the flowers of spring,—primrose, violet, buttercup, anemone, and veronica,—faint, but sweetest-odored, and the heralds of spring in all lands. So I gave little heed to the weird lines of cloud, twisting through and between the severed pyramids of the Sentis, as if weaving the woof of storms. The scenery was entirely lovely, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... went on board he would beckon me down below, "Come down, Little Buttercup, come" (for he loved to call me so), And he'd tell of the fights at sea in which he'd taken a part, And so LIEUTENANT BELAYE won poor ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... or at twenty-five were already deep in politics, social science, and educational projects. What good would all his wealth or all his position do for his children if their minds could rise to nothing beyond the shooting of deer and the hunting of foxes? There was young Lord Buttercup, the son of the Earl of Woolantallow, only a few months older than Silverbridge,—who was already a junior lord, and as constant at his office, or during the Session on the Treasury Bench, as though there were not a pack of hounds or a card-table ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... a little thing like wet feet would stop me from getting into the game?" he answered. "And you called me a sturdy oak! Who is the little buttercup?" he added, looking at the child whose shock of bright golden curls made his nickname an ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... must play most in the open, and in its noble park, with its vast stretches of bright green, here empurpled by masses of the dainty grass-flower, there yellowing with the sheen of the buttercup, one finds the tireless golf-players leisurely strolling over the links; from yonder come the cries of the boys at ball; and in the farther distance you may see through the frame-like branches of a giant live-oak the students ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... queen, what an excellent scheme!" and Pipalee was so lively during the rest of the night that the old fairies in the honeysuckle insinuated that the lady of honour had drunk a buttercup too much of ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... iv, p. 426. The same author also cites Romer as having found two plants of Ranunculus, from the stem of which emerged a daisy. As it is not an uncommon practice to stick a daisy on a buttercup, it is to be hoped no hoax was played off ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Antionous^, Narcissus. peacock, butterfly; garden; flower of, pink of; bijou; jewel &c (ornament) 847; work of art. flower, flow'ret gay^; [flowers: list] wildflower; rose, lily, anemone, asphodel, buttercup, crane's bill, daffodil, tulip, tiger lily, day lily, begonia, marigold, geranium, lily of the valley, ranunculus, rhododendron, windflower. pleasurableness &c 829. beautifying; landscaping, landscape gardening; decoration &c 847; calisthenics^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... insect world, now sunbeams higher climb, Oft dream of Spring, and wake before their time: Bees stroke their little legs across their wings, And venture short flights where the snow-drop hings Its silver bell, and winter aconite Its buttercup-like flowers that shut at night, With green leaf furling round its cup of gold, Like tender maiden muffled from the cold: They sip and find their honey-dreams are vain, Then feebly hasten to their hives again. The butterflies, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... under big trees—you never get a decently big, decently shaped tree by the seaside—its sign towards the roadway, its sun-blistered green bench and tables, its shapely white windows and its row of upshooting hollyhock plants in the garden. A hedge separated it from a buttercup-yellow meadow, and beyond stood three poplars in a group against the sky, three exceptionally tall, graceful and harmonious poplars. It is hard to say what there was about them that made them so beautiful to Mr. Polly; but they seemed to him to touch a pleasant scene to a distinction almost ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... pass one day, that in the midst of a shower of rain that might well be called golden, seeing the sun, shining as it fell, turned all its drops into molten topazes, and every drop was good for a grain of golden corn, or a yellow cowslip, or a buttercup, or a dandelion at least;—while this splendid rain was falling, I say, with a musical patter upon the great leaves of the horse-chestnuts, which hung like Vandyke collars about the necks of the creamy, red-spotted blossoms, and on the leaves of the sycamores, looking as if they ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... blossoms best," remarked Cleo. "I suppose if we opened a window he would turn his back on all this vain-glory, and float away to a roadside buttercup." ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean To be some happy creature's palace; The little bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... look back, along the field-path. It was a dewy May evening after rain, and the hawthorn was all in bloom, and the leaves shaking out their crumpled flags of tender green. The blackbird was singing as he only sings after rain, and the fields were covered with the gold and silver dust of buttercup and daisy. It was sad to see the poor fellow going away at such a time, and from a place where every one knew and was kind to him, to an unknown world that might be very cruel. Once again as we watched him we anathematised the emigration which has so ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... come if you make it jolly," answered Dorothy. "If there is one thing in this world worth while, it is fun," and she tossed her yellow head about like a buttercup, that has no other way ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... postponement, deference, and modesty. Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature has something even more severe than modertion: she has an innumerable singleness. Her buttercup meadows are not prodigal; they show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes—the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... noticed that some of the travellers hesitated, slowed up, and finally stood quite still. He saw that the tall beech tree stopped, and that the roebuck and the wheat blade tarried by the wayside, likewise the blackberry bush, the little yellow buttercup, the chestnut tree, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... was no good. He came to himself, at long intervals, to find that he had been looking about his room and wondering how it had formerly been furnished—whether a settee in buttercup or petunia satin had stood under the farther window, whether from the centre moulding of the light lofty ceiling had depended a glimmering crystal chandelier, or where the tambour-frame or the picquet-table had stood.... No, it was no good; he had ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... our trembling heartstrings musical. Is not the hawthorn for the Queen of May? And cuckoo-flowers for whom the cuckoo's voice Hails, like an answering sister, to the woods? Is not the maiden blushing in the rose? Shall not the babe and buttercup rejoice, Twins in one meadow? Are not violets all By name or nature for the breast of Dames! For them the primrose, pale as star of prime, For them the wind-flower, trembling to a sigh, For them the dew stands in the eyes of day That blink in April on the daisied lea? Like them ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... lily, with its singular, fierce-looking leaf, spotted like a panther's hide, growing in solitary couples, protecting between them the slender stalk with its drooping yellow bell. Later in the season come the larger and more brilliantly tinted flowers, the wild purple larkspur, the great yellow buttercup, and the lilac flox. There were dusky depths in the wood, too, into which, book in hand, we sometimes retreated from the mid-summer heat into an atmosphere of moist and murky coolness. There we found the Indian pipe, or ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... very sight of the supper set before him softened Gallito's harsh face. Brook trout, freshly caught that afternoon from the rushing mountain stream not far away from the cabin, and smoking hot from the frying pan; an omelette, golden brown and buttercup yellow, of a fluff, a fragrance, with savories hidden beneath its surface, a conserve of fruits, luscious, amber and subtly biting, the coffee of dreams and a bottle of red wine, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... evening we had our second nautical entertainment in honour of the day. Muriel's 'first appearance' as 'Little Buttercup,' in the old-fashioned costume of a Portsmouth bumboat woman, consisting of a blue gown, red shawl, and bonnet of antique shape, was greeted with vociferous applause, and it was only out of deference ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... begged flour of the primrose, and sugar of the violet, and butter of the buttercup. He shook dewdrops from the cowslip into the cup of the harebell, spread out a large lime-leaf, set his breakfast upon it, and feasted daintily. And he invited a humming-bee and a gay butterfly to partake of his feast, but his favorite ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... unequally expanded, but "a veil of mystery hangs over the whole."[EN18] The valley-sides of dark trap were striped with white veins of heat-altered argil; the sole with black magnetic sand; and patches of the bed were buttercup-yellow with the Handn (dandelion), the Cytisus, and the Zaram (Panicum turgidum) loved by camels. Their jaundiced hue contrasted vividly with the red and mauve blossoms of the boragine El-Kahl, the blue flowerets of the Lavandula ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... to pick them up, But stumbling forward, sunk, O'er the wild pea and buttercup, Across the ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... you that Buttercup (the spotted cow with one horn, Mother of Lesbia) has done a disgraceful thing. She got into the orchard Friday evening and ate apples under the trees, and ate and ate until they went to her head. For two days she has been perfectly dead drunk! That is the truth I am telling. Did you ever ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... the other stuff?" Peterson was asked, referring to the brownish "milk" subsequently identified as coming from a dainty young cow known as Melody Buttercup Greenbrier IV. ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way; there is a purpose ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... it is only in their first love affairs that women have the patience to watch the flower unfold itself. He himself was of infinite patience in that pastime. He bit his lip and struck with his cane at the buttercup heads. He had made a wretched beginning, with his "good and sweet." his "young and innocent and beautiful like—like." If the girl had been a shade less innocent the whole business would have been ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... lovely as a tea rose, stood doubtfully in the cedar-wood door, poised for flight either way, sucking in the dimple at the left of her mouth. Running at his call she flew into his arms and dropped her buttercup head on his shoulder. For the first time he smiled, and the wise wife slipped quietly away and watched them from the door, guessing at their murmurs, counting their kisses. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... Common Meadow Buttercup, Tall Crowfoot or Cuckoo Flower; Tall Meadow Rue; Liver-leaf, Hepatica, Liverwort or Squirrel Cup; Wood Anemone or Wind Flower; Virgin's Bower, Virginia Clematis or Old Man's Beard; Marsh Marigold, Meadow-gowan ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... hillside above the stream. From that slope a for mounted to its crown of rocks. The ground there was covered with a mist of bluebells, and nearly a score of crab-apple trees were in full bloom. He threw himself down on the grass. The change from the buttercup glory and oak-goldened glamour of the fields to this ethereal beauty under the grey for filled him with a sort of wonder; nothing the same, save the sound of running water and the songs of the cuckoos. He lay there a long time, watching the sunlight wheel till ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... July. Outside, and far up overhead, a dappled sky shining down on a world of light and beauty; green verdant slopes and wide sweeps of meadowland glistening still with the early dew; flowers blossoming everywhere, from the modest daisy and golden buttercup to the queenliest rose and fairest lily; birds singing from every bush and tree their morning trill of flute-like melody; bees humming busily hither and thither; butterflies flitting idly by or resting ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... Margate Pier. Excursionists discovered embarking in two rival sailing-boats, the "Daisy" and the "Buttercup," whose respective Mates ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... the fagots from the hedgerows; to-morrow there will be a merry, merry note in the ash copse, the chiffchaffs' ringing call to arms, to arms, ye leaves! By-and-by a bennet, a bloom of the grass; in time to come the furrow, as it were, shall open, and the great buttercup of the waters will show a broad palm of gold. You never know what will come to the net of the eye next—a bud, a flower, a nest, a curled fern, or whether it will be in the woodland or by the meadow path, at the water's side or on the dead dry heap of fagots. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... "I recollect you called me a cool and calculating Englishman. I shall take you down to the lake, where it will be cool, and there I shall find a Smorblomst, or a buttercup, and by placing it to your chin, I shall be able to calculate the transparency of your complexion from the reflection ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... you love to fill your books with flowers. It is a real bookish delight, and they make such a pretty diary. My poets are full of them, and they all mean a memory—old spring mornings, lost sunsets, walks forgotten and unforgotten. Here a buttercup pressed like finely beaten brass, there a great yellow rose—in my Keats; my Chaucer is like his old meadows, 'ypoudred with daisie,' and my Herrick is full of violets. The only thing is that they haunt me sometimes. But then, again, they bloom afresh every ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... straight into the hands of the devil. It is not through its heroes the world lives and thrives, But through its sweet commonplace mothers and wives. We love them, and leave them; deceive, and respect them, We laud loud their virtues and straightway neglect them. They are daisy and buttercup women of earth Who grace common ways with their sweetness and worth. We praise, but we pass them, to reach for some flower That stings when we pluck it, or wilts ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... before the banquet was through, I am sadly afraid some of the gay young fellows forgot they were in the presence of ladies, they laughed so loud, and talked so much nonsense, and one of them came very near upsetting the table at which he sat, spilling his buttercup of dew all over the new gossamer dress of Lilliebelle, who ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... Buttercup,[67:1] but in Shakespeare's time it was applied to the Ragged Robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi), and I should think that this was the flower that poor Ophelia wove into her garland. Gerard says, "They are not used either in medicine ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... sight, therefore, the existence of flowers such as the violet, the buttercup, and the honeysuckle in an island south of the equator, and surrounded by vegetation of a totally different order, appeared to be so inexplicable that the hypothesis of a separate and distinct origin ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... here! This red and yellow flower! Tell me its name."—"A columbine. It grows In clefts of rocks. That's an anemone: We call it so because the leaves are torn So easily by the wind; for anemos Is Greek for wind."—"Oh! here's a buttercup! I know that well. Red clover, too, I know. Isn't the dandelion beautiful? And O, Miss Percival, what flower is this?" "That's a wild rose."—"What, does the rose grow wild? But is not that delightful? A wild rose! And I can take as many as I want! I did not dream ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... and smoked and cooled, and Gerda, a cigarette stuck in one side of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled "Penelope's baby's come, by the way. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... fresh-water tank. It must be grown as a bottom-plant, and flourishes only when rooted. The Nitella is another pleasing variety. The Ranunculus aquatilis, or Water-Crowfoot, is to be found in almost every pond in bloom by the middle of May, and continues so into the autumn. It is of the buttercup family, and may be known as a white buttercup with a yellow centre. The floating leaves are fleshy; the lower ones finely cut. It must be very carefully washed, and planted from a good joint, allowing length enough of stem to reach the surface. Some of the blossom-heads ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... what a dear little puppy it was!" said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with her hat. "I should have liked teaching it tricks, if—if I'd only been the right size to do it! Oh! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again! Let me see; how is it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or ...
— Alice's Adventures Under Ground • Lewis Carroll
... laden honey-bag hummed and buzzed in the hedge as I got ready for work, importuning the flowers for that which he could not carry, and finally giving up the attempt in despair fell asleep on a buttercup, the best place for his weary little velvet body. In five minutes—they may have been five hours to him—he awoke a new bee, sensible and clear-sighted, and flew blithely away to the hive with his sufficiency—an example this weary world would be ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... appetite the unhappy mate made David cook an omelet and bake a seed-cake, the latter so richly compounded that it opened to the knife like a freckled buttercup. With the same object he stuck night-lines into the banks of the mill-pond, and drew up next morning a family of fat eels, some of which were skinned and prepared for his breakfast. They were his favourite fish, but such had been his condition that, until the moment of making this ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... ran along the path with Freddie. He looked like a live buttercup, so fresh and bright, his sunny sandy curls blowing in the soft breeze. Mrs. Bobbsey had just ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope
... lessening temptation, is based on what life has taught me, that the fundamental character of people is not greatly alterable, but that the alteration of their circumstances will certainly influence the effect and working of their capacities and instincts. The buttercup which is tall with a flower at the end of a high firm stalk and leaves with slender spike fingers, if it grows in an open meadow, becomes a stunted flower on a short stem, and its leaves form squat webs, in order to force its growth on a close-cropped lawn. The experience of the ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... very early, before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me, and was ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... mile of chestnut, lilac, and apple trees, hanging over the wooden palings on each side—suddenly the trees stopped on the left, and out one came on the top of the field sloping down to the south into Dulwich valley—open field animate with cow and buttercup, and below, the beautiful meadows and high avenues of Dulwich; and beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood hills; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going down to the left, always so warm that invalids could be sheltered there in March, when to walk elsewhere would have been death to them; and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... there is one portion known to me where the lines are barely fifty yards apart, and at the present time the grass is hiding the enemy's trenches; to peep over the parapet gives one the impression of looking on a beautiful meadow splashed with daisy, buttercup, and poppy flower; the whole is a riot of colour—crimson, heliotrope, mauve, and green. What a change from some weeks ago! Then the place was littered with dead bodies, and limp, (p. 080) lifeless figures hung on to the barbed wire where they had ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... especially if hot caviare is afterwards administered in large bowls. Then there would be the first chapters of an enthralling serial whose plot revolved round the love-story of Sir Robert Wyandotte and Lady Cecilia Buttercup—a literary effort of unparalleled brilliancy due to the genius of a new novelist who preferred to be known as the Red Rover of Rhode Island. And so on and so on. If you think the scheme is feasible, let me hear from you and I will begin to get ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... long been on the look-out for, seemed as far off as ever. On the afternoon of the fifth day, as he was taking a solitary stroll about the country, having about made up his mind to be off to town, just as he was crossing Jog's buttercup meadow on his way to the stable, a rapid bang! bang! caused him to start, and, looking over the hedge, he saw a brawny-looking sportsman in brown reloading his gun, with a brace of liver-and-white setters crouching like ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... Munn picked a buttercup and bit off the stem. With the blossom between his teeth he surveyed the sky, the river, the forest, and ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch. I'm going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lad. His face was made up with real skill, and his bow and quiver hung gracefully at his back as he strode about. He had not danced, but he was evidently having a most delightful time with the Moon figure and Buttercup. ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... how short a time they have to be together, and as if they both, for the time, try to forget that they must part so soon. Then the hill grows green as if by a sudden miracle, and the bluebell, the dandelion, the buttercup, the dog-daisy, the wild rose, the raspberry and the strawberry spring up in lavish abundance, by every brook, on every hillock, on every mountain-slope; then hundreds of insects hum in the grass as in a tropical land; then cows, ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... golden the buttercup blooms by the way, A song of the joyous ground; While the melody rained from yonder spray Is a blossom in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... do so many things," said the Story Girl, plucking off her crown of buttercup gold with a tragic gesture, "but if it's the Judgment Day to-morrow I won't have time to do any ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the bright yellow buttercup-looking flowers, are now in full luxuriance of bloom in wet places near running water; they may not be esteemed beautiful by all, and yet all God's works, and all his flowers, are good and beautiful. Let any one see them as I have seen them, a large flowerbed of an acre and ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... (Cruciferae); the poppies (Papaveraceae); the water-lilies (Nymphaceae); the berberries (Berberideae); the custard-apples (Anonaceae); the magnolias (Magnoliaceae); and, finally, the great group (Ranunculaceae) containing the anemones, the clematis, hellebore, monkshood, and the buttercup, which last is of great use to the student of Botany because it is an excellent type ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... by asking, she had learnt the way to go; She had found the famous meadow—it was wrapped in cruel snow; Not a buttercup or daisy, not a single verdant blade Showed its head above its prison. Then she knelt ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... his sweet eyelids, and the finch and the linnet waked him merrily with their morning songs, he arose, and went out into the green meadow. And he begged flour of the primrose, and sugar of the violet, and butter of the buttercup; he shook dewdrops from the cowslip into the cup of a harebell; spread out a large lime-leaf, set his little breakfast upon it, and feasted daintily. Sometimes he invited a humming-bee, oftener a gay butterfly, to partake his feast; but his favourite guest was the blue dragon-fly. The ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... Buttercup. Any medicine you hand out is good to me. But say, that dope about hidden ores may not be all Indian at that, for I recollect that mountaineers of Tennessee had the same hunch about coal veins, and an old lead vein where one family went ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the germ in the egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose; or harmonise itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla's bright passion of life. And the gradations which thus exist between the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that it could be kept from the two would-be murderers for a long time that he was still in existence; but he thought that, by keeping out of sight, he might puzzle them as to his intentions, and perhaps frighten them away from Buttercup. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... maid-servant, was coming home for a short visit. She kissed her grandmother. There was gold, heart's gold, in that blessed kiss—gold in the mouth, gold in the south, gold in the morning hour. See, that's my little story," said the Buttercup. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and chirps and songs. Skylarks would spring out of the fields and soar into the sky, dropping crystal chains of joyous trills. The cottage gardens would be full of flowers, there would be poppies gleaming scarlet in the corn, and in buttercup-time all the green grass would be ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... grass and the flowers," said the fairy queen. "In every blade and in every bud lie hidden notes of fairy music. Each violet and daisy and buttercup,—every modest wild-flower (no matter how hidden) gives glad response to the tinkle of fairy feet. Dancing daintily over this quiet sward where flowers dot the green, my little people strike here and there and everywhere the keys which ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... had flown too high, And felt a little lazy, Was resting near a buttercup Who wished she ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... so as not to obstruct the view of the window over it. The carving, chiefly the work of Mr. Baker, as already mentioned, represents various vegetable forms in a naturalistic manner, the plants chosen being for the most part such as grow in the neighbourhood—convolvulus, primrose, buttercup, poppy, gooseberry, blackberry, rose, maple, ivy, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... enough, but within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency and profanity. Well, there are hundreds of such plants, even in cold climates, to tempt the eyes and poison the veins of unsuspecting cattle or childish humanity. There is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows carefully avoid it in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow is not usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly poison with which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is baneberry, whose very ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen |
