"Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men, Fittest for sunless work; Old Night is steaming from her den, And her children gather and lurk; Bad things are creeping from the fen, And sliding ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... power hath bless'd me, sure it still Will lead me on, O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... of great hunting matches[39] they would drive up masses of foxes and wolves; and all the huntsmen of the neighborhood might lie in wait in its expanse for fowl from morn till eve, and if they pleased, might roam at will in a canoe and destroy the swarms of winged inhabitants of the fen: ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... once, from lowly fen, Soared up in stately flight; But, striking 'gainst the gilded vane, He fell in sorry plight: And as, with wounded wing, he lay Down in the marsh below, He thus addressed the glittering thing, The cause of all ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... some bird of night flies past them, and they hear the whooping of the owl, and see him skimming like a ghost over the waste. Then more fen fires arise, showing that other treacherous quagmires are at hand; but Crouch skirts them safely. Now the bull-frog croaks in the marsh, and a deep booming tells of a bittern passing by. They see the mighty bird above them, with his wide heavy wings and long neck. Grip howls at him, but ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... spread like the great white wings of birds, and the craft glides among the islands and hovers about every gulf and bay and rocky coast of that beautiful sea. Under her dashing young French captain, Raoul Yvard, Le Fen Follet (Jack-o'-Lantern or fire-fly, as you will) glides like a water-sprite here, there, and everywhere, guided by Cooper's sea phrases,—for which he had an unfailing instinct,—that meant something "even to the land-lubber who does not know the lingo." It is said ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... With too much sack-and-sugar under belt, Then was his face set homeward this same hour, Why lingers he? Ill news, 't is said, flies fast, And good news creeps; then his must needs be good That lets the tortoise pass him on the road. Ride, Dawkins, ride! by flashing tarn and fen And haunted hollow! Look not where in chains On Hounslow heath the malefactor hangs, A lasting terror! Give thy roan jade spur, And spare her not! All Devon waits for thee, Thou, for the moment, most important man! A sevennight later, when the rider sent To Town drew rein ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I don't know ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... reduced, the Earl now proceeded toward the more important city which he had determined to besiege. Zutphen, or South-Fen, an antique town of wealth and elegance, was the capital of the old Landgraves of Zutphen. It is situate on the right bank of the Yssel, that branch of the Rhine which flows between Gelderland and Overyssel into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... were a Tadpole and I was a Fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide, We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen— My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... indicates a fan of science fiction, especially one who goes to {con}s and tends to hang out with other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly 'fen', but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the stuff occasionally ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question not ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... Sheriff's men And drived them down bydene. ROBIN started to that Knight, And cut a two his bond; And took him in his hand a bow, And bade him by him stand. "Leave thy horse thee behind, And learn for to run! Thou shalt with me to green wood Through mire, moss, and fen! Thou shalt with me to green wood Without any leasing, Till that I have got us grace Of EDWARD, ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, I lost ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... barren heath, bleak moor, and quaking fen, Or depth of labyrinthine glen; Or into trackless forest set With trees, whose lofty umbrage met; World-wearied Men withdrew of yore; (Penance their trust, and prayer their store;) And in the wilderness were bound To such apartments as they found; Or with a new ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and worse usages ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... breaking and taking to the marshes, where the Danes cared not to follow them. More than one I could see sinking under the weight of arms in the fen slime among the green tussocks of grass that he had slipped from, and I saw that the flying men ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... herds range field and fen, Full-headed stand the shocks of grain, Our sailors sweep the peaceful main, And man can trust ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... cul'prit al'to hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... to ask you.... Isn't the reason, Fen ... isn't the reason she will not come here to pour out tea, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... district made it difficult for my men to arrange four hundred "big" cash current in Szech'wan in the Yuen-nan equivalent. After Tong-ch'uan-fu, right on to Burma, the rate of coolie pay varies considerably. Three tsien two fen (thirty-two tael cents) was the highest I paid until I got to Tengyueh, where rupee money came into circulation, and where expense of living was ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... particular reason. Many voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did not understand the word any better ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Or drainin' a fen, They'll muck out a stable As well as the men. Their praises I'm hymnin', For where would ha' bin, If it weren't for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye And blister you ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... ditches, swining it stark in their styes; Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams; Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams; Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen, Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men. Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands; Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands. Master, I've done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west, And the long, long shift is over... Master, ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... for the motherless brood, and for Gran'ther and Mr. Fen Llewellen. They lived in a most haphazard fashion, for, although they were not really poor, the children never seemed to have any decent clothing to wear; and if, by chance, they got a new garment, something always happened to it as, for instance, the taking of ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And man never ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... than any other European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact with the people of Finland. Topelius, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... number, close bordering the water, embracing about an acre each, and situated in a low fen, draining several valleys. The excavated soil was thrown up in dykes, made tight by being beaten all over, while in a soft state, with the heavy, flat ends of Palm stalks. Lving side by side, by three connecting ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related to its great ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... July 1. To-day Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice-President and others will take effective ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... to be attempted in calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, or the ironed convict, dragging his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling plateau, looks ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... outlying scarps and counterscarps, remarkably suggests the deliberate and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste of bog-land ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... pris femme, il s'tait dbarrass fort vigoureusement d'un rival qui passait pour aussi redoutable en guerre qu'en amour: du moins on attribuait Mateo certain coup de fusil qui surprit ce rival comme il tait se raser devant un petit miroir pendu sa fentre. L'affaire assoupie, Mateo se maria. Sa femme Giuseppa lui avait donn d'abord trois filles (dont il enrageait), et enfin un fils, qu'il nomma Fortunato: c'tait l'espoir de sa famille, l'hritier du nom. Les filles taient bien maries: leur pre ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... universal. Boys usually have one shooter made from agate which they call a "real." To change the position of the shooter is called "roundings," and to object to this or to any other play is expressed by the word "fen." The common game of marbles is to make a rectangular ring and to shoot from a line and endeavour to knock the marbles or "mibs" of one's opponents out of the square. A similar game is to place all the mibs in a line in an oval ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... of the Britons before the Romans landed, is supposed to have been little other than 'a collection of huts set down on a dry spot in the midst of the marshes;' a forest nearly bounded this spot, at no great distance from the Thames; and a lake or fen existed, outside London, at or near the site now occupied by Finsbury Square. The area of London, at this early period, is supposed to have been bounded by—to use their modern designation—Tower Hill on the east, Dowgate Hill on the west, Lombard and Fenchurch Streets on the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... it meet to give a gift to Dame Elinor, and live queenlier thyself than now thou dost, then mayst thou give unto her the Castle of Greenharbour, and the six manors appertaining thereto, and withal the rights of wild-wood and fen and fell that lie thereabout. Also, if thou wilt, thou mayst honour the said castle with abiding there awhile at thy pleasure; and I shall see to it that thou have due meney to go with thee thither. How sayest thou, ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... great fen on the north side of the city with ice, good Fitzstephen delighted to watch "the young men play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... Maki of Adma, Kenti-au-ush of Khenti-keshu, and Tenus from the two lands of the Fen-khu; these are the princes who bear witness of me as to all that has passed, out of love for thyself. Does not Tenu believe that it belongs to thee like thy dogs? Behold this flight that I have made: ...
— Egyptian Literature
... light, Floating the livelong yesternight, Shifting like flashes darted forth By the red streamers of the north; I marked at morn how close they ride, Thick moored by the lone islet's side, Like wild ducks couching in the fen When stoops the hawk upon the glen. Since this rude race dare not abide The peril on the mainland side, Shall not thy noble father's care Some ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast. All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the knowledge of twenty years of life behind her—the delicious aroma of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life, the smell ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Patricia of Connaught who is by Dermot Astore out of Cheevra, and is the dam of Ch. Cotswold Patricia. She is one of the tallest of her race, her height being 33 inches; another bitch that measures the same number of inches at the shoulder being Dr. Pitts-Tucker's Juno of the Fen, a ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... In the fen country of Lincolnshire, there lived, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, a wealthy Saxon franklin named Leofric, Lord of Bourn. He was related to the great Earls of Mercia, and his brother Brand was Abbot of Peterborough, so that he, and his wife Ediva, were persons ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of these enclosures, which began to change the England of open fields into the country we know of hedgerows and winding roads, great part of the land was in a wild and uncultivated state of fen, heath, and wood, the latter sometimes growing right up to the walls of the towns.[197] An unbroken series of woods and fens stretched right across England from Lincoln to the Mersey, and northwards from the Mersey ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... Herden[3] wird Schwefel zu schwefliger Sure[4] verbrannt (SO{2}SO{2}) oder es[5] werden in geeigneten Rostfen natrlich vorkommende Metallsulfide, z. B. Schwefelkies (FeS{2}), Zinkblende (ZnS), Bleiglanz (PbS) in der Glhhitze bei Luftzutritt oxydiert, wobei sich der Schwefel der Sulfide ganz oder teilweise in ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... of his retainers led up a poor, cringing old man, as pale as a candle, and all shaking with the fen fever. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spy for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World SciFi ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... down the garden walk. The path sloped gently from the back of the house to the water side, from which it was parted by a low wooden fence. After pacing backward and forward slowly for some little time, he stopped at the lower extremity of the garden, and, leaning on the fen ce, looked down listlessly at the smooth flow ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... crumbling plain, Where the sweet waters of Aegyptus glide, To those that on the Northern marches ride, And the Ceteians, and the blameless men That round the rising-place of Morn abide, And all the dwellers in the Asian fen. ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... to "comfort and succour all them who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity!" And still less able are we to realize the countless answers to our feeble prayers already winging their way to every portion of the inhabited globe; o'er moor and fen, o'er lake and sea and prairie, in the crowded town and in the vast wilderness. Was it in blessed England, where the sun has long past the meridian; while here in the far North-West, there are but the first faint tints of early dawn:—was it in England, or in some far ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... like great flocks of geese, or cranes, or swans on the plain about the waters of Cayster, that wing their way hither and thither, glorying in the pride of flight, and crying as they settle till the fen is alive with their screaming. Even thus did their tribes pour from ships and tents on to the plain of the Scamander, and the ground rang as brass under the feet of men and horses. They stood as thick upon the flower-bespangled field as ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by those ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... wrapped the stalwart frame so deep, Was woke by guard and sign; The forest sounded with the tramp Of rushing steeds, until the camp Was reached by foremost line Of the brigade of fearless men, Who rode through wood, and brake, and fen, As speeds the red deer to his glen. No gorgeous suit of war array, No uniform of red or gray In that rude band were seen; The ploughman's dress, but coarse and plain, And marred by toil with many a stain, Betrayed no gilded ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... my heroes, tempt the fearless toil, Enrich your nations with the nurturing spoil; O'er my vast vales let yellow harvests wave, Quay the calm ports and dike the lawns I lave. Win from the waters every stagnant fen, Where truant rills escape my conscious ken; And break those remnant rocks that still impede My current crowding thro the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the author of my own happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... of Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled through ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... are the two magnificent gold torcs found in the side of one of the raths at Tara, and these belong to a type that has been found in England and France, of which the best known examples are those found at Yeovil, Somerset,[28] and Grunty Fen, Cambridge.[29] A torc of this type was also found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy. This find has led to a good deal of speculative opinions varying as to whether the model of the torc was imported into Ireland from the ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... Mirth's my trade and follies fond, Methinks a fair name were Joconde; And for thy sake I travail make Through briar and brake, O'er fen and lake, The Southward ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... dew-mist broods Heavy and low o'er field and fen, Like gloom above the souls of men; And through the forest solitudes The fitful night-wind rustles by, ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Wilfrid de Thorold[2] freely holds What his stout sires held before— Broad lands for plough, and fruitful folds,— Though by gold he sets no store; And he saith, from fen and woodland wolds, From marish, heath, and moor,— To feast in his hall, Both free and thrall, Shall come as they ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... a great arc of the foul fen, between the dry bank and the slough, with eyes turned on those who guzzle the mire. We came at length to the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the Emperor, and threw it down on the ground, and it was not broken but bent and folded. And he made it right and amended it with an hammer. Then the emperor commanded to smite off his head anon, lest that his craft were known. For then gold should be no better than fen, and all other metal should be of little worth, for certain if glass vessels were not brittle, they should be accounted of more ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... small subsidiary tells round about it, the sites of small isolated buildings or villages connected with the central settlement. Originally the settlements were built upon natural rises of the ground which stood up as islands in the fen-country. ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... with the bird, but at least ninety yards to the right of the mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum go, ain't it—me singing that hymn in a place like this? ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... of the Ely Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' 'a story worthy ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the night Waking she heard the night-fowl crow; The cock sang out an hour ere light: From the dark fen the oxen's low Came to her: without hope of change, In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Umbrellas made of a palm-leaf cut and folded, so that the stem formed a handle. The same writer describes the audience-chamber of the King of Siam. In his quaint old French, he says:—"Pour tout meuble il n'y a que trois para-sol, un devant la fentre, a neuf ronds, & deux sept ronds aux deux ctz de la fentre. Le para-sol est en ce Pais-la, ce que ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... as beauteous, Nature, is thy face; * * * all that grows, has grace. All are appropriate. Bog and moss and fen Are only poor to undiscerning men. Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the ruby moor; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But will repay ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... formidable work were in many respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense undertakings of the period. Their expertness ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... grew my bosom then, Still as a stagnant fen! Hateful to me were men, The sun-light hateful. In the vast forest here, Clad in my warlike gear, Fell I upon my spear, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled; God's breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath—the word which he calls spiritual,—is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition. This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last, and fatalest ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... prize. This would pay her tuition in the local university for the first year. She resolved to throw her fruitless writing to the winds and put all her strength into her history. The world stretched out before her a blooming, sunny meadow, instead of a stagnant fen, and exultantly she sang to herself one of the pageant songs of ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... she wandered on, and she wandered on, till she came to a big fen where the reeds grew ever so tall and the rushes swayed in the wind like a field of corn. There she sate down and plaited herself an overall of rushes and a cap to match, so as to hide her fine clothes, and her beautiful ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... a boy-chief of a British tribe which takes a prominent part in the insurrection under Boadicea: and after the defeat of that heroic queen he continues the struggle in the fen-country. Ultimately Beric is defeated and carried captive to Rome, where he succeeds in saving a Christian maid by slaying a lion in the arena, and is rewarded by being made the personal protector of Nero. ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead of the night's ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... and historian, s. of a clergyman, was b. at Holne Vicarage near Dartmoor, but passed most of his childhood at Barnack in the Fen country, and Clovelly in Devonshire, ed. at King's Coll., London, and Camb. Intended for the law, he entered the Church, and became, in 1842, curate, and two years later rector, of Eversley, Hampshire. In the latter year he ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... two men, as in the case of a thousand others in the gold-camp, it seemed as if easy, unhoped-for affluence was to prove their undoing. On the trail they had been supreme; in fen or forest, on peak or plain, they were men among men, fighting with nature savagely, exultantly. But when the fight was over their arms rested, their muscles relaxed, they yielded to sensuous pleasures. It seemed as if to them ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... "he is as young as I. 'Good boy' doth he call me? An I had known, I should have seen the varlet hanged ere I had told him. Well, if he goes through the fen, I may come up with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye, And blister ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... there were two princes who were twins. Their names were Acrisius and Proetus, and they lived in the pleasant vale of Argos, far away in Hellas. They had fruitful meadows and vineyards, sheep and oxen, great herds of horses feeding down in Lerna Fen, and all that men could need to make them blest: and yet they were wretched, because they were jealous of each other. From the moment they were born they began to quarrel; and when they grew up each tried to take away the ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... head to snuff the ground. Prosper laughed at the plight they were both in, and looked about him, considering what he should do. Very far off he could see a feeble light flickering; it was the only speck of brightness within his vision, and he judged it too steady for a fen-flame. Lodging of some sort should be there, for where there is a candle there is a candlestick. This was not firelight. To it he turned his tired beast, and found that he had been well advised. He was before a mud-walled hovel; there through the horn he saw the candle-flame. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... considerable antiquity; and it stood, as we have already said, on the opposite side of the road to the church, looking towards the west end, where its handsome tower stands, with lofty well-proportioned spire, a conspicuous object to all the fen country for miles around. It was about a mile ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... thee, and learn to run on foot," he counselled him. "Thou shalt go with me to the greenwood through mire and moss and fen. Thou shalt go with me to the forest, and dwell with me there, until I have got our pardon ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" And the forests, dark and lonely, Moved through all their depths of darkness^ Sighed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" And the waves upon the margin, Rising, rippling on the pebbles, Sobbed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" And the heron, the shuh-shu-gah, From her haunts among the fen-lands, Screamed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" Thus departed Hiawatha, Hiawatha the Beloved, In the glory of the sunset, In the purple mists of evening, To the regions of the home-wind, Of the northwest wind, Keewaydin, To the Islands of ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... in the weird of the fen, With God's creatures I bide, 'mid the birds that I ken; Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea Brings a message of peace from ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... called—which grew low along the sand like brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled through ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and invisible,—they will wish to handle, measure, and dive into. They will invent, for all that is incomprehensible, words and numbers; and heap system upon system, till they have brought deeper darkness upon the earth, through which doubt, like the fen-fire, will only shine to allure the wanderer into the morass. Only then will they think to see clearly, and then I expect them. After they have shovelled away religion, and are forced, out of the remains, to patch together a new and monstrous mixture ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... hedges and dotted with single spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln, Nottingham, Norfolk, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... afar the city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... by all kinds of men; Gracing the mountain or hid in the fen; Never adorning the brow of the fair; Seldom deemed worthy some corner to share In the bouquets that are cast in the way Princely feet tread on reception's proud day; The glory of roses do not attain; Beautiful mosses, ye grow ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood was ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... dizhmal shwamp he shpeeds— His path is rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, And many a fen where the serpent feeds, And birrud niver flew before— And niver will fly ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... protruded, his forehead receded obliquely; his ears formed one solid piece with head and neck—a horrible man. The other, Manteca, was so much human refuse; his eyes were almost hidden, his look sullen; his wiry straight hair fen over his ears, forehead and neck; his scrofulous lips hung eternally agape. Once more, Luis Cervantes felt ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... with beasts that scatter fire, Like Jason, when he sought the fleece of gold, Or change from man to beast three years entire, As King Nebuchadnezzar did of old; Or else have times as shameful and as bad As Trojan folk for ravished Helen had; Or gulfed with Proserpine and Tantalus Let hell's deep fen devour him dolorous, With worse to bear than Job's worst sufferance, Bound in his prison-maze with Daedalus, Who could wish evil to the state ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... some extent were considered identical. In some of the woods there were patches of cultivated ground, as the entries show, where the tenant had cleared the dense undergrowth and had his corn land and his meadows. Even the fen lands were of value, for their rents ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... conversation I got up, and thanking the kind woman departed. I soon left the moors behind me and continued walking till I came to a few houses on the margin of a meadow or fen in a valley through which the way trended to the east. They were almost overshadowed by an enormous mountain which rose beyond the fen on the south. Seeing a house which bore a sign, and at the door of which a horse stood tied, I went in, and a woman coming to meet me in a kind of passage, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Ocnus of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen. And wasted fields and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... year, as it becomes known what a splendid abode it is. The first who settled there were the wild ducks; and they still live there by thousands. But they no longer own the entire lake, for they have been obliged to share it with swans, grebes, coots, loons, fen-ducks, and a ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... town in the Wisbech parliamentary division of Cambridgeshire, England, 25-1/2 m. N. by W. of Cambridge by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 4711. It lies in the midst of the flat Fen country. The church of St Peter is principally Decorated; and there are fragments of a Benedictine convent founded in the 10th century and rebuilt after fire in the first half of the 14th. The town has breweries, and engineering and rope-making ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... plucks them back, puts out their eyes, Turns them to tears and words? Ah my sweet knight, You have the better of us that weave and weep While the blithe battle blows upon your eyes Like rain and wind; yet I remember too When this last year the fight at Corrichie Reddened the rushes with stained fen-water, I rode with my good men and took delight, Feeling the sweet clear wind upon my eyes And rainy soft smells blown upon my face In riding: then the great fight jarred and joined, And the sound stung me right through ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields and slaughtered men ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... wastes, and their adventures are of unusual interest. Sketches of shooting and fishing experiences are introduced in a manner which should stimulate the faculty of observation and give a healthy love for country life; while the record of the fen-men's stealthy resistance to the great draining scheme is full of the keenest interest. The ambushes and shots in the mist and dark, the incendiary fires, the bursting of the sea-wall, and the long-baffled attempts to trace the ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... and bequeath my farm of West Woldland to my eldest nephew, Grimes Goodenough; my farm of Holland Fen to my dear nephew, John Wright, and my farm of Clover-hill to my ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... During the abbacy of Elsinus, England was invaded by the Danes under King Sweyn, in revenge of a massacre of his subjects by the order of King Ethelred. They landed in the north, and, having gained some advantages, proceeded southward to the fen country, which they plundered and laid waste with fire and sword. Heavy fines were extorted from the rich abbeys; that on Crowland amounting to L64,000 of the present value of money. Elsinus ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... to the dizhmal shwamp he spheeds— His path is rugged and sore Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds And many a fen where the serpent feeds, And birrud niver flew before— And ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Isles-men carried at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... at St. James's the other day more people were invited than there was room for, and some half-dozen were forced to sit at a side table. He said to Lord Brownlow, 'Well, when you are flooded (he thinks Lincolnshire is all fen) you will come to us at Windsor.' To the Freemasons he was rather good. The Duke of Sussex wanted him to receive their address in a solemn audience, which he refused, and when they did come he said, 'Gentlemen, if my love for you equalled my ignorance of everything concerning ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... Where the gnu, the gazelle, and the hartebeest graze, And the kudu and eland unhunted recline By the skirts of gray forest o'erhung with wild vine; Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild ass ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... or Suomenmaa, the swampy region, of which Finland, or Fen-land is said to be a Swedish translation,) is at present a Grand-Duchy in the north-western part of the Russian empire, bordering on Olenetz, Archangel, Sweden, Norway, and the Baltic Sea, its area being more than 144,000 square miles, and inhabited ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... thrashing machines were broken or burnt in open day, mills were attacked. At Brandon large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers. They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport, attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops, emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The soldiery was called ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... was called; His hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might reckon each rib So rentful[14] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... "Fen says that these animal drawings of yours show promise and he wants to know whether you ever thought of trying something along ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... delighted the heart of Edgar Allan Poe, the author of Ulalume. In Professor Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots overshrouds ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... boggy spot and then trailed to a place that Dick claimed was the clearing. But it turned out to be a little fen made by ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... steam makes head, Benacus then no more They call the name, but Mincius, till at last Reaching Governo into Po he falls. Not far his course hath run, when a wide flat It finds, which overstretchmg as a marsh It covers, pestilent in summer oft. Hence journeying, the savage maiden saw 'Midst of the fen a territory waste And naked of inhabitants. To shun All human converse, here she with her slaves Plying her arts remain'd, and liv'd, and left Her body tenantless. Thenceforth the tribes, Who round were scatter'd, gath'ring to that place Assembled; for its strength was great, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... j'entends, moi aussi. Tu veux me jouer centre elle. La Grangeur—pah! Consoles-toi avec elle, mon vieux. Je ne veux plus de toi. Tu m'as donne de tes sales rentes Groenlandoises, et je n'ai pas pu les vendre. Ah, vieux farceur, tu vas voir ce que fen vais faire." ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... marched in even time, singing their King; as whilome snowy swans among the thin clouds, when they return from pasturage, and utter resonant notes through their long necks; far off echoes the river and the smitten Asian fen. . . . Nor would one think these vast streaming masses were ranks clad in brass; rather that, high in air, a cloud of hoarse birds from the deep gulf was pressing to ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... 's a flower in garden fair, Her beauty charms the sicht o' men; And I 'm a weed upon the wolde, For nane reck how I fare or fen'. She blooms in beild o' castle wa', I bide the blast o' povertie; My covert looks are treasures stown— Sae how culd ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... for all these things He shall give grace and guidance. Does our preaching answer these instinctive expectations, these deep longings, these inborn hopes in those to whom we are sent? Do we truly put before them that high life their spirits yearn to live? Do we show them the path "o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent," to the heights that ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... are gettin' shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... these countries particularly abound, they have within these few years found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot too, as well as the turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up to London in droves from the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from the fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as also from all the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet droves with a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove. They begin to drive them generally in August, by which time the harvest is almost ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe |
