"Mossy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of bogs, of shaggy moor. Southward 10 miles is Radeberg [not RadebUrg, observe]; yonder is the town of Pulsnitz on our stream of Pulsnitz; to southeast, and twice as far, is Bischofswerda, chasmy Stolpen (too well known to us before this): behind us, Konigsbruck, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... walk along the winding road up the level valley amid the noble pines and spruces and oaks, and past the groves and bits of meadow and the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy granite boulders here and there reposing in the shade of the trees, with the full, clear, silent river winding through the plain near you, you are all the time aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces scarred and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with moisture, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... saddle. She relieved her horse of its saddle and flung herself upon the mossy ground in the shelter of a cluster of spruce. The humid heat was oppressive. The tumbling waters were unable to stir the atmosphere. But their music was soothing, and the sight of their turbulent rush seemed to hold sympathy for her troubled heart. And ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... Madame Taverneau a strange face, who gruffly announced that the post-mistress had gone away for a few days with Madame Louise Guerin. The dove had flown, leaving to mark its passage a few white feathers in its mossy nest, a faint perfume of grace ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... maid whom there wore none to praise And very few to love; A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! Fair as a star when only one Is shining ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... Hudson Straits, dank with muskeg, and silent as the very realms of death itself, but for the flacker of wild fowl, the roaring of the floundering {385} walrus herds, or the lonely tinkling of mountain streams running from the ice fields to the mossy valleys bordering the northern sea. It needed a robust hope, or the blind faith of an almost religious zeal, to penetrate the future and see beyond these sterile shores the Promised Land, where homes were to be built, and plenty to abound. If pioneer struggles leave a something in the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... this fellow, I saw that his head was bigger than that of a horse or of any other beast; that his hair was in tufts, leaving his forehead bare for a width of more than two spans; that his ears were big and mossy, just like those of an elephant; his eyebrows were heavy and his face was flat; his eyes were those of an owl, and his nose was like a cat's; his jowls were split like a wolf, and his teeth were sharp and yellow like a wild boar's; ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... pretty ill, but pick up, though still somewhat of a mossy ruin. If you would view my countenance aright, come—view it by the pale moonlight. But that is on the mend. I believe I have now a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow path along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base of the hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious power interpreted ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... as the sun was beginning to decline, I was particularly impressed by the beauty of the situation. The road was on the declivity of a rocky mountain, slightly covered with a mossy herbage and vagrant firs. At the bottom, a river, straggling amongst the recesses of stone, was hastening forward to the ocean and its grey rocks, of which we had a prospect on the left; whilst on the right it stole peacefully forward ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... many chairs of amber with soft mossy cushions. On each side of the cave-opening was a great forest of coral. Back of the ...
— Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children • Flora J. Cooke
... now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously, behind the woodpile. His father had finally cuffed him for importunity; and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but his rights. Only the woodpile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances; and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till, observing them, he began to wonder whether he could ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: 550 Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth, To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower, That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, 555 Lighting the green wood with ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... front of the back-cloth, and apparently among its apple trees, lies the counterfeitment of a mossy boulder; he puts his foot on it] If, you don't put too much ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... some newly put up, and others mossy and grey; it was a humbling yet an edifying sight, preaching, as forcibly as ever Maister Wiggie did in his best days, of the vanity and the passingness of all human enjoyments. Mouldered to dust beneath the tufts lay the blithe laddies with whom I have a ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... in all her smiling pomp, Where Beauty onward moving claims the verse Her charms inspire: the freely-flowing verse In thy immortal praise, O form divine, Smooths her mellifluent stream. Thee, Beauty, thee The regal dome, and thy enlivening ray The mossy roofs adore: thou, better sun! For ever beamest on the enchanted heart Love, and harmonious wonder, and delight Poetic. Brightest progeny of Heaven! 