"Gorse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... needed the eye of the eagle soaring in the clouds, or that of the screech-owl piercing the darkness, to distinguish these men among the gorse and heather and ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... broom and furze, trees and pasture broke the monotony of the moorland. Here was the better Limousin landscape—every knoll and mamelon covered with heather and other moor-plants, woods and meadows in the dells and dips. The numerous clumps of silver birches, and the gorse arrayed in its new flowers of bright gold, added to the charm of the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and a flock of wheeling gulls to possess it; before me rose the great crag of the Castle Rock, each plane and angle of its twisted slate pile cut sharply in light and shadow, and against this sullen grey background a newly flowered gorse bush blazed in ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... carefully one on the top of the other in Tom's arms, then sat down on the mossy root of a tree, and watched him as he crossed the common towards the little brown hut among the gorse bushes. ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... own family.—"Oh! ah! yes," he remarked aloud, and somewhat vaguely. "Quite right, Knott. Then of course it was earlier. Record run for that season. Seldom had a better. We found a fox in the Grimshott gorse and ran to Water End ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... general aspect of nature in temperate than in tropical climates. During twelve years spent amid the grandest tropical vegetation, I have seen nothing comparable to the effect produced on our landscapes by gorse, broom, heather, wild hyacinths, hawthorn, purple ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... higher round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... an opinion on a point of law. Great advantage to have a first-rate authority like that to turn to in a legal difficulty. Very useful in county business Denier, and laid hold of country life wonderfully, understood the obligations of a land-owner. Always found a fox in that Grimshott gorse ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... hill towards the village, meeting parties of visitors, mounted on donkeys, which is a much more sensible way of ascending in a hot day than to walk. On the sides and summit of the hill we found yellow gorse,—heath of two colors, I think, and very beautiful,—and here and there a harebell. Owing to the long-continued dry weather, the grass was getting withered and brown, though not so much so as on American hill-pastures at this season. Returning to the village, we all went into a confectioner's ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below. They were coming; they were among the rocks! He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes as the red flare of their pistols ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... travelled was at first varied with trees and bushes clothed in rich foliage; but soon its aspect changed, and ere long he pursued a path which led over a wide extent of wild moorland covered with purple heath and gorse in golden-yellow bloom. The ground, too, became so rough that the youth was fain to confine himself to the highroad; but being of an explorative disposition, he quickly diverged into the lanes, which ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... me of the Canadian Dominion on the bleak slopes of Starcross Moor. There was a hollow in the hillside where a few pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two beneath them seemed utterly alone in the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... by themselves, are two old houses, Elm Lodge and West Lodge, in big gardens sliced off the common. The houses are fancifully painted, and half hidden behind a privet hedge and a row of elms. The common to the south is bare of bushes, but to the north there are still big clumps of gorse and brambles, with many straggling trees between. Putney Cemetery is on the common, and further west that of Barnes is seen. At the beginning of the Mill Hill Road is an old cottage hidden behind closely-trimmed trees and a high hedge, the residence of the cattle gate-keeper, whose duty it ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... a ballroom floor," said he. It was a clear, still day and we were sitting among the gorse on the top of the garrison, looking down the sea towards the west. Five miles from the Scillies, the thin column of the Bishop showed like a cord strung tight in the sky. "But out there all round the lighthouse ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... arms a young goat, white as the driven snow. When they were upon the topmost knoll they stood a while. Dovenald laid down the bleating kid, whose little feet were tethered one to the other, and he bade the two youths go about and gather some dry twigs of heather and gorse that ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... sight in England to see land in a natural uncultivated state devoid of vegetation. The hills are covered with grasses and bushes, the moors with ling and heather, commons with grass, bracken and gorse, a garden tends to become smothered in weeds, and even a gravel path will not long remain free from grass. It is clear that soil is well suited for the growth of plants. We will make a few experiments to see what we can find out about this ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... the fox-hunters of the Roman Campagna. He still deserves it. In twenty strides he left me behind. I saw him jumping over the heather, knocking off with his cane the young shoots on the oaks, or turning his head to look at me as I struggled after, torn by brambles and pricked by gorse. A startled pheasant brought him to a halt. The bird rose under his feet and soared into the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... until the time came to return to Rumpell's, and the holiday passed so quickly that he could not believe that it was really over. They had picnicked in the Smugglers' Cave and on Boveyhayne Common where the gorse was in bloom, and Henry had plucked whinblossoms to dye Easter eggs when he found that the Grahams did not know that whinblossoms could be used in this way. "You boil the blossoms and the eggs together, and the eggs come out a lovely browny-yellow colour. We always dye our eggs like ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... seized the professional opportunity, lifted her bodily off the slope, and lowered her to the beach. "There, now, if you will sit absolutely still . . . for one minute. I command you! Yes, as I suspected—a gorse-prickle!" ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fours, save when he clung to his spectacles, Beetle wormed into the gorse, and presently announced between grunts of pain that he had found a very fair fox-track. This was well for Beetle, since Stalky pinched him a tergo. Down that tunnel they crawled. It was evidently a highway ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... their spreading branches; at most they lose their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta, where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun slants along the vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks, among the juniper and gorse and dry grass and flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast mediaeval forests of Germany and France, Boiardo ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... the gorse, or Ulex, is not narrow and spinose like the older leaves. On the other hand, with many Leguminous plants, for instance, Cassia, Acacia lophantha, etc., the first leaf has essentially the same character as ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... suspended landing net into the thorns, and perhaps shake his fly-book out of his pocket in petulant descent from the top bar. If there is a bramble thicket anywhere in the parish, or a tall patch of meadow sweet in the rear, or a convenient gorse clump handy, be sure his flies will find them out. Another man would coolly proceed to extricate them; he pulls and hauls, and swears, carrying away his gear, and is lucky if his rod is left sound. In wading he goes in sooner or later over the tops of his stockings, cracks off ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... flowers of the Chase we see at once. In whatever direction we look across the common there is a perfect blaze of gold—the blossoms of the prickly Gorse or Furze. Spring is the time to see its mass of golden yellow blossoms best; but I do not think there is a week, or even a day, in the whole year when some of the flowers are not out. Did you ever hear the saying, "Kissing is out of season when ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... bedraggled, but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble-grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of woods. The pack of fierce-mouthed things that had rattled him from copse and gorse-cover, along fallow and plough, hedgerow and wooded lane, for nigh on an hour, and had pressed hard on his life for the last few minutes, receded suddenly into the background of his experiences. The cold, wet meadow, the thick mask of woods, ...
— When William Came • Saki
... up the field with the lane on my right, down which ran a runnel of water, from which doubtless the house derived its name. I soon came to an unenclosed part of the mountain covered with gorse and whin, and still proceeding upward reached a road, which I subsequently learned was the main road from Llangollen over the hill. I was not long in gaining the top which was nearly level. Here I stood for some time looking about me, having the vale of Llangollen to the north ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... said Chris, eagerly. "And if we only had the frame I could set Lord Littimer's doubts to rest entirely. I happen to know that the real thief came and went by the cliff under the terrace. If the frame was thrown into the gorse, there it—" ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... it drinks in, too, the rain greedily, so that the wide common is nearly always fit for walking; and the air, unlike the heavy atmosphere of the University beneath it, is fresh and bracing. The gorse was still in bloom, in the latter end of the month of June, when Reding and Sheffield took up their abode in a small cottage at the upper end of this village—so hid with trees and girt in with meadows that for the stranger it was hard to find—there to ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... is a mile nearer Newport: and affords an instance within a few years of a wild tract of gorse and brambles being profitably converted to tillage and garden. Here too are several scattered dwellings forming an improving hamlet; and in one of them (called in courtesy Landscape Cottage,) was produced in all its stages the present little work, ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... Up the gorse-embattled brae, With equal eager feet they dash, And on the moorland summit clash, Friend mix'd with foe in stormy disarray: Once more the Northern charge asserts its right, As with the driving rain They drive them down the plain: ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... away from our work to-day, For the breeze sweeps over the down; And it's hey for a game where the gorse blossoms flame, And the bracken is bronzing to brown. With the turf 'neath our tread and the blue overhead, And the song of the lark in the whin; There's the flag and the green, with the bunkers between - Now will you be ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and vitality. I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the trees. I stopped to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Scotia's moors the gorse is gay, And England's lanes and fallows Are decked with broom whose winsome grace The hovering linnet hallows; But the robin sings from his maple bow, "Ah, linnet, lightly won, Your bloom to my blaze of wayside gold Is the wan moon to ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... of them all came to a bough by my window, and in his call I heard the sweet-briar wind rushing over the young grass. Refulgent fall the golden rays of the sun; a minute only, the clouds cover him and the hedge is dark. The bloom of the gorse is shut like a book; but it is there—a few hours of warmth and the covers will fall open. The meadow is bare, but in a little while the heart-shaped celandine leaves will come in their accustomed place. On the pollard willows the long wands are yellow-ruddy in the passing gleam of sunshine, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... lunatic asylum; and on the left is the "Necropolis," where London, in the black and sandy soil, deposits the myriads of its dead. All around, the ground is olive-coloured with unblossomed heath, bright and golden here and there with the flowerets of the prickly gorse. Dense and dismal plantations of black-looking Scotch firs are enlivened at intervals by the delicate and tender green spikelets of a sprouting larch. On we rush for miles through this sombre region, through dank morasses, and past dark and gloomy pools, from ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... on the quivering leaves in the park. It was a joyous morning, and men and women looked at the sky and smiled as they went about their work or their pleasure, and the wind blew as blithely as upon the meadows and the scented gorse. But somehow or other I got out of the bustle and the gaiety, and found myself walking slowly along a quiet, dull street, where there seemed to be no sunshine and no air, and where the few foot-passengers loitered as they walked, and hung indecisively about corners and ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... facing it, one, ten, twenty paces, my eyes almost starting from my head, as though I expected to see the thing roll up from the bottom of the pit under my very gaze. At last I turned my back to the pit and strode out across the gorse-covered moorland toward my home. As I reached the road that winds from St. Gildas to St. Julien I gave one hasty glance at the pit over my shoulder. The sun shone hot on the sod about the excavation. There was something white and bare and round on the turf ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... soon turned off into the heart of the moorlands that lay, rising and falling in irregular undulations, between the sea and the hills. He was quickly out of sight of Scarhaven, and in the midst of a solitude. All round him stretched wide expanses of heather and gorse, broken up by great masses of rock: from a rise in the road he looked about him and saw no sign of a human habitation and heard nothing but the rush of the wind across the moors and the plaintive cry of ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa, over which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those last days. It passes an immense forest of stone-pines—aisles and avenues; undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their velvet roof and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... shore, and looks straight south over the Atlantic to the island of Colonsay. The entire surroundings are a delight to the eye: great towering mountains behind, the sea in front, and in the space between, green lawns, rocks, gorse, and ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... golden gorse, and tufts of broom. Tall pines with branches like steps to tempt you to climb. Regular precipices after climbing above the sand-pit, from which you could jump into the soft sand, and then slide and roll down to the bottom. Once I jumped upon a little promontory high above the slope, and it gave ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... wayfaring humanity, and can't be got rid of without some little difficulty. Most of them, you will find on examination, belonged to confirmed hedgerow or woodside plants: they grow among bushes or low scrub, and thickets of gorse or bramble. Now, to such plants as these, it is obviously useful to have adhesive fruits and seeds: for when sheep or other animals get them caught in their coats, they carry them away to other bushy spots, and there, to get rid of the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Holly House, Osborne, St. James, Victoria, and Albert houses, Tank Villa, Poplar Villa, Rose, Brake, and Thorn Villas, as well as Hawthorn, Gorse, Fern, Shrubbery, and Providence Cottages. All had apartments, but many were taken, and many more had rooms either dark and stuffy or without view. Holly House was my first stopping-place. Why will a woman voluntarily call her place by a name which she can never pronounce? It is my landlady's ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... most of the land in England, and no doubt there are signorial rights which overlie the popular privileges. I fancied a symbol of these in the game keeper—whom we met coming out of the wood, brown-clad, with a scarcely touched hat, silently sweeping through the gorse, furtive as one of the pheasants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met in England, and, as it happened, the last, but he now seems to me to have been so perfect in his way that I would not for the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... from three to four miles in breadth. Its summit is a wide expanse of table land, the highest part of which is nearly seventeen hundred feet above the level of the sea. The whole of this unenclosed moorland is covered with gorse and heather, making it extremely gay in the summer time; it is also tolerably abundant in grouse and black game, and so fruitful in bilberries, that from 400 to 500 pounds worth are said to have been gathered on it in the course ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... well I found a very little dell, No higher than my head. The heather and the gorse about In summer bloom were coming out, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... could judge, she had got half a mile away from the scene of the rams' combat, she changed her course and went to the right, directed by the murmur of the river. It was slow walking through the heath and gorse which grew above her head, and were closely woven together, but in time she reached shelving ground, and heard the song of the river louder on her ear. The heath ceased to grow within a few yards of the stream and was ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... sea of fern, gone a russet-brown from decay, in which are isles of dark green gorse, and little trees with little scarlet and orange and lemon-colored leaflets fluttering down, and running after each other on the bright grass, under the brisk west wind which makes the willows rustle, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... mounted the hill along a sandy road, bordered with pines and with cool, green thickets of broom and gorse, I looked up at her and said: "In spite of your theories, mademoiselle, you ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... across the vast common to the north of Guignen when he came to a halt. He had left the road, and taken heedlessly to the footpath that struck across the waste of indifferent pasture interspersed with clumps of gorse. A stone's throw away on his right the common was bordered by a thorn hedge. Beyond this loomed a tall building which he knew to be an open barn, standing on the edge of a long stretch of meadowland. That dark, silent shadow it may have been that ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... now heard approaching through the darkness, now splashing deep into some treacherous moss hole with a loud curse, now blundering among loose-lying blocks of stone. Lee waited till he was quite close, and then seizing a bunch of gorse lighted it at his fire and held it aloft; the bright blaze fell full upon the face and features of ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... that the dead body of John Slater, driver of the special train, has just been found among the gorse bushes at a point two and a quarter miles from the Junction. Had fallen from his engine, pitched down the embankment, and rolled among the bushes. Injuries to his head, from the fall, appear to be cause of death. Ground has now been carefully examined, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bright in a sky of plain dark blue, making a path of swaying gold toward the beach, where we could see the water curl upon the sands like suds. A little back was a steep rise of granite rocks, with gorse and heather growing on the sides, at the bottom of which some gipsies, or free-traders, had built a great fire, and we heard them singing a drunken catch in chorus, and saw them whirling round and round the fire in a circle, as we stepped ashore ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... mean. It gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... which retains the eyes upon details too material. The colours about it are pale and slight, as if on the point of swooning away. Immense sterile stretches, fawn-coloured throughout, with here and there shining a little pink, a little green; gorse, furze-bushes by the deep banks of the river, or a few boschetti with dusty leaves, which feebly stand out upon the blondness of the soil. To the right, a pine forest. To the left, the undulations ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... beginning to think itself quite smart and civilized. That was nice to learn, practically on the spot. We were chatting about the few Indians who exist to this day on Long Island (rather mixed up with negroes) and admiring the gorgeous golden dunes, and gorgeouser goldener gorse when suddenly bump! bump! The moderately bad road became immoderately awful. At this spot some disillusioned motorist had revengefully printed on a proud sign-post the classic words: "Damn Bad Road." ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... thing I want you to arrange is the purchase of those twenty acres of rough pasture and gorse, right in the centre of the property," said John, "rented by the man who lives outside Youlestone, at what they call Pott's farm, for his wretched, half-starved beasts to graze upon. He's saved us the trouble of exterminating the ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... but there was no one on the bank, and though the towers of S. Philip and S. James appeared again and again in lessening size as we looked back, there came at last a bend in the canal, when a high bank of gorse shut out the distance, and ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... Berkshire side, leaving the cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk. It was the English winter at its loveliest—still, patient, expectant—rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of. But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been so near to him—and yet so far away—so sweet, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had wandered on from Willey Water along the course of the bright little stream. The afternoon was full of larks' singing. On the bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots flowered by the water. There was a rousedness and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... work, recommending prizes for essays on twenty-four subjects, some of which are in the first volume of the Society's Journal. Prizes were also offered for the best draining-plough, the best implement for crushing gorse, for a ploughing match to be held at the first country meeting of the Society fixed at Oxford in 1839, for the best cultivated farm in Oxfordshire and the adjacent counties, and for the invention ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... burrow, and until the grass is too tall, or after it is cut or grazed, can be watched from the highway. In this hedge the first nightingale of the year sings, beginning some two or three days before the bird which comes to the bushes in the gorse, which ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... are many places where a horse would be a source of danger. The sides of the valley are closely wooded for the first seven or eight miles north of Pickering, but the surrounding country gradually loses its cultivation, at first gorse and bracken, and then heather, taking the place of the ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... primroses; narcissus grows wild in the lower fields; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels; hyacinth-pools of blue shine in the woods; and then with a later burst of glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, and blazing round about the beacon hill. The beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you follow the little wood of nightingales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the blackthorn hedges shine in spring-time (lovely dials ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... stream is Sutlej now, And Putney's evening haze The dust that half a hundred kine Before my window raise. Unkempt, unclean, athwart the mist The seething city looms, In place of Putney's golden gorse The sickly ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of Dog Lane, the outlet towards Paddiford Common, whither the caricatures were moving; and you foresee, of course, that those works of symbolical art were consumed with a liberal expenditure of dry gorse-bushes and ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Gorse and heather riot over the moorland. There is a charm and peace about this too little known country ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... Carman To the Daisy William Wordsworth To Daisies Francis Thompson To the Dandelion James Russell Lowell Dandelion Annie Rankin Annan The Dandelions Helen Gray Cone To the Fringed Gentian William Cullen Bryant Goldenrod Elaine Goodale Eastman Lessons from the Gorse Elizabeth Barrett Browning The Voice of The Grass Sarah Roberts Boyle A Song the Grass Sings Charles G. Blanden The Wild Honeysuckle Philip Freneau The Ivy Green Charles Dickens Yellow Jessamine Constance Fenimore Woolson Knapweed Arthur Christopher ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamy vegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... the lead, the chain stretched taut, and the boy had all his work cut out to keep up with the dog. Up the hill they went on to the downs, and in and out among the furze bushes. The night was no longer dark to Edred. His eyes had got used to the gentle starlight, and he followed the dog among the gorse and brambles without stumbling and without hurting himself against the million sharp spears ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... would think that he communed with himself save that, at the pauses, he shoots a powerful glance at the listener. Between the poems he is still but moves his lips... He likes best to speak of hunting (he will shout of it!), of open air mornings when the gorse alone flames brighter than the sky, of country quiet, ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... My soul was nurst, amid the loveliest scenes Of-unpolluted nature. Sweet it was, As the white mists of morning roll'd away, To see the mountain's wooded heights appear Dark in the early dawn, and mark its slope With gorse-flowers glowing, as the rising sun On the golden ripeness pour'd a deepening light. Pleasant at noon beside the vocal brook To lay me down, and watch the the floating clouds, And shape to Fancy's wild similitudes Their ever-varying ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... 