"Lilac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Moses left his boat and made his way over the ledge of rocks toward his retreat. They were all shaggy and slippery with yellow seaweeds, with here and there among them wide crystal pools, where purple and lilac and green mosses unfolded their delicate threads, and thousands of curious little shell-fish were tranquilly pursuing their quiet life. The rocks where the pellucid water lay were in some places crusted with barnacles, which were opening and ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... from the sun. It has the advantage also of not engendering insects; for, in consequence of its poisonous qualities, no insect can live upon it. When in blossom, the large clusters of its flowers resemble those of the lilac; these are succeeded by bunches of yellow berries, each about the size of a small cherry. It is a deciduous tree; but the berries remain during the winter, and drop ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... Hidden among some lilac bushes, she enjoyed the great decorum of the arrest, and heard the dialogue of the two men die away along the path. Soon after, the rolling of a carriage and the beat of hoofs arose in the still air of the night, and passed speedily farther ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... precious little tyke! Ma wore this gown to visit me (they drove the whole way then). And little Edson wore this waist. He never came again. This lavender par'matta was your Great-aunt Jane's—poor dear! Mine was a sprig, with the lilac ground; see, in the corner here. Such goods were high in war times. Ah, that scrap of army blue; Your bright eyes spied it! Yes, dear child, that has its memories, too. They sent him home on furlough once—our soldier brother Ned; But somewhere, now, the dear boy sleeps among the unknown ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... "At Lilac Lodge, over Windsor way," replied the Captain, trying to answer all three questions at once. "They started about a week after the Comstocks went to live there. And the thing was so appalling, the place seemed so certainly under a curse, that ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the German fashion of planting all our streets with double avenues of healthy trees. Berlin in spring seems to be set in a wood; it is so fresh and green. The flowering shrubs, on the other hand, are not to be compared with ours. Everyone rushes to see a few lilac bushes, and Gueldres roses trimmed to a stiff snowball of flowers, and everyone says Wie Herrlich! but you miss the profusion of lilac, hawthorn, and laburnum that runs riot all about London in every residential ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... all bourgeoning with Spring, You hold my winter in forgetfulness; Without my window lilac branches swing, Within my gate I hear a robin sing — O little laughing blooms that lift ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the crispy fields, Curls up the wan leaves of the lilac-hedge, And every eve cheats us with show of clouds That braze the horizon's western rim, or hang Motionless, with heaped canvas drooping idly, Like a dim fleet by starving men besieged, Conjectured half, and half descried afar, Helpless ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... on a lilac bush entered passionate protest against the word stupidity. "What will you have? What will you have?" trilled the robin in ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... dress as far as possible, painfully conscious that her shoes were untied, and white with dust. The next picture was several days later. She and Jack were playing mumble-peg outside under the window by the lilac-bushes, and the little mother was just inside the door, bending over a pile of photographs that Cousin Kate had dropped in her lap. Cousin Kate was saying, "This beautiful old French villa is where I expect ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of a flower for garter-wearing purposes is considered according to the degree and strength of its perfume, the most highly perfumed being the most highly appropriate. Violets are in great favor, and are used for garters worn with lilac, lavander, delicate green or white costumes. Again, as American women love to ape the fashionable society of gay Paris it may not be very long before in the great cities of the country we may not only have the American morphine fiend and cologne-drinker, but also the perfume faddist. Not ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... satisfaction when the dim still-room precincts were fairly left behind, and they got into the pleasant old walled-in garden, where the yellow afternoon's sun was lying on the opening fruit-blossom, and bringing delicious scents out of the newly-blown lilac and hawthorn. She kept pulling Geordie's corduroys, to draw his attention to all that captivated her as they walked along the broad gravel walk. This was certainly a much pleasanter way home than along ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... most beautifully contrasted colours: among them are pairs of yellow and rose-red, golden and azure, orange and purple, orange and lilac, copper-colour and blue, apple-green and cherry-red, and so on. In the Southern Hemisphere there is a cluster containing so many stars of brilliant colours that Sir John Herschel named it 'the ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... lilac bushes and cut off a part of the roots while the other men were digging the holes, and they planted the lilac bushes in the holes, but they didn't do it so carefully as they had with the other ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... them to keep them from blowing away, looked like immense shells. It was strange that even the sea seemed to sound differently when all those leaping, laughing figures ran into the waves. Old Mrs. Fairfield, in a lilac cotton dress and a black hat tied under the chin, gathered her little brood and got them ready. The little Trout boys whipped their shirts over their heads, and away the five sped, while their grandma sat with one hand in her knitting-bag ready to ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... lace for you. Can't you use it on some of your clothes? I don't know anything about such things: maybe it isn't pretty enough, but I thought perhaps it would do for that lilac silk ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... her bed's edge, swathed in a lilac silk kimona—delicate relic of school days. Her bandaged feet, crossed, dangled above the rag-rug on the floor; her slim, tanned fingers were interlaced over the book on ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... to him the responsibility for his poetic images and his moral reflections, blossoms unknown to my naturalist's garden; but I can swear to the truth of all he says, for it corresponds with what I see each summer on the lilac-trees of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... whole row of snowball and lilac bushes, and here are some early yellow roses, and over there a border of golden glow and a bed of lilies of the valley, and yet further on some hardy lilies and peonies, and beyond the walk a strawberry bed and sage, and gooseberries and red raspberries and an ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... In the quaint old town, front doors became back doors, kitchens looked out on the street, and the windows of living-rooms and dining-rooms faced the sea. But there were two seasons when the rocky and ignored gardens of the town were ablaze with beauty—in the lilac month of the spring, and in the dahlia ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... for our enlightenment and delectation. Maria felt kindly toward us, and her sympathies had been awakened to their very depths by a tender souvenir Adah had sent her—a leaf plucked from one of the lilac bushes on the old Schmittheimer place. Both Adah and Maria belong to that old-school class of proper feminine folk who never ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... valuable gum, its flowers yield a dye, and the dry leaves are eaten by buffaloes. A tree commonly planted near wells and villages in the submontane tract is the dhrek (Melia azedarach, N.O. Meliaceae), which is found as far west as Persia and is often called by English people the Persian lilac. The bahera (Terminalia belerica, N.O. Combretaceae), a much larger tree, is Indo-Malayan. Common shrubs are the marwan (Vitex negundo, N.O. Verbenaceae), Plumbago Zeylanica (Plumbaginaceae), the bansa or bhekar (Adhatoda vasica, N.O. Acanthaceae). ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... and strolled to a back window. She looked across the noisy, crowded stable-yard into the corner of a garden, where a lilac bush was budding into dusty dim purple and a hoary apple-tree blossomed white and pink like a blushing child, away over the green fields to a farmhouse upon a hill, where russet and yellow stacks proved the farmer's command of ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... disconnected bits of tinsel which were incomprehensible unless one knew the memory associated with them, and among the strange, motley chaos, the most personal mementoes: women's hair smooth, curled, braided, long, and short, arranged by a true eye, with scandalously cool composure, upon a pale lilac varnished board, in a wonderful scale of colours, from the highest pitch, the fair locks of the Englishwoman, resembling a delicate halo, through almost imperceptible gradations to the deep, shining blue-black of the Sicilian, and portraits in ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... belated, unfurling their rusty-red fronds. A waft of rich scent comes from a hawthorn hedge where a hidden cuckoo flutes, or just where the lane turns by the old water-mill, which throbs and grumbles with the moving gear, a great lilac-bush leans out of a garden and fills the air with perfume. Yet, as I go, I am filled with a heavy anxiety, which plays with my sick heart as a cat plays with a mouse, letting it run a little in the sun, and then pouncing upon it in terror and dismay. The beautiful sounds and sights round ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Four kinds of lilac here are grown, One double flowering cherry, And weeping ditto, not much known; Eight different sorts of rose I own, And ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... slowly upon its hinges with a creaking noise, and, forth from the solemn grove beyond, came a long file of young ladies, two and two, all with open books in their hands, and some with parasols likewise. And last of the goodly procession came Miss Monflathers, bearing herself a parasol of lilac silk, and supported by two smiling teachers, each mortally envious of the other, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... intense, yet seemingly so evanescent!—the glittering mantle of powdered gold; the emerald green that changes to velvet black; ruby reds and luminous scarlets; dull bronze that brightens and burns like polished brass, and pale neutral tints that kindle to rose and lilac-coloured flame. And to the glory of prismatic colouring are added feather decorations, such as the racket-plumes and downy muffs of Spathura, the crest and frills of Lophornis, the sapphire gorget burning on the snow-white breast of Oreotrochilus, the fiery tail of Cometes, and, amongst grotesque ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... the elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... talking all the way to fill up the somewhat sulky silence between them; but when she got safely within the garden door, and heard it shut behind her, and found herself in the quiet of the little green enclosure, with the budding trees and the lilac bushes for her only companions, the relief was very grateful to her. She could not go in all at once to make conversation for grandpapa and grandmamma, and give them the account they liked to hear, of how she had "enjoyed herself." She took off her hat to be cooler, and walked slowly ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... It was then the month of Mary. Formerly, at this season, the altar disappeared under the flowers brought from the conservatories of Longueval. None this year were on the altar, except a few bouquets of lily-of-the-valley and white lilac in gilded china vases. Formerly, every Sunday at high mass, and every evening during the month of Mary, Mademoiselle Hebert, the reader to Madame de Longueval, played the little harmonium given by the Marquise. Now the poor harmonium, reduced to silence, no longer accompanied the voices of the ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... had just left, was his mother who was coming out to Falmer this evening to dine; above illimitable blue stretched from horizon to horizon, behind was the free fresh sea. Birds chirped in the bushes and lilac was in ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... a chateau, overgrown with creepers, and with terraced lawns stretching down to the sunny corner to which the girl had been carried earlier in the day. There were flowers everywhere—beds of hyacinths, and borders of purple and yellow crocuses. A lilac tree was bursting into blossom, the breeze was soft and full of life. Below, beyond the yellow-starred field of which the woman had spoken, flowed the Seine, and in the distance one could see ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... she could see the garden and at a little distance bushes of lilac in full flower, drowsy and lifeless from the cold; and the thick white mist was floating softly up to the lilac, trying to cover it. Drowsy rooks were ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... that the good effects of the hot baths are confined to the parts actually immersed and do not extend to the whole plant. Thus, on the same stem we may see developing only the branches that have been treated with the bath, while the others remain torpid. This is easy to verify with the lilac or ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... and disappear behind us. The sun has now risen well; the sky is a rich blue, and the tardy moon still hangs in it. Lilac tones show through the water. In the south there are a few straggling small white clouds,—like a long flight of birds. A great gray mountain shape looms up before us. We are steaming ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... feared that soap may change the color of an article, as, for instance, scarlet hosiery or lilac print, if the garment be not badly soiled, it may be cleansed by washing without soap in water in which pared potatoes have been boiled. This method will also prevent color from running in ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... spring, several deer are seen crossing the field just a little distance from the house. They like to drink at the brooks and nip off the buds of the lilac ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... against the sun's glare like ivory beneath the blue, and quivering with heat, was flecked here and there with small lilac shadows; and these shadows marked the entrances of the caves with which Rueda was honeycombed. I had once or twice resolved to visit these caves; for I had heard much of their renown, and even (although this I disbelieved) that they contained ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Susan Kemp. He came from somewhere in Norfolk, the scene, I remember, of the 'Babes in the Wood,' and he wore the only smock-frock in the parish, where the ruling fashion was "thunder-and-lightning" sleeve-waistcoats. Susan's Sunday dress was a clean lilac print gown, made very short, so as to show white stockings and boots with cloth tops. Over the dress was pinned a little black shawl, and her bonnet was unusually large, of black velvet or silk, with a great white frill inside it. She was troubled at times with a mysterious complaint called ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... drooping lilac-bush a few feet away from the open casement was mingled with the fainter odour of jessamine and homely stocks. In the soft morning sunshine the terrors of last night seemed a thing far removed from us. We sat at breakfast in our little sitting-room, and as though by common though unspoken ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... climbed to the summit of the bluff, and beheld the inlet in all its length and depth, from the open, sunny expanse of the lake to the dark strait below us, where the overhanging trees of the opposite cliffs almost touched above the water. The honeyed bitter of lilac and apple blossoms in the garden below steeped the air; and as I inhaled the scent, and beheld the rich green crowns of the oaks which grew at the base of the rocks, I appreciated the wisdom of Sergius and Herrmann that led them to pick out this bit of privileged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... the dark house. "Scarlet, dark red, blue and pink flowers within three feet of the light soon turned to a grayish white." Chinese primulas seven feet from the light were unaffected, but those four feet away were changed. Lilac colors were bleached to pure white when the light struck them fairly. An elaborate series of tables of the effect of the light is given in the paper. The author believes it possible that the electric light may be used some day to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... of concrete—a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and remember. The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees. He saw the house contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions, he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch. "So it has come to this," he thought resentfully, with ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... were deposited Frank's well-brushed hat; a satinwood box, containing kid-gloves, of various delicate tints, from primrose to lilac; a tray full of cards and three-cornered notes; an opera-glass, and an ivory subscription-ticket ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the current of the cooling air; 'Not much, good Dame; I'm weary by the way; 'Perhaps, anon, I've something else to say.' Now, while the Seed-cake crumbled on her knee, And Snowy Jasmine peeped in to see; And the transparent Lilac at the door, Full to the Sun its purple honors bore, The clam'rous Hen her fearless brood display'd, And march'd around; while thus the Matron said: 'Jane has been weeping, Walter;—prithee why? 