280 How shall I trace thy features? where select The ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Waverley had just ascended. [See Note 20.] The borders of this romantic reservoir corresponded in beauty; but it was beauty of a stern and commanding cast, as if in the act of expanding into grandeur. Mossy banks of turf were broken and interrupted by huge fragments of rock, and decorated with trees and shrubs, some of which had been planted under the direction of Flora, but so cautiously, that they added to the grace, without diminishing the ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... from Bengal; panther-skins from the Cape, spotted beautifully, like those that appeared to Dante; bear-skins from Siberia, fox-skins from Norway, and so on; and all these skins were strewn in profusion one on the other, so that it seemed like walking over the most mossy turf, or reclining on the most luxurious bed. Both laid themselves down on the divan; chibouques with jasmine tubes and amber mouthpieces were within reach, and all prepared so that there was no need to smoke the same pipe twice. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... time, speed was golden. But every step met its obstacle; there were low boughs, festoons of long-moss, bushes, briers, brake-cane, mossy logs, snaky pools, and things half fallen and held dead. If at any point on the bridle-path, near the stream, some cowpath, footpath, any trail whatever, led across to the road, my liers-in-wait were certainly guarding it and would rush to ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... arrangements for the evening were concluded, Zelma found that she had no time for a pilgrimage to the parish churchyard. She could see it from a window of her lodgings;—it was high-walled, dark and damp, crowded with quaint, mossy tomb-stones, and brooded over by immemorial yews. In the deepening, misty twilight, there was something awful in the spot. It was easy to fancy unquiet spectres lurking in its gloomy shadows, waiting for the night Yet Zelma's heart yearned toward it, and she murmured softly, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... heads and burst near our billet on the soft mossy field which we had just crossed. Another followed, flew over the roof of the dwelling and shattered the wall of an outhouse to pieces. Somewhere near a dog barked loudly when the echo of the explosion died away, and a steed neighed in the horse-lines ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... the moor, woke him to a realization of the fact that the school was long since out, and probably another thrashing awaited him when he got home. Sadly and regretfully he dragged his little aching body from its soft mossy bed, felt that his limbs were still sore, and that he was very, very hungry. Rebellion again surging within him as he remembered all, he trudged home, fearful yet proud, resolved to go through with ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... will, and I will grant it to you,' whispered Zoulvisia with a smile, as they sat together on a mossy bank by the stream. And the king prayed her to set free the old man to whom he owed his life, and to send him ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... of Solyma! begin the Song: To heav'nly Themes sublimer Strains belong. The Mossy Fountains, and the Sylvan Shades, The Dreams of Pindus and th' Aonian Maids, Delight no more—O Thou my Voice inspire, Who touch'd Isaiah's [hallow'd [2]] Lips with Fire! Rapt into future Times, the Bard begun; A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to a cup o' tea lest Teysday efternune; so I gae my hands an' face a bit dicht, an' threw on my Sabbath goon, an' awa' I gaed. I fell in wi' Mistress Kenawee on the road, an', gin we landit, there was a gaitherin' o' wives like what you wudda seen ony mornin' at the Mossy Wall afore the noo water supply was brocht in aboot ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... the bank of the lake to a point where she was screened both by thick, green shrubbery and the top of a single immense tree from the sky, sat down on some dry, mossy growth, took the law library from her belt, opened it and placed it in her lap. Vague stirrings indicated that her escort was also settling down in an irregular circle about her; and apprehension shivered on Telzey's skin again. It wasn't that their attitude was hostile; ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... passing through the wood. Before him he saw a noble oak about to fall. He ran and propped its mossy trunk with great branches that he ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... slowly and clumsily out from the shelter of a little ledge, his fearful eyes gleaming with deadly intentions against a ground-squirrel frisking upon the end of a mossy log, near where Captain Bob Bennett was seated, poring over a troublesome detail in the "Tactics." The snake saw the man, and his awkward movement changed at once into one of electric alertness. He sounded his terrible rattle, and his dull ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer and this is their heaven. But we had a splendid time today, Marilla. We had our lunch down in a big mossy hollow by an old well—such a ROMANTIC spot. Charlie Sloane dared Arty Gillis to jump over it, and Arty did because he wouldn't take a dare. Nobody would in school. It is very FASHIONABLE to dare. Mr. Phillips gave all the Mayflowers he found to Prissy Andrews ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pressure of footsteps. This he kept on for over half-an-hour, when he stopped short and, bending down nearly double, pointed to where, instead of being firm, the way he had selected had suddenly become boggy, mossy, and ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... living can conceive how mossy and dried-up and gnarled and black and unlike a human being such an old plain-dweller could be. The skin was so drawn over brow and cheeks, that he looked almost like a death's-head, and one saw only by a faint gleam in the hollows of the eye sockets that he was alive. And the dried-up ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... fir-top floats, an airy isle, High o'er the mossy ground; Harmonious silence breathes the while ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... By a mossy bank a little girl—a miniature Audrey—stout, rosy, and ragged, stood with a yellow straw hat aslant on her yellow hair, eating the leaves from a spray of beech in her hand. Audrey looked at us, eating the beech leaves steadily, but would not answer, not ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild water, their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away." "Satque superque satis"—we cannot go on. There is nothing like calling things by their contraries—it is truly startling. Whenever you speak of water, treat it as fire—of fire, vice versa, as water; and be sure to send them all shattering out of reach and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... unmoved, a ruin at his feet, The lowliest home where human hearts have beat? Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain, A century's showery torrents wash in vain; Its starving orchard where the thistle blows, And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows; Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen Next an old roof, or where a roof has been; Its knot-grass, plantain,—all the social weeds, Man's mute companions following where he leads; Its dwarfed pale ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or pensive pair Of picnickers, straying there— By green fields and running brooks, Sylvan shades and mossy nooks! ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... the yellow catkins cover All the slender willows over! And on the banks of mossy green Star-like primroses are seen; And, their clustering leaves below, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands. The trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process of which we have not the secret, have tiny little leaves on their decrepit and knotty branches. A pervading hue of the mossy green of antiquity harmonizes all this medley, which is ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... her feet, And the day is fading down to the night, And close at her pillow, and round and sweet, The red rose burns like a lamp a-light. Under and over, the gray mist lops, And down and down from the mossy eaves, And down from the sycamore's long wild leaves, The slow rain drops and drops ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... burnie, love, Rins roarin' to the sea, And tumbles o'er it's rocky bed, Like spirit wild and free. The mellow mavis tunes his lay, The blackbird swells his note, And little robin sweetly sings Above the woody grot. There meet me, love, by a' unseen, Beside yon mossy den, Oh, meet me, love, at dewy eve, In Morag's fairy glen; Oh, meet me, love, at dewy eve, In Morag's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... artist, I would paint her as a priestess at Ephesus, chanting a hymn to Diana; and instead of Hero and the pigeons, place brown deer and spotted fawns on mossy banks ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... craws on the brows of Ben-Connal, He kens of his bed in a sweet mossy hame; The eagle that soars o'er the cliffs of Clan-Ronald, Unawed and unhunted his eyrie can claim; The solan can sleep on the shelve of the shore, The cormorant roost on his rock of the sea, But, ah! there is one whose hard fate ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Singing, smiling, dimpling down To a mossy nook and brown, Under bending boughs of May; Where the nodding wind-flower grows, And the coolwort's lovely pink, Brooding o'er the brooklet's brink Dips and ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... full length on the mossy bank, watched the antics of his pet, laughing boisterously at times as Mr. Stubbs would do some one thing more comical than usual, and forgot there was in this world such a thing as a circus or such a man as Job Lord. It was to Toby a morning ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... Solyma! begin the song: To heavenly themes sublimer strains belong. The mossy fountains and the sylvan shades, The dreams of Pindus and th' Aonian maids, Delight no more—O thou my voice inspire Who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with fire! Rapt into future times, the bard begun: A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a Son! From Jesse's root behold ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... so in the shadowy forest the birds sing loud and sweet From swaying boughs where breezes rock their little broods to sleep. The golden cups of the cowslip spring from the mossy sod, And the sweet blue violet blooms alone—just for itself ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... all friendless,—for such mortal throes Pass not unpitied, though no mortal knows;— The spirits that infest the clearer air Looked down upon the innocent lady there, While troops of fairies smoothed her mossy bed And with sweet balsam pillowed her fair head. Her dim eyes could not see them, but she guessed Whose gentle ministrations thus had blessed Her travail; and when pitying fairies laid Upon her heart ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... had begun to take the place of the shrinking sensation he had felt on seeing that the woodwork was grey and mossy, much of it greatly decayed, and that the rough door had fallen away from its hinges and lay across the opening which it had been used to close. The timbers had been caulked with moss, and no doubt had had snow piled up against them, to keep out the ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... all physical substances with its mossy mantle, as it invests all things of the mind with forgetfulness, seemed to have respected these signs, which apparently had been made with some degree of regularity, and probably with a definite purpose. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hear the Oreads calling among the mountains; if you come cautiously around that bending hill, you may catch a glimpse of the great Pan himself. When the moonlight showers filled the forests with a magical light, one might see the untouched Artemis gliding rapidly among the mossy trunks. Beneath, in the deep abysses of earth, reigned the gloomy Pluto with the sad Persephone, home-sick for the upper air. By the sea-shore Proteus wound his horn, the Sirens sang their fatal song among the rocks, the Nereids and Oceanides gleamed beneath the green waters, the vast Amphitrite ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of two heavy turrets, one against the other, built of brick and stone in the style of Louis XIII, with great slate roofs and high dormer windows. After these came a lower and more modern building, ending with the chapel. In front of the chateau was an old square bastion forming a terrace, whose mossy walls were bathed by the waters of a large stagnant marsh. The west front which was plainer, was separated by only a few feet of level ground from the abrupt, wooded hill by which Tournebut was sheltered. ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... sufficient powers of observation to note the great luminary's exact relation to the horizon. Polar bears, like the Eskimo, had forsaken the spot. All nature, indeed, animate and inanimate, favoured the idea of repose when the explorers lay down to sleep on a mossy couch that was quite as soft as a feather bed, ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... who that is, and what he has found," thought Bobby. "I wish it wasn't such hard work to keep my eyes open." He made a great effort, however, and raised his heavy lids. At first he could see nothing. Then he caught a glimpse of a mossy log, with a row of frogs and toads sitting upon it. They were looking solemnly at him. Bobby felt a little uncomfortable under ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... yon mossy boulder, see an ebony shoulder, Dazzling the beholder, rises o'er the blue; But a moment's thinking, sends the Naiad sinking, With a modest shrinking, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... only her eyes, dull as those of a corpse. He plucked her by the sleeve, and both went on together, glancing back continually. At length they descended the slope of a small ravine, almost a hole, along the bottom of which a brook flowed lazily, overgrown with sedge, and strewed with mossy boulders. Descending into this ravine, they were completely concealed from the view of all the plain occupied by the Zaporovian camp. At least Andrii, glancing back, saw that the steep slope rose behind him higher than a man. On its summit appeared a few blades of steppe-grass; and behind them, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... cherish thee, or none (Such love thy simple charms begot), When first I saw thee, precious one; And now to some sweet lonely spot, Some shady dell or mossy grot, Come let us hasten, you and me, And I will eat you like a shot; Oh! penny bun, I love ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... these timepieces of sun and shadow made at all, or do they just occur here and there like hoary rocks and mossy springs? And what a charming provision of Nature it is that they so often occur in gardens! Sun-dials and gardens! Sunshine-and-shadow time for plants to grow by; sunshine-and-shadow time for flowers to bloom by. Surely this is the only ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... coming out from mossy path upon wide forest-road: and there, taking promenade, was Frankl, quite near, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... enchanting valley. The air was mild and clear; a few light clouds occasionally crossing the sun chequered the hills with sun and shade. I have as yet seen nothing that in pastoral beauty can compare with its glassy winding stream, its mossy old woods and guarding hills and the ivy-grown, castellated towers embosomed in its forests or standing on the banks of the Leven—the purest of rivers. At the little village called Renton is a monument ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... seat on the mossy rock 'Lena had been watching him. She was very ardent and impulsive, strong in her likes and dislikes, but quite ready to change the latter if she saw any indications of improvement in the person disliked. For her uncle she had conceived ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... prophesied thus, a lad passed on an ass. Paphnutius ordered him to descend, seated Thais on the ass, and led it by the bridle. Towards evening they came to a canal shaded by fine trees; he tied the ass to the trunk of a date palm, and sitting on a mossy stone he shared with Thais a loaf, which they ate with salt and hyssop. They drank fresh water in their hands, and talked of things eternal. ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... grass and her hat was awry. If she had a fault, it was a tendency to being overdressed. At present her plumed hat and large fluffy boa gave her an aspect unsympathetic with the surroundings. Jewel pulled her upright and placed her on the mossy divan. ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... shadowy figure melted away, and I found myself standing alone on the mossy roof of the dormitory. The cold stars were shining down upon me, and I heard the howl of the watch-dogs near the gate. The fair abbey slept in beauty around me, and I gnashed my teeth with rage to think that you had made me an ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... walked over the small ponds on the ice. The summits of the hills on which we stood had snow on them, in some places many feet deep. The deer were migrating from the rugged and dreary mountains in the north to the low mossy barrens and more woody parts in the south; and we inferred, that if any of the Red Indians had been at White Bay during the past summer, they might be at that time stationed about the borders of the low tract of country before us, at the deer-passes, or were employed somewhere else in the ...
— Report of Mr. W. E. Cormack's journey in search of the Red Indians - in Newfoundland • W. E. Cormack
... with cannon, protected the humble buildings erected for the use of the first settlers on what is now the Custom-house Square. The little stream—not much more than a rivulet except in spring—which for many years rippled between green, mossy banks, now struggles beneath the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... their tea in a mossy glade out of sight of the road. The sun was beginning to slant. Its rays fell in splashes of golden ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... tend those fragrant lovely flowers, close of a day the doors, And with thine own hands take the can and sprinkle water o'er the mossy pots. Red, as if with cosmetic washed, are the shadows in autumn on the steps. Their crystal snowy bloom invites the dew on their spirits to heap itself. Their extreme whiteness mostly shows that they're more comely than all other flowers. When much they grieve, how can ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... a large rambling stucco house, somewhat decayed looking, and evidently built on the ruins of an older building. We came upon it at a broad Italian-looking loggia, supported by stone pillars bowered in with vines—very cool and pleasant—with mossy slabs for its floor, here and there tropical ferns set out in tubs, some wicker chairs standing about, and a table at one side on which two little barelegged negro girls were busy setting out yellow fruit, and other appurtenances of luncheon, on ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... than reddest red-ripe plums. He took from her hand the lifted cup Of clear spring-water, pure and cold, And passed it to me: And I raised my hat And drank to her with a reverence that My conscience knew was justly due The old black face, and the old eyes, too— The old black head, with its mossy mat Of hair, set under its cap and frills White as the snows on Alpine hills; Drank to the old black smile, but yet Bright as the sun on the violet,— Drank to the gnarled and knuckled old Black hands whose palms had ached and bled ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... led him to attempt rough vengeance on the woman he had felt was his master's foe. And he had met his fate, and died in the performance of duty. But I said no more on the subject. The dog's death was not alluded to again by either Nina or myself. He lay in his mossy grave under the cypress boughs—his memory untainted by any lie, and his fidelity enshrined in my heart as a thing good and gracious, far exceeding the self-interested friendship of so-called ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... through mossy pathways straying, Striving to make thy choice, Hearing the while the brook which downward leaping, Lifts up its merry voice, Pluck me; and as a rich reward I'll whisper Things them wilt love to hear: The name of him who comes to win thy favor ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... westerly breeze to-day (3d) as I sit here, the water surface prettily moving in wind-ripples before me. On a stout old beech at the edge, decayed and slanting, almost fallen to the stream, yet with life and leaves in its mossy limbs, a gray squirrel, exploring, runs up and down, flirts his tail, leaps to the ground, sits on his haunches upright as he sees me, (a Darwinian hint?) and then races up the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and woody places, Thickets shady, sunlit spaces, Have you never heard us calling, When the golden eve is falling— When the noon-day sun is beaming— When the silver moon is gleaming? Have you never seen us dancing— Through the mossy tree-boles glancing? Have you never caught us gliding Through the tall ferns? laughing—hiding? We are here, we are there— We are everywhere; Swinging on the tree tops, floating in the air; Hush! Hush! Hush! Creep into the Bush, ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... on the other hand, I could not now look back to that dinner on the Turin-Paris rapide. I should never have seen that little, ruined French village, with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should never have met the most beautiful—Well, all clouds have silver linings; some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped at ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... for such an investigation cannot be at all appreciated by those who have not directed their energies towards such an object. The rocky coasts and sandy beaches of the sea, the valleys and hills of the interior, the pastures, mossy banks, thickets, woods, rocks, ruins, walls, ditches, pools, canals, rills, and rivers, were all to be assiduously searched. No collections of mollusca made in the district were known to me, nor do any of our libraries contain the works necessary to be consulted, although that of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... banquet-board—a board literally as well as figuratively—from which many a feast, seasoned as no viands were elsewhere, had been eaten in Rainbow Valley. It was converted into a table by propping it on two large, mossy stones. Newspapers served as tablecloth, and broken plates and handleless cups from Susan's discard furnished the dishes. From a tin box secreted at the root of a spruce tree Nan brought forth bread and salt. The brook gave Adam's ale of unsurpassed crystal. For the ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... we turned away from the plain and river and entered a more broken country, hills and valleys, ridges and dells, rushing brooks between banks of ferns, little tumbling cascades over mossy stones, groups and avenues of fine trees, picturesque stone bridges, everywhere painstaking tillage and ingenious irrigation. It was all charming, with the artificial beauty of a carefully ordered park. Resting in my chair in front of a tea-house where the coolies were refreshing themselves, I ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... on a mossy rock beside the pool, and bending put his lips to the water. It was the sweetest, most satisfying drink, he had ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... of falling waters as they oozed from out their rocky bed, and fell into one of those tiny hollows of nature which, overflowing, sent its burden towards the stream below. He looked above, and saw the fabled ledge—its mossy bank all snow-covered—with the entrance to Jenny Greenteeth's chambers dark against the white that lay around. Tired with the search, yet glad at heart with the find, he climbed and entered, the somnolence wrought by the snow soon closing his eyes, ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... yielded grudgingly, not knowing what else to do. They sat down on a mossy bank beside the spring, and while the blue smoke of their cigarettes went drifting under the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... steamers, through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold the grain-fields golden, where the bison grazed of eld; See the fanes of forests olden by the ruthless Saxon felled,— Plumd pines that spread their shadows ere Columbus spread his sails. Firs that fringed the mossy meadows ere the Mayflower braved the gales, Iron oaks that nourished bruin while the Vikings roamed the main, Crashing fall in broken ruin for the greedy ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... precaution not to tread down the bracken, or make a beaten path which might lead others to that secret spot, he found to his surprise that Silvia was not there and that there were no cubs to be seen either. He called to them, but it was in vain, and at last he laid himself on the mossy bank beside ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... foe, No towers defenced with rampire, moat, or wall, No stream, no wood, no mountain could forslow Their hasty pace, or stop their march at all; So when his banks the prince of rivers, Po, Doth overswell, he breaks with hideous fall The mossy rocks and trees o'ergrown with age, Nor aught withstands his fury ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... turned away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... one man—already awaiting her. He stood back to back with a mossy nymph languishing on her pedestal, and Flora hoped by running softly to steal up behind him, and make of the helpless marble lady a buffer between their greetings. But either she underestimated the nymph's bulk, or forgot how invariably direct was ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... up this beehive and set it swarming again, I had no inclination to turn drone. Yet I remembered my note to the Countess de Vassart and her reply. So about four o'clock I made the best toilet I could in my only other suit of clothes, and walked out of the bustling camp into the square, where the mossy fountain splashed under the oaks and the children of Paradise were playing. Hands joined, they danced in ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... nests be it." A long and animated conversation ensued: the bird-nesting of his boyhood, the blackbird's nest which his father had held him up in his arms to look at when a child at Wylam, the hedges in which he had found the thrush's and the linnet's nests, the mossy bank where the robin built, the cleft in the branch of the young tree where the chaffinch had reared its dwelling—all rose up clear in his mind's eye, and led him back to the scenes of his boyhood ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... gloom of these murky mornings! I know that the young woman who said so lyrically, "If you're waking, call me early, call me early, Mother dear!" is popularly supposed to have died without issue, but that is a misconception. I shrink from putting a Spoon River scandal on her mossy tombstone, but my Mrs. Mussel ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... quiet of a mossy graveyard, nor in a church where priests mumble unmeaning words at fixed times, nor yet alone on the mountain-side—for he chafed at solitude—but he should have been buried at sea. In the midst of storm and driving sleet, at midnight, the sails should have been lowered, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of trees immemorially old, through whose vaulted foliage the sunlight leaks thinly down in rare flecks; a crepuscular light, tender and solemn, revealing the weirdest host of unfamiliar shapes—a vast congregation of grey, columnar, mossy things, stony, monumental, sculptured with Chinese ideographs. And about them, behind them, rising high above them, thickly set as rushes in a marsh-verge, tall slender wooden tablets, like laths, covered with similar ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... picture! Its aged roof seemed to have bent beneath the weight of years; for the ridge had sunk in the middle of its mossy, grass-grown expanse, and threatened to fall upon its occupant to the peril of his life. A small barrel served for a chimney. One window possessed still two small panes of glass; the other openings were filled in with bits of boarding, as was ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... Ben?" he whispered behind his hand, pointing to the portrait of a red-haired Diana sitting on a low, mossy stump in a lonely spot. Her back was turned toward us, and she seemed to be taking a sun bath. He looked stealthily around to make sure his curiosity was not noted by the spectators ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... with capsicums, brown-paper, seeds, even with hints of lusty snails and fine young curly leeches. Many and many a pleasant stroll they had among the poultry markets, where ducks and fowls, with necks unnaturally long, lay stretched out in pairs, ready for cooking; where there were speckled eggs in mossy baskets, white country sausages beyond impeachment by surviving cat or dog, or horse or donkey; new cheeses to any wild extent, live birds in coops and cages, looking much too big to be natural, in consequence of those receptacles being much too little; rabbits, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... didn't. He just started right out without knowing where he was going, and of course the way was hard, very hard indeed. The grass was so tall that he couldn't see over it, and the ground was so rough that it hurt his tender feet, which were used to the soft, mossy bank of the Smiling Pool. He had gone only a little way before he wished with all his might that he had never thought of seeing the Great World. But he had said that he was going to and he would, so he kept right ...
— The Adventures of Grandfather Frog • Thornton W. Burgess
... helped Scamper and Limpy-toes set four strong corner posts and made a roof of green boughs to shelter the kiddies when it rained; but there were no walls to shut out the fresh air and sunshine. There were rows of green mossy seats and a desk in which Dot could ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard
... these Crusoes had to be very careful to do was never to let the fire go out. It was easily kept in by placing a kind of mossy peat among the hot ashes ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... come into the yard behind his mother's cottage, and, after a careful inspection of the ground for hens and chicks, he would sit down slowly with his back against the barn. In a minute the chicks, who liked him, would be pecking all over him at the mossy chalk-mud in the seams of his clothing, and if it was blowing up for wet, Mrs. Caddies' kitten, who never lost her confidence in him, would assume a sinuous form and start scampering into the cottage, up to the ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... romantic heart could desire. There was something sinister and ironical even in the sunshine that lighted up these bleak hills. The silver waters of a spring—whose source was hidden somewhere high up among the mossy boulders—dripping silently from ledge to ledge, had the pathos of tears. The deathly stillness was broken only by the dismal caw of a crow taking abrupt flight from a blasted pine. Here and there a birch with its white satin skin glimmered ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Acetosella).—This exquisite plant with delicate flower and trefoil leaves grows on many mossy banks, especially on one ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... it is! The queen of flowers, The marble rose of Rome! Its petals torn By wind and rain of thrice five hundred years; Its mossy sheath half rent away, and sold To ornament our palaces and churches, Or to be trodden under feet of man Upon the Tiber's bank; yet what remains Still opening its fair bosom to the sun, And to the constellations ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... late in the day, in a bend of the river, about fifteen miles above the Vaux ranch, forming a jungle of several thousand acres. In this thickety covert the fugitive made his final stand, taking refuge in an immense old live-oak, the mossy festoons of which partially screened him from view. The larger portion of the cavalcade remained in the open, but the rest of us, under the leadership of the two rancheros, forced our horses through the underbrush and reached the hounds. ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... a wide drive had led through this avenue to the house. It had been the south approach to Priesthope. But in these impoverished days, the road, with its sweep of turf on either side, had been neglected, and was now little more than a mossy cart-rut, with ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... looked at you with those big grey eyes of hers. Only a five-day acquaintanceship, but they had crowded much into it as one did in a strange land. The episode had been a green and dangerous spot, like one of those bright mossy bits of bog when you were snipe-shooting, to set foot on which was to let you down up to the neck, at least. Well, there was none of that danger now, for her husband was dead-poor chap! It would be nice, in these dismal days, when nobody spent any time whatever except in the service ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... an iron cage, and a set of rugged features that had the Old Man of the Mountain lookin' like a ribbon clerk. Reg'lar cave dweller's face, it was; and with his bristly hair growin' down to a point just above his eyes, and the ear tufts, and the mossy-backed paws—well, if there ever was a throw-back to the Stone Age ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... fragrance of by-gone years. O, there are rich treasures garnered up in Memory's secret chambers, enclosed in the recesses of the soul, to spring into life at the touch of her magic wand. Here let us sit on this mossy stone, beneath this wide spread elm, and as its waving branches fan our feverish cheeks, fold back the dim, misty curtains of the past, the silent past, and hold communings with the years that are gone. Listen to the ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... damp, cold ground beneath them, with nothing between but their good blankets, and the dead, dry leaves of autumn heaped together; and lucky was he who got the place nearest the fire, or could put the mossy trunk of a fallen tree between him and the biting blast, or, better still, could boast a bearskin for his bed. A little before sunset, they would halt for the night in some sheltered spot, convenient to a running stream; where, turning their horses ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... of a venerable rose-bush; and there is something analogous to this in human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental—who can give the world nothing but flowers—should die young, and never be seen with gray hairs and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy bark and scanty foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that beauty is not worthy of immortality. Nothing else, indeed, is worthy of it; and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... was a pump, with a big tub by it, to catch the waste, I suppose. The artistic possibilities of these simple objects flashed across him. In his mind's eye he saw this prosaic tub sublimed into a romantic pool, and girdled by a rockery, in whose mossy crannies errant trickles of water might lose themselves, and perhaps fertilize exotic flora yet unborn. At this moment I espied a wheelbarrow in the distance, and went for it with that purposeful briskness, which may sometimes be used in fatigues ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... across your path Stretches in his golden bath: Mossy-footed squirrels leap Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep: Yaffles on a chuckle skim Low to laugh from branches dim: Up the pine, where sits the star, Rattles deep the moth-winged jar. Each has business ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at that distance; he uttered a low exclamation of satisfaction, sprang from his saddle, and led his horse down among the mossy rocks of the water-course to the shelf of rock overhanging the ravine where she stood as motionless as ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... now called Monzievaird, but formerly Monivaird, and anciently Moivaird, is believed to be Gaelic, and to signify, not the hill, but rather the "mossy plain" of the bards. It is difficult to say how far this carries us back. The Bards are not to be confounded with the Druids, a religious class from which they were quite distinct. The bards seem to have been ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... the desolate mossy-green cobbles of the great solitary yard into a square, tall, bare, whitewashed place. Already from the outside one caught a droning voice. There might have been three hundred people there, boxed off in pews, with turnkeys at each ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... were sitting on a mossy bank on the hillside, with green fields before them and a wood on the right, in which the leaves were bursting forth fresh and bright, and a wide piece of water some hundred yards below, in which several wild fowl ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... an organ heard outside a cathedral. In another minute the lane enters: it is dark, but the ruddy stems catch the sun, and in open patches are small beeches responding to it with intense golden-brown. Along the edge of the path, springing from the mossy bank they grow to a greater height. A pine has pushed itself between the branches of one of them as if on purpose to show off the splendour of its sister's beauty. It is stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft. There was a frost last night and ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... to each other as they gather the smooth brown nuts, filling their baskets, and running to pour them into the great bags! It is merry autumn work. The sun looks down upon them through the yellow leaves, and the rocks give them mossy seats; while here and there comes a bird or a squirrel to see what these strange people ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. As we went along there were more, and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them; some rested their heads on the stones as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily danced with the wind, they looked so ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... forty lines in particular are majestic and high-sounding. Indeed, the whole vision of the Palace of Ambition and what follows are supremely excellent. Your simile of the Laplander, "By Niemi's lake, or Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stone of Solfar-Kapper," [1] will bear comparison with any in Milton for fulness of circumstance and lofty-pacedness of versification. Southey's similes, though many of 'em are capital, are all inferior. In one of his books, the simile of the oak ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... downhill in pursuit. The wind was playful, and led us a fine dance; we were obliged to laugh. When at last he caught and handed back to me my property, we were thoroughly exhausted and sat down at the foot of the hill on the mossy tree-roots. I am sure we must have looked very silly, for we were so out of breath that we could not leave off laughing,—my young man has the heartiest laugh I ever heard. When we had somewhat recovered, ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... to approach my soft, my tender maid: I am calm, my soul, as thy bewitching smiles; hush, as thy secret sighs, and will resolve to die rather than offend my adorable virgin; only send me word what you think of my fate, while I expect it here on this kind mossy bed where now I lie; which I would not quit for a throne, since here I may hope the news may soonest arrive to make me happier than a god! which that nothing on my part may prevent, I here vow in the face of heaven, I will not abuse the freedom ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... wood—not a wild wood like the first, but a tame, domesticated wood. The dead limbs were cut away, and the ground was neatly brushed up under the trees. The brook flowed sedately between fern-bordered banks, under rustic bridges, and widened occasionally into pools carpeted with lily pads. Mossy paths set with stepping-stones led off into mysterious depths that the eye could not penetrate: the leaves were just out enough to half hide and to tantalize. The grass was starred with crocuses. It looked like an enchanted wood in a ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... Let Steele—some other Ranger finish it. I swear I don't plead for my uncle or my cousin, for their sakes. If they are vile, let them suffer. Russ, it's you I think of! Oh, my pitiful little dreams! I wanted so to surprise you with my beautiful home—the oranges, the mossy trees, the mocking-birds. Now you'll never, ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... in the world of an acquaintance with the usages of fashion, which struck one oddly in those wild and dreary surroundings. On the whole, she impressed one like those fragile wild-flowers which in April cast their fluttering shadows from the mossy crevices of the old New England granite,—an existence in which colorless delicacy is united to a sort of elastic hardihood of life, fit for the rocky soil and harsh winds it is ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe |