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 hear in woodlands dim Their unarticulated hymn, Now walk through rippling waves of wheat, Now sink in mats of clover sweet, Or see before us from the lawn The lark go up to ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... the dragon. "I will promise nothing to-day to any man or to any woman," said Violet. What was to be said to a young lady who spoke in this way, and who had become of age only a fortnight since? She rode that day the famous run from Bagnall's Gorse to Foulsham Common, and ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... and the prospect on every side so free and unbounded! Then it was all covered with gay flowers, many of which I had never observed before. There were, at least, three kinds of heath (I have got them in my handkerchief here), and gorse, and broom, and bell-flower, and many others of all colors that I will beg you presently to tell ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the fences: the men who tended his sheep might easily keep them from the plantation for this season, and the next spring he purposed to dig such a ditch round the whole as should secure it for ever. He was now extremely busy, making jackets for his sheep, providing willows for his decoy, and gorse and corn for his geese: the geese, of which he had a prodigious flock, were not yet turned into their fen, because a new scheme had occurred to Marvel, relative to some reeds with which a part of this fen was covered; on these reeds myriads of starlings were accustomed to roost, who broke them ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... was called "The Wilderness." The house was of distinctly composite structure. Tradition said that it had been a royal hunting lodge in the days when Barnes and Putney and Wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the Thames flowed silver-clear through a vast, wild region of forest and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of the deer in Richmond Park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges bellowing across the open spaces which ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... the New Testament. "In this strange volume," I continued, "the most beautiful ethical maxims exist in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said to have felt when he first saw growing wild the masses of blooming gorse, which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such elevation of tone, I leave you to judge." ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and wonderful cloud pictures. ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... older than in other parts of the world and which but feebly gilded the sorrowful, age-old forests and the mossy sandstone. There were the same endless stretches of broken, rocky soil, pitted with ponds of rusty water, dotted with scattered clumps of gorse and fruze copse, and sprinkled with pink harebells ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... gazed pathetically out of the window. Her eyes rested on the bed where the hyacinths were planted, and beyond it to gorse bushes and a ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... rather, in the direction where cover-point would have been. "Ye're awfu' bad in the whuns," said the orphan boy; and, indeed, BULGER'S next strokes were played in distressing circumstances. The spikes of the gorse ran into his person—he could only see a small part of the ball, and, in a few minutes, he had made a useful clearing of about a quarter ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... the hall. "No;—that wasn't it," said Mrs. Spooner loudly. "I don't care what Dick said." Dick Rabbit was the first whip, and seemed to have been much exercised with the matter now under dispute. "The fox never went into Grobby Gorse at all. I was there and saw Sappho give him a ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... of smoke issuing from a small clay-built hut thatched with furze, built against the steepest part of the hill, of which it seemed a mere excrescence, about half way down the declivity; and, on calling aloud, two children, who had been picking up dry stumps of heath and gorse, and collecting them in a heap for fuel at the door of their hovel, first carefully deposited their little load, and then came running to know ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... over, I made bold to call at Hartledon, but the servants said his lordship wasn't in. As I came away, I saw him, as I thought, pass the lodge and go up the road, and I cut after him, but couldn't overtake him, and at last lost sight of him. I struck into a tangled sort of pathway through the gorse, or whatever it's called down here, and it brought me out near the river. His lordship was just sculling down, and then I knew it was some one else had gone by the lodge, and not him. Perhaps it ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Some one with the love of God in his heart had built it long ago, and chose a site for the bairns in the sweet pine-woods at the foot of the cart road to Whinnie Knowe and the upland farms. It stood in a clearing with the tall Scotch firs round three sides, and on the fourth a brake of gorse and bramble bushes, through which there was an opening to the road. The clearing was the playground, and in summer the bairns annexed as much wood as they liked, playing tig among the trees, or sitting down at dinner-time on the ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... itself all these changes; and is, indeed, an epitome of the results of this awakening. Anything more desolate than its aspect when it was first established it would be impossible to imagine. Long 'lines' of huts, planted in a wilderness of gorse, heather, and sand, dimly lit, and miserably appointed; 'women that were sinners' prowling about the outskirts, and gradually taking possession of much of the hastily-constructed town, with the usual accompaniment of low ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... charming! That view alone is worth coming down for! See those purple shadows! see that golden light on the gorse bushes!" ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... moorland sprinkled here and there with white-fleeced sheep stretching away on one side, and on the other a valley, down which flowed, with ceaseless murmurings, a rapid stream, a steep hill covered with gorse and heather, the summit crowned with a wood of dark pines rising beyond it. Just above the manse could be seen the kirk, which, with a few cottages, composed the village; while scattered far around were the huts in which the larger part of the pastor's flock abode. ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... to the church, An ornament unto the town; On one side an old coal pit, The other well gorsed around. Peter Hadley peeped through the gorse, In order to see them fight; Spittle jobbed out his eye with a fork, And said, — ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... the only intruders were occasional visitors of irreproachable antecedents from Tunbridge Wells. Respectability is a plant which in that fashionable watering-place has been so assiduously cultivated that it flourishes now in the open air; like the yellow gorse, it is found in every corner, thriving hardily under the most unfavourable conditions; and the keener the wind, the harder the frost, the more proudly does it hold its head. But on this particular day the gathering was confined ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... was in the year, there was still some autumn foliage on the trees and bushes and some few flowers and many ferns in sheltered places; we also had the golden furze or gorse to cheer us on our way, for an old saying ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... was sandy and light, but matted with the roots of the surrounding firs. Gorse tore their hands; and as they baled the sand from the grave, it was often discoloured with their blood. An hour passed of unremitting energy upon the part of Morris, of lukewarm help on that of John; and still the trench was barely nine inches in depth. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is here, and the world is lovely in its yellow and green. It must be urromassy nice over yandher in the 'oilan' too, with the primroses and the violets and the gorse in the glen. Oh, dear! oh, dear! I can smell it all three hundred miles away! The lilacs will be out at Glenfaba now, and Aunt Anna will be collecting her Easter eggs. Well—wait a whilley, and I'll come to thee, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... slipped very easily from his unresisting shoulders. The glory of a perfect English midsummer lay like a golden spell upon the land. The moors were purple with heather, touched here and there with the fire of the flaming gorse, the wind blew always from the west, the gardens were ablaze with slowly bursting rhododendrons. Every gleam of coloring, every breath of perfume, seemed to carry him unresistingly back to the days of his boyhood. He fished once more in the ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... place is generally chosen where two or four roads meet, and the dancers come from the scattered farmhouses in every direction. In Ballyfuchsia, they dance on a flat piece of road under some fir-trees and larches, with stretches of mountain covered with yellow gorse or purple heather, and the quiet lakes lying in the distance. A message comes down to us at Ardnagreena—where we commonly spend our Sunday afternoons—that they expect a good dance, and the blind ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the summons, over which Mistress Betty, a little worn by voluntary adversity, shed "a power" of joyful tears. To travel down into Somersetshire, and stroll among the grass in the meadows, and the gorse on the commons, which she had not seen for twelve months; to feed the calves, and milk the cows, and gather the eggs, and ride Dapple, and tie up the woodbine, and eat syllabub in a bower; to present "great ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... how merry a start we got, When the red fox broke from the gorse, In a country so deep, with a scent so hot, That the hound could outpace the horse; I remember how few in the front rank shew'd, How endless appeared the tail, On the brown hill-side, where we cross'd the road, And headed towards the vale. The dark-brown ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... different from a huntsman at the end of a bad day! A huntsman often has a very bad time out hunting, and it is sometimes a marvel that he does not take the advice which Job got from his wife. But now all things were smiling, and it was soon known that his lordship intended to draw Craigattan Gorse. Now in those parts there is no surer find, and no better chance of a ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... was turned towards the fence, and again Jim failed to recognise him. And Jim peered over the fence through a gorse-whin, undetected even ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... may use the word. It seemed, on the contrary, to have a tonic and exhilarating effect on this Patchinar pony. Before we could reach him (a work of considerable difficulty and some risk) he had risen to his feet, given himself a good shake, and was nibbling away at a bit of gorse that peeped through the snow on which he had fallen. A deep cut on the shoulder was his only injury, and, curiously enough, our portmanteaus, with the exception of a broken strap, were unharmed. There was, luckily, nothing ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the former; or stimuli, stings, as in the nettles, which are armed with a venomous fluid for the annoyance of naked animals. The shrubs and trees, which have prickles or thorns, are grateful food to many animals, as goosberry, and gorse; and would be quickly devoured, if not thus armed; the stings seem a protection against some kinds of insects, as well as the naked mouths of quadrupeds. Many plants lose their thorns by cultivation, as wild animals lose their ferocity; and some of them their horns. ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... it neared the sea. The mountains, which rose tier after tier from the level green meadows, had their lower slopes thickly clothed with pines and larches; but where they towered above the level of a thousand feet the forest growth gave way to gorse and bracken, and their jagged summits, bare of all vegetation save a few clumps of coarse grass, showed a splintered, weather-worn outline against the sky. Penllwyd, Penglaslyn, and Glyder Garmon, those lofty peaks like three ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... found the open mountain heath Yellow with gorse, and rested there and stood To gaze upon the misty sea beneath, Or on the ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... rather have this pretty little rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italian terraces. The cottagers have chosen the better part. What gillyflowers and what columbines! And here you look out so directly on the common. I love the gorse and the bracken, I love the stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug hard at the silverweed, they make it all seem so ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... you stay on deck?" demanded the mother angrily, as she lifted the transformation from her brow and heaved it on to the upper berth, thereby unashamedly exposing a head not unlike a gorse common devastated by fire. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... laid us all under an obligation never to be expressed in words. Newlands, with its keen, almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am grateful for the health and strength which Newlands has given me. But this must be told, if I ever write it, in the history of the house. Still, I regret not to have ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Bordeaux road (not far from the race-course), but we continued along it instead for some distance, finally turning off down a narrow lane without any sign of a hedge. After following this for a length of time, we took the road at right angles leading between fields covered with gorse, and later, descending one or two steep hills with trees on either side, we reascended and entered the ancient town of Lescar, only to dip under the tottering walls of the ancient castle—a few minutes later—and mount again under a narrow archway ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Christ Church to Main's is metalled for about four and a half miles; there are fences and fields on both sides, either laid down in English grass or sown with grain; the fences are chiefly low ditch and bank planted with gorse, rarely with quick, the scarcity of which detracts from the resemblance to English scenery which would otherwise prevail. The copy, however, is slatternly compared with the original; the scarcity of timber, the high price of labour, and the pressing urgency of more important claims upon the time ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... rob me; yes, to rob me, of course, to rob me.' To rob her, and of what?... of her watch; where was it? It was gone. The watch was gone.... But, had she lost it? Should she go back and see if she could find it? Oh! impossible! see the place again—impossible! search among the gorse—impossible! ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... overcast, and almost at the same moment we discovered that we had strayed from the track. The country in that district resembles the more western parts of Brittany, in consisting of huge tracts of bog and moorland strewn with rocks and covered with gorse; which present a cheerful aspect in sunshine, but are savage and barren to a degree when viewed through sheets of rain or under a ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... extent by cultivation. The sheep and the birds are mostly in sole possession and are almost the only living moving things on the hills. The fox, though at one time common, is now very rarely seen, for game, with the disappearance of gorse and bramble, has almost vanished, and other beasts of prey, weasel and stoat, shun the open uplands where the only enemy of field mouse and vole is the eagle of the south country, the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... to the friendly goat, came near the edge of the field, which here sloped more steeply to the mountain top. Great boulders, slightly covered with lichen and moss, were strewn about, and around them the bracken and gorse were growing, and in every crevice of these rocks there were plants whose little, tight-fisted roots gripped a desperate, adventurous habitation in a soil scarcely more than half an inch deep. At some ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... after which he briefly addressed his followers, explaining to them the importance of making the attack as complete a surprise as possible, and pointing out the necessity for availing ourselves to the utmost possible extent of the cover afforded us by the gorse bushes while approaching the battery. Then, having told off six of the men for the especial duty of spiking the guns—one man to each gun—he directed me to lead the way, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... a large piece of uncultivated ground covered with gorse, over which the wind rustled and blew day and night. Then the coast suddenly fell a hundred yards, forming a high, white cliff, the foot of which was washed by the sea; and Jeanne gazed at the vast, watery expanse whose waves seemed to ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending its golden empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel roots and beginning to gleam along the edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End the birches rose like green clouds against ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