'I've seen her laugh, and dance, but never cry. 'But ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... hair a brief lick with the brush, collected his cap and sweater, bolted the plate of breakfast Aunt Saxon had left on the back of the stove when she went away for her regular Monday's wash, and was ready behind the lilac bush with old trusty, down on his knees oiling her a bit, when the Chief drove back with Mark Carter in the back seat looking strangely white and haughty, but ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... kitchen garden and cropped the tips of the newly planted orchard. After that the two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... there in 1855, in her ninety-first year. Probably she is my most direct link with the past, for she carried down to the time of the Crimean War the habits and phraseology of Queen Charlotte's early Court. "Goold" of course she said for gold, and "yaller" for yellow, and "laylock" for lilac. She laid the stress on the second syllable of "balcony." She called her maid her "'ooman;" instead of sleeping at a place, she "lay" there, and when she consulted the doctor she spoke of having "used ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... which actually pierces snow, though I have seen gentians filling thawed hoof-prints. Crocuses are languid till they have had sun for a day or two. But the soldanella enjoys its snow, at first, and afterwards its fields. I have seen it make a pasture look like a large lilac silk gown. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... them nest on the Farallones. They lay their two eggs on the bare rock in dark crevices. The color is grayish or pale greenish blue and the markings are brown and black with paler shell markings of lilac. Size 2.40 x 1.60. Data.—S. Farallone Islands, Cal. Two eggs laid on gravel at the end of a burrow, about two feet from the entrance and 285 feet above the ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... warmth in the sunshine to-day, there was a fragrance of lilac and early roses in the idle breezes. "Hot!" shouted the players exultantly, as they passed each other in the green valleys and over the sunny mounds. "You bet it's hot!" agreed stout and glowing ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... spinsterish-looking Main Street lined by dooryards having fences of pointed painted pickets, and behind the pickets, peonies and hollyhocks encroaching upon prim flagged walks which led back to the white-panelled doors of small houses buried almost to their eaves in lilac ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Cassia, Cassie, Cedar, Cedrat, Cinnamon, Citron, Citronella, Clove, Dill, Eglantine or Sweet Brier, Elder, Fennel, Flag, Geranium, Heliotrope, Honeysuckle, Hovenia, Jasmine, Jonquil, Laurel, Lavender, Lemon-grass, Lilac, Lily, Mace, Magnolia, Marjoram, Meadow-sweet, Melissa, Mignonette, Miribane, Mint, Myrtle, Neroli, Nutmeg, Olibanum, Orange, Orris, Palm, Patchouly, Sweet Pea (Theory of Odors), Pineapple, Pink, Rhodium (Rose yields two Odors), Rosemary, Sage, Santal, Sassafras, ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... scarce but remarkably handsome perennial, producing lilac-purple flowers with yellow stamens in July and August. It will grow in ordinary soil, and may be increased by ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... grass and the bushes nearest to the window yielded a series of useful clews. For example, Dukovski succeeded in discovering a long, dark streak, made up of spots, on the grass, which led some distance into the centre of the garden. The streak ended under one of the lilac bushes in a dark brown stain. Under this same lilac bush was found a top boot, which turned out to be the fellow of the boot already ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... were the woods, to be sure, but half a mile away across the fields. Near the house, there were no trees at all; only some lilac bushes at one side; there was no green grass either. A gravel path took up the whole of the narrow front yard; and, what with the blazing color of the paint and the wide-awake look of the blindless windows, the house had somehow the air of standing on tip-toe and staring hard at something,—the ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... again, he was so uncommonly smart. He had an entirely new suit of glossy clothes on, a shining hat, lilac-kid gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little finger. Besides which, he quite scented the dining-room with bear's-grease and other perfumery. He looked ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... April day, the air is keen and sweet here in the heart of the old-fashioned garden, full of the odor of budding leaves and freshly-turned earth, mingled with the perfume of the great lilac-trees, which ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... marvel; the walls were hung with lilac and pink satin, and the immense chandelier was one mass of candles and flowers; from each panel in the room there were suspended baskets of flowers and plants, and between the panels were mirrors which reflected ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Acapansingo, than which I never beheld anything prettier in its way. Some few houses there are of stone, but the generality are of cane, and each cottage is surrounded by its fruit-trees, and by others covered with lilac or white blossoms, and twined with creepers. The lanes or streets of the village are cleanly swept, and shaded by the blossoming branches that overhang them; while every now and then they are crossed by little streams ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... over. I had not left her Fanny Hill, but why I cannot tell, for I knew how baudy books excited a woman. The night before my next attack, I wrapped up the book, directed it to her, gave a boy sixpence to deliver it, hid myself by a lilac which was in the front-garden close to the road, and saw the boy give it to her, and go off quickly as I had told him. It was just dark, and too dark inside the passage of the house to see; for ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... hide, growing in solitary couples, protecting between them the slender stalk with its drooping yellow bell. Later in the season come the larger and more brilliantly tinted flowers, the wild purple larkspur, the great yellow buttercup, and the lilac flox. There were dusky depths in the wood, too, into which, book in hand, we sometimes retreated from the mid-summer heat into an atmosphere of moist and murky coolness. There we found the Indian pipe, or ghost-flower—leaf, stem, and flower, all white ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... along the path leading from the barn, he stood near a lilac bush for a few moments watching the pretty group under the trees. But he couldn't understand having breakfast outside the ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Brackenhurst, of course, the greenest and leafiest of our southern suburbs. It looked even prettier than its wont just then, that town of villas, in the first fresh tenderness of its wan spring foliage, the first full flush of lilac, laburnum, horse-chestnut, and guelder-rose. The air was heavy with the odour of May and the hum of bees. Philip paused a while at the corner, by the ivied cottage, admiring it silently. He was glad he lived there—so very aristocratic! ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... submit to. Few of the coloured people are ever married, but they don't separate oftener than REALLY married folks. Bill, the handsome West Indian black, married my pretty washerwoman Rosalind, and was thought rather assuming because he was asked in church and lawfully married; and she wore a handsome lilac silk gown and a white wreath and veil, and very well she looked in them. She had a child of two years old, which did not at all disconcert Bill; but he continues to be dignified, and won't let her go and wash clothes in the river, because the hot sun ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... to bid each other farewell. Everything before them was on a perfect level. The sun, resting on the horizon line, streamed across the ground from between copper-coloured and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a sky of pale soft green. All dark objects on the earth that lay towards the sun were overspread by a purple haze, against which groups of wailing gnats shone out, rising upwards and dancing about ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... and new, fragrant as the morning— One pale widow, passing by, pauses for a space, Thinking of the lilac tree that once grew, adorning All a little cottage home, in life's fragrant morning; Of a lilac tree that ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... nudged Jerry. The gnarled finger pointed to a twig of wild lilac eight feet off the ground. Caught on the twig were several coarse black hairs, six inches long. Jerry looked from them back to the Carvers, then down at the ground again. He didn't speak. What was ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris
... living for. What do the dwellers in cities know of true happiness? They never have seen grass or flowers! May God have pity on them!'" How glorious to watch the face of the desert changing its colors almost from day to day, white succeeding to pale straw color, red to white, blue to red, lilac to blue, and bright gold to that, according to the flowers with which it decked itself! Out of sight stretches the gorgeous carpet, dotted with the black camel's-hair tents of the Arabs, enlivened with flocks of sheep and camels, and whole studs of ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... they said, but as Handy Solomon and the Nigger were the centre of discussion, I could imagine the subject. I felt very stiff and sore and hazy in my mind. My neck was lame from the dragging and my tongue dry from the choking. For some time I lay in a half-torpor watching the lilac of dawn change to the rose of sunrise, utterly indifferent to everything. They had thrown me down across the first rise of the little sand dunes back of the tide sands, and from it I could at once look out over the sea full of the restless shadows of dawn, and the land narrowing to the mouth ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... long over many a mound that bore the names of those whom I had been familiar with in life, thinking of what they had been, and what I had known of them. Over some I planted shrubs and flowers, little lilac trees, obtained with no small trouble, and flowering evergreens, which looked quite gay and pretty ere I left, and may in time become great trees, and witness strange scenes, or be cut down as fuel for another besieging ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... the Saturday previous to her mistress. She was dressed in lilac damask, trimmed with swansdown, and her hair, for the last time in her life, streamed over her shoulders and fell at its own sweet will. Matrons always tucked away their hair in the dove-cote, while widows were careful not to show a single lock. ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... key of her room the porter handed her a note and a bouquet of violets and lilac blossoms.... Oh, why had not she had a similar idea and sent Emil some flowers? But what could he have to write to her about? With a slight thrill of fear at her heart, she opened the ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... neutrality. They are very jealous of neighbors. A few years ago I was much interested in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... It was Tottie, wearing her best manners, and with a countenance from which, obviously, she had extracted, as it were, some of the rosy color worn at her earlier appearance. She had smoothed her bobbed red tresses, too, and a long motor veil of a lilac tinge made less obtrusive the decollete ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... parterres of Europe grow by the side of the gayer plants and shrubs of the country, shaded by the orange, banana, bread-fruit (now nearly naturalised here,) and the palms, between straight alleys of limes, over whose heads the African melia waves its lilac blossoms; and on the raised water channels, china vases are placed, filled with aloes and tuberoses, and here and there a statue intermixed. In these gardens there are occasionally fountains and seats under the trees, forming places ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... scent the red rose weaves Nor hawthorn blossom over bloom-strewn grass, Nor violet's whisper when the children pass, Nor lilac perfume in the soft May eves, Nor new-mown hay, crisp scent of yellow sheaves, Nor any scent that Spring-time can amass And Summer squander, such a magic has As scent of fresh wet ...
— All Round the Year • Edith Nesbit
... home together, through a windy night which was bringing out April scents even from the London grass and lilac-bushes. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated with music and sunshine, were singing madly in the lilac-trees around." ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... began to write a novel. Poetry, too, she read with singular pleasure, never weary of repeating her favorite pieces. But the passion of her childhood was painting pictures. Almost in her infancy she began to draw with a pin and lilac-leaf, and advanced from that to slate and pencil, and, by and by, to a lead-pencil and backs of letters. When she had learned to draw pretty well, she was on fire to paint her pictures, but was long puzzled to procure the colors. Having obtained in some way a cake of gamboge, she ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the gardens with lilac and laburnum bushes, with gooseberries and currants. There were no flowers there that did not sow themselves year after year. They were damp, grubby places, but even there an imaginative child like Mary Gray could find suggestions ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... his hand, he strolled out on to the platform. Above the roofs the twilight was rising from the Sound. A few doves were flying there, catching the last red rays of the sun on their white pinions, while down in the shaft the darkness lay like a hot lilac mist. The hurdy-gurdy man had come home and was playing his evening tune down there to the dancing children, while the inhabitants of the "Ark" were gossiping and squabbling from gallery to gallery. Now and again a faint vibrating note rose upward, and all fell silent. This was the dwarf ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... behind the high, green hedge bordering the road on which we were walking some red roofs rising, half hidden by the masses of white cherry blossom which hung over them. A cottage was there boasting a garden in front, a garden that was filled with lilac and laburnum not yet in bloom; filled to overflowing, for the lilac bulged all over the hedge in purple bunches and the laburnum poured its young leaves down on it. A tiny lawn, rather long-grassed and not innocent ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... leaving the mountains, there was a very extraordinary view; red, purple, green, and quite white sedimentary rocks, alternating with black lavas, were broken up and thrown into all kinds of disorder by masses of porphyry of every shade of colour, from dark brown to the brightest lilac. It was the first view I ever saw, which really resembled those pretty sections which geologists make of the inside of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... well-stocked paint-box. His forehead and crown are metallic green. His back is red, crimson on the shoulders. His lower plumage might be a model for the colouring of a Neapolitan ice-cream; from the chin downwards it displays the following order of colours: lilac, crimson, black, yellow. The hen is brown above, with a dull red rump, ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... frosty, snow-laden season began; nothing but white forests, white fields, are to be seen in every quarter of the level Alfoeld, and as early as four o'clock in the afternoon the dark-grey, lilac-coloured atmosphere begins to envelope the horizon all round about, rising higher and higher every moment, till at last the very vault of heaven is reached, and it is night. Only the snowy whiteness of the plain preserves some gleam of light to ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... hear," Eliza replied. "Let me go and peep in, to see if he is there. But no; hush! See, here he comes! Come; we will hide behind the lilac-bush, and ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... garden, under the lilac and rose bushes, ran Bunny and Sue after the old rooster. The rooster was getting tired now, and could not go so fast. Neither could Bunny nor Sue, and Bunny's arm was so tired, from having thrown his lasso so much, that he ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Playing Circus • Laura Lee Hope
... from the Hermit the glory of the sundown. But we can behold its effects on Mt. Sanneen, on the clouds above us, on the glass casements in the villages far away. The mountains in the east are mantled with etherial lilac alternating with mauve; the clouds are touched with purple and gold; the casements in the distance are scintillating with mystical carbuncles: the sun is setting in the Mediterranean,—he is waving ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the Polota many times a day, yet the lesser stream flooded the universe on one occasion. On the hither bank of that stream, as you go from Polotzk, I should plant a flowering bush, a lilac or a rose, in memory of the life that bloomed in me one day that I ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... inn. The landlady recognized Vane with pleased surprise. When she had attended to Evelyn she provided Vane with some of her husband's clothes. Then she lighted a fire; and when she had laid out a meal in the guest-room, Evelyn came in, attired in a dress of lilac print. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... killed her? Brave men have died thus. Revenge demanded keener punishment. So I walked softly on those lilac hills, Touching my rhibab lightly as ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... at her a moment, plucked a small sprig from a lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away. "I am not very sure ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... through a wood of great beeches and then into a shallow valley, with the green backs of downs peeping over the distant trees. After Scotland the air smelt heavy and flat, but infinitely sweet, for the limes and chestnuts and lilac bushes were domes of blossom. Presently I came to a bridge, below which a clear slow stream flowed between snowy beds of water-buttercups. A little above it was a mill; and the lasher made a pleasant cool sound in the scented dusk. Somehow the place soothed ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... was at a standstill, drawn up at the platform of the station. It was very quiet, and even the train coming in hardly seemed to disturb the sleepy stillness that hung over the strips of asphalt, the beds of hollyhocks and lilac bushes against the whitewashed walls, where the rural fancy of the stationmaster had gone so far as to range ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... one thing and another, the sun was right up in the very mid-most middle of the sky when she crossed the last meadow from the mill and came in sight of her grandmother's cottage, and the big lilac-bushes that grew by the ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... on the arm of our dear Prince?" asked a little fat man, girt in a white satin waistcoat, and a spray of white lilac in his buttonhole. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... cried after her unexpectedly. "I have a great favour to beg of your mother and you; to pay me a visit in my new abode. You know, I have had a piano sent over; Lemm is staying with me; the lilac is in flower now; you will get a breath of country air, and you can return the same day—will you consent?" Lisa looked towards her mother; Marya Dmitrievna was assuming an expression of suffering; but Lavretsky did not give her time to open her mouth; he at once ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... to put on everything fresh from the armoir. We have saved what we can; but I find myself obliged to leave one of my new muslins I had just finished, as it occupied more room than I can afford, the body of my lovely lilac, and my beauteous white mull. But then, I have saved eight half-made linen chemises! that will be better ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... limousine that drew up at the corner of Gissing and Swinburne streets early that afternoon. A chauffeur in green livery opened the door, lifted out a suitcase of beautiful brown leather, and gave a respectful hand to the vision that emerged from depths of lilac-coloured upholstery. ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... with a lilac dove This Corsair desperate and daft? Behold the conning tower above The big stern chasers pointing aft! This is not he that saved mankind With pards and pigs from tempests blind, But rather he that forged a flood, And not of water but of blood, And filled with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... blossom, however small, is a mystery, a miracle. Here is the star of Bethlehem, wide open in the sunshine and showing so purely white amidst the green, and yonder is the purple fringe-like tuft of the weird muscari. Along the banks of the stream tall lilac-purple, stock-like flowers rise proudly above the grasses. They belong to the hesperis or dame's violet, a common wild-flower in this valley. Upon my left is the abrupt stony slope of the gorge. Between it and the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... waiting for the Anthophorae to carry them off to their cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies "spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis, rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly, on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one praying," and paralyses ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... arm in arm and full of a sedate joy; turning in between the tubbed box-trees at Lovett's Court, loitering for a moment to gaze out over the smooth harbor and nod to the stragglers of the congregation before they entered the big green door flanked by the lilac panes. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Villefranche. The great fire crackled in the grate, the hooded hawks slept upon their perches, the rough deer-hounds with expectant eyes crouched upon the tiled floor; close at the elbows of the guests stood the dapper little lilac-coated pages; the laugh and jest circled round and all was harmony and comfort. Little they recked of the brushwood men who crouched in their rags along the fringe of the forest and looked with wild and haggard eyes at the rich, warm glow ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fear and flurry old Bridget obeyed and departed at a run. Then, recovering herself a little, or drawn by some instinct, she returned, hid herself in a clump of lilac bushes and watched. ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... barrows trays and pans Grace and glimmer of romance, Bring the moonlight into noon Hid in gleaming piles of stone; On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet, Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square. Let statue, picture, park and hall, Ballad, flag and festival, The past restore, the day adorn And make each morrow a new morn So shall ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with them to the woods, to find the first creamy blossoms of the trillium, and scented branches of wild lilac. One Sunday they packed a lunch basket, and walked, boys and girls and mother, up to the old cemetery, high in the hills. Three miles of railroad track, twinkling in the sun, and a mile of country road, brought them to the old ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her. It was a spring sketch. My great-grandfather had lain face downwards on the lawn to do it. This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subject of his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades of lilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in its first beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-striped leaves. The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting on smooth cardboard, but a sketch—indefinite at the outer edges of the whole ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... still rather short, but it would be hard to hide such small feet, and such still smaller shoes. "Il faut souffrir pour tre belle," but quoi bon tre belle? if no one sees it. As for me, I ventured upon a lilac silk of Palmyre's, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... boys did not leave for a good quarter of an hour, and during that time, Dick and Dora somehow managed to walk to the end of the campus, where there were big clumps of rose bushes and lilac shrubbery. Once in the shadow of these Dick pulled something from a pocket and held ...
— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer
... looking at Ray Ingraham, in her striped lilac and white calico, with its plaited waist and cross-banded, machine-stitched double skirt, sitting by her shady window, beyond which, behind the garden angle, rose up the red brick wall of the bakehouse, whence came a warm, sweet smell of many ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a gate, and behind it was a green cluster of lilac bushes, which lined the walk to the big plum-colored house which Lionel Carvel had built. Virginia remembered that down this walk on a certain day in June, a hundred years agone, Richard Carvel had led ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink; And down the borders, well I know, The poppy and the pansy blow . . . Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through, Beside the river make for you A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep Deeply above; ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... to me you bring; Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, And thought of him ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... canopy over our heads. Although the stream is sluggish, we were unable to reach Bodegas that night. We stopped therefore at the house of a gentleman engaged in the cultivation of cacao. The tree on which it grows somewhat resembles a lilac in size and shape. The fruit is yellowish-red, and oblong in shape, and the seeds are enveloped in a mass of white pulp. It is from the seeds that chocolate is prepared. The flowers and fruits grow directly out of the trunk and branches. Cacao—or, as we call it, cocoa—was used by the ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... should wear crape with a bonnet having a small border of white. The veil should be long, and worn over the face for three months, after which a shorter veil may be worn for a year, and then the face may be exposed. After six months white and lilac may be used, and colors ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... fact, than Dobble. He, too, was dressed en militaire, with a frogged coat and spurs; and was walking with a showy-looking, Jewish-faced, black-haired lady, glittering with chains and rings, with a green bonnet and a bird-of-Paradise—a lilac shawl, a yellow gown, pink silk stockings, and light-blue shoes. Three children, and a handsome footman, were walking behind her, and the party, not seeing me, ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... When I was ill he used to come and read to me. He used to say I was the only friend he had. The dear marquis—and he is gone now. I went to his grave yesterday, and I strewed the tomb with chrysanthemums, and every spring he has the first lilac ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... are all brief, but they are frequent and like these: "Walk before breakfast with E—— and afterward alone. The country is beautiful, but oh, how sad! How can I live any longer!" "The glimmer of golden leaves in the sunshine; the lilac hedge shot with the crimson creeper; the river writing its silver S in the meadow; everything without full of loveliness. But within me the hunger, the famine of the heart!" "Another walk under the pines, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... through the beechwood that embroiders the hem of the down's cloak. There are only two colours in a beechwood after rain, lilac and green. A bank of violets is not more pure in colour than a beech trunk shining in the sun. The two colours answered one another, fainter and fainter, away and away, to the end of one's sight, and there were two cuckoos, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson |
