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Blossom   Listen
noun
Blossom  n.  
1.
The flower of a plant, or the essential organs of reproduction, with their appendages; florescence; bloom; the flowers of a plant, collectively; as, the blossoms and fruit of a tree; an apple tree in blossom. Note: The term has been applied by some botanists, and is also applied in common usage, to the corolla. It is more commonly used than flower or bloom, when we have reference to the fruit which is to succeed. Thus we use flowers when we speak of plants cultivated for ornament, and bloom in a more general sense, as of flowers in general, or in reference to the beauty of flowers. "Blossoms flaunting in the eye of day."
2.
A blooming period or stage of development; something lovely that gives rich promise. "In the blossom of my youth."
3.
The color of a horse that has white hairs intermixed with sorrel and bay hairs; otherwise called peach color.
In blossom, having the blossoms open; in bloom.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Blossom" Quotes from Famous Books



... the swallows fly home to the old brown shed, And the robins build on the bough overhead, Then out from the mold, from the darkness and cold, Blossom and runner and ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... I whispered, bending in terrified joy over her shoulder; and I plucked a blossom straight from her lips and another and yet another, till there came into the deep, gray eyes what I cannot transcribe, but what sent me away the king of all men—for had I not found ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... resplendent in the sunshine. The door is cracked and black, but approach and examine it; you will without doubt find upon it a bit of antique ironwork of the time of Louis XIII., cut out like a piece of guipure. The roof is full of crevices, but in each crevice there is a convolvulus that will blossom in the spring, or a daisy that will bloom in the autumn. The tiles are patched with thatch. Of course they are, I should say so! It affords the occasion to have on one's roof a colony of pink dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... Old Overland Trail lay across the "Great American Desert," as it was named in the earlier geographies. Irrigation and progressive energy have made these wastes in many instances literally to "blossom as the rose"; but until that was done ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia-tree. Yesterday it had been a bud; but to-day the great almond-white petals which guarded it, overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... and faint; and their profligacy was chiefly cerebral. They delighted in feeling themselves sink into the great piscina of civilization, that warm mud-bath in which human energy, the primeval and vital forces, primitive animalism, and its blossom of faith, will, duties, and passions, are liquefied. Jacqueline's pretty body was steeped in that bath of gelatinous thought. Olivier could do nothing to keep her from it. Besides, he too was touched by the disease of the time: he thought he had no right to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... song ye may learn the nest," Said Yniol; "enter quickly." Entering then, Right o'er a mount of newly-fallen stones, The dusky-rafter'd many-cobweb'd hall, He found an ancient dame in dim brocade; And near her, like a blossom vermeil-white,[2] That lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath, Moved the fair Enid, all in faded silk, Her daughter. In a moment thought Geraint, "Here by God's rood is the one maid for me." But none spake word except the hoary Earl: "Enid, the good ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... casting lengths of exquisite tissue over the boy's shoulder, "these are the mists of the dawn, David,—all silvery white and golden rose and jewelled blue. But—oh! oh!—these are the loveliest of all! A pair of slippers in orange-blossom kid, spangled with silver! Look at ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... a thing gliding about sae unhappy. Black be his gate that had the heart to leave you, for rank and wealth, my winsome lassie. Weary on him, and little good may his wealth and rank do him! Oh wha would a thocht that the peerless young blossom wad hae been withered so soon, or that the Fawn o' Springvale wad hae ever come to the like o' this. Alas! the day, too, for the friends that nurst you, Ay bonnie bairn!" and then the kind-hearted matron would wipe her eyes on seeing the far-loved Fawn of Springvale ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... sun was positively summer hot. I am out of doors almost all day. Our spring, however, has made up for the lenient winter, by being as cold and capricious as possible, and at this moment hardly a fruit-tree is in blossom or a lilac-tree in bud; and looking abroad over the landscape, 'tis only here and there that I can detect faint symptoms of that exquisite green haze which generally seems to hang like a halo over the distant woods at this season. I do not remember so backward a spring since I have been ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... bird sits at his door in the sun, Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, And lets his illumined being o'errun With the deluge of summer it receives. His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings; He sings to the ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... had cleared their farms from stones and stumps, they planted a field, or "patch" of flax, and usually one of hemp. The seed was sown broadcast like grass-seed in May. Flax is a graceful plant with pretty drooping blue flowers; hemp has but a sad-colored blossom. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... ordinary among its quaint kind! As I picked out the design of the gold-work, that fact was borne in upon my mind. Here was no pattern of scroll or blossom or cupids and hearts. The small sphere was belted with the signs of the Zodiac, beautiful in minute perfection. All the rest of the globe was covered with lace-fine work repeating one group of characters over and over. I was not learned enough to tell what the characters were, but the ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram

... must we grieve, no longer trial made, For that impatience which we then display'd? Now to their love and worth of every kind, A soft compunction turns the afflicted mind; Virtues neglected then, adored become, And graces slighted, blossom on the tomb." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various

... oblivious of the fact that his wife was sound asleep, "what is a feller like Newt Blossom goin' to keep a wife on, I'd like to know. He c'n hardly keep himself in chewin' tobaccer as it is, an' as fer the other necessities of life he wouldn't have any of 'em if his mother wasn't such a dern' fool about him. The idee ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon

... the mass, and at last came to a standstill before a wedge of figures in front of a prominent canvas. A nude female figure stood upright, facing the spectator, with both arms upraised to fasten a pomegranate blossom in the tightly twisted hair: an indefinite heap of sketchy clothing lay ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... of the Cherry or Apple will show the four kinds of organs that belong to a complete flower. Fig. 9 represents an Apple-blossom. The calyx is the outer row of leaves, more or less united into one piece. The corolla is the row of leaves within the calyx; it is usually the brightest and most conspicuous part of the flower. The stamens are the next organs; they are usually, as in this case, small two-lobed bodies ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar

... country cannot be dispensed with, and we give him all honor. Still, the use of defence and protection is not so high as the use of building up and sustaining. The thorn that wounds the hand stretched forth to pluck the flower, is not so much esteemed, nor of so much worth, as the blossom it was meant to guard. Still, the thorn performs a great use. Precisely a similar use does the soldier or naval officer perform to society; and it will be for you, my lad, to decide as to which position ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth

... white light was not the white of a snow wall, it came from the large wings of an angel stooping over him, an angel with eyes beaming with love. The angel's form seemed to spring from the pages of the Bible, as from the pitcher of a lily-blossom; he extended his arms, and lo! the narrow walls of the snow-hut sank back like a mist melting before the daylight. Once again the green meadows and autumnal-tinted woods of the sailor's home lay around him, bathed in quiet sunshine; the stork's nest was empty, but the apples still ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... effusive politeness of my parent, I went up to the little girl and shyly offered her a blossom from my mother's geranium upon the window-sill. A scrap of a hand, as cold as ice when it touched mine, closed over the stem of the flower, and without looking at me, she stood, very erect, with the scarlet geranium grasped ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... wanderings. Only to see was enough. He would have shut out the encroaching thoughts of self, of others, of life, had that been wholly possible. But here, after the first few moments of exquisite riot of his senses, where fragrance of grass and blossom filled the air, and blaze of gold canopied the purple, he began to think how beautiful the earth was, how Nature hid her rarest gifts for those who loved her most, how good it was to live, if only for these ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... against the still cold sky, the equally delicate forms of the wintry trees. By the time these forms have thickened, the expanses of daffodil will have become a mass of bluebells. All the daffodil pictures have a rare loveliness, but especially those that deal also with the earlier fruit-blossom, the young plum-trees in Berkshire orchards. Here the air is faintly pink, and the painter makes us feel the little blow in the thin blue sky. The spring, fortunately, is everybody's property and, in the language of all ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... which it is not lawful that I should answer thee. Perchance I can read that which shall befall thee, perchance it doth not please Me so to read. What can it profit the Divine, that hath all time wherein to await the issues, to be eager to look upon the blossom that is not blown, but which, lying a seed in the bosom of the earth, shall blow in its season? Know, Harmachis, that I do not shape the Future; the Future is to thee and not to Me; for it is born of Law and of the rule ordained of the Invisible. Yet thou art free to act therein, and thou ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... you will never give up. And here is Ella with complexion of roses and snow and eyes like violets with the morning dew still on them—forgive an old woman's flowery speech, for that's the way we used to talk when I was young—yes, here is Ella, a little peach blossom, yet brimming over with the wish to become a big, luscious peach. Lor, Lor—oh, fie! Am I saying naughty words? But then, my dears, you know my husband was a naval officer, and no man ever swore more piously ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... looking tamer now. The peaches have taken right hold, and those fillers of strawberries are hurrying on the green. But you give 'em three years or maybe four, and take 'em in blossom time,—my, you won't know this ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson

... cold and deep. To the April sun and the April showers, In field and forest, the baby flowers Lift their blushing faces and dewy eyes; And wet with the tears of the winter-fairies, Soon bloom and blossom the emerald prairies, Like the fabled Garden ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... path to the garden. Jean manifested undisguised 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 ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae

... ideality of art consists. The more cautious he is in assigning the right species of moss to its favorite trunk, and the right kind of weed to its necessary stone, in marking the definite and characteristic leaf, blossom, seed, fracture, color, and inward anatomy of everything, the more truly ideal his work becomes. All confusion of species, all careless rendering of character, all unnatural and arbitrary association, is vulgar and unideal in proportion to ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... when the fresh, cool Winds were blowing, and not a cloud was in the sky, little Annie walked among her flowers, looking carefully into each, hoping thus to find the Fairy, who alone could take the magic blossom from her breast. But she lifted up their drooping leaves, peeped into their dewy cups in vain; no little Elf lay hidden there, and she turned sadly from them all, saying, "I will go out into the fields and woods, and seek her there. I will not listen to this tiresome music more, nor wear this ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott

... with Bennett, and when we got a little way from San Jose, on the road to the Mission, the road seemed walled in on both sides with growing mustard ten or twelve feet high and all in blossom. How so much mustard could grow, and grow so large, I could not understand. I had seen a few plants in the gardens or fields which people used for greens, and here seemed to be enough to feed the nation, if ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... lover who has adored you since he came to plunder but stayed to woo! Do you know that when I came upon you to-day, my heart burst into flower as a tree blooms in the spring-time? Had I a harp in my hand, my lips would blossom into song. Get me one from your minstrels, and I will sing to you as we ride, and we will forget that a day has passed since the time when first we roved together through the ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... one asphyxiating gust, so offensive, so violent, as to choke him. He tried to close his senses, to subdue and annihilate them. But Albine reappeared before him like a tall flower that had sprung and grown beautiful in that soil. She was the natural blossom of that corruption, delicate in the sunshine, her white shoulders expanding in youthfulness, her whole being so fraught with the gladness of life, that she leaped from her stem and darted upon his mouth, scenting him with her ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... taught him the fire of love—so quickly, so surely! From the vague boyish beatitude had sprung this passion, like the opulent blossom out of the infolding bosom of the plant. Her kiss had dissipated his horrid suspicions. Her lips were bond ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like a rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the ax of industry, and to rise again, transformed into the habitations of ease and elegance? Shall he doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... other countries is no improvement, though the feeling is otherwise here. More than once I have had a bouquet of common stocks given to me as a grand present, while orchids, gardenias, stephanotis, large purple, pink, and white azaleas, orange-blossom, and roses, were growing around ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... the house of the Lord, the unseen fane of reverence, trust, and communion, that a man can learn what beauty is, and where to look for it. Out in the world beauty is held to be a sporadic thing. It is like a flower growing where no one expected a blossom. It is an unrelated and unexplained surprise. It is a green oasis in the desert of unlovely and unpromising things. But for the dweller in the house of the Lord beauty is not on this wise. Said one such dweller, 'The desert shall rejoice and blossom as ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth

... bush, with blossom white Veiling her branches pricking; The painted lady, fluttering light, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... order these organic processes, any more than a milliner can make a rose. She can make something that looks like a rose, more or less, but it takes all the forces of the universe to finish and sweeten that blossom in your button-hole; and you may be sure that when the orator's brain is in a flame, when the poet's heart is in a tumult, it is something mightier than he and his will that is dealing with him! As I have looked from one of the northern windows of the street ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... were dressed exactly alike, in long-trained, rich white silk dresses, with illusion overdresses and illusion veils, white orange-blossom wreaths, pearl necklaces and bracelets, and dainty white kid gloves, and carried delicate white lace handkerchiefs ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... two month-old English magazines. Then he stood by the stall, looking on to the distances near and far behind it. Our feverish contact had not spoilt much of the landscape there as yet. Beyond a few railway sheds showed some bushes, as it were, of wild cherry-blossom, flaunting a true white under the sky's true blue. Spring colors dressed the woodland behind them red and bronze, and also the two famous colors of Faeryland. Behind that, again, the view was spread out widely diverse, certain blue ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... was his cry! I would have deemed so—but oh! I thought of Richard's parting hope; I remembered our German brethren's tale, how the Holy Father, the Pope, said there was as little hope of pardon as that his staff should bud and blossom; and lo, in one night it bore bud and flower. I besought him for Richard's sake to let me strive in prayer for him. All day we fought on the walls—all night, beside Richard's cross, did he lie and weep and groan, and I would pray till strength failed both of us. Day after day, night after night, ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the Companion of his Riots In all the leud course of our early Youth, Where like unwearied Bees we gather'd Flowers? But no kind Blossom could oblige our stay, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn

... alone beside the freshly turned earth. Through a rift in the great branches two hundred feet above, a patch of cerulean sky showed faintly; the sunlight fell like a broad golden shaft over the blossom-laden grave, and from the brown trunk of an adjacent tree a gray squirrel, a descendant, perhaps, of the gray squirrel that had been wont to rob Bryce's pockets of pine-nuts twenty years before, chirped at ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... be a-meaede all becomen an' plain, An' cleaen as a blossom undimm'd by a stain; Her bonnet ha' got but two ribbons, a-tied Up under her chin, or let ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes

... the period of English history in every way fullest of marvel—the period of Elizabeth. As in a northern summer the whole region bursts into blossom at once, so with the thought and feeling of England in this ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless; but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This was the "Lady ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... new principle within him. Something has happened within him as in a plant when it adds a coloured flower to its green leaves. It is true the forces causing the flower to grow were already latent in the plant before the blossom appeared, but they only became effective when this took place. Divine, spiritual forces are latent in the man who lives merely through his senses, but they only become a manifest reality in the initiate. Such is the transformation which takes place in the Mystic. By his ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... sounding drums of tin. This is Cailsham in the spring. Cailsham at any time is more the country that surrounds it. All its colours, all its life, all its interests, it takes from those great, wide gardens of fruit as they break from leaf into blossom, blossom to fruit, from fruit to the black, naked branches of winter, when Cailsham itself sinks into the silence of a well-earned, lethargic repose. Then they talk of the fruit seasons that are past, and the fruit seasons that are to ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... water-melon you ought not to mix the pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... jest wild flowers. She made them all into bouquets. And there wasn't a new baby born in the village but that the mother found by her bedside a bouquet of Mis' Sweet's, and no bride went to the altar but she had a little piece o' orange blossom on her that had been lovingly pinned on by Mis' Sweet, and before the lid was closed over our dead—they had slipped in their fingers a little flower from their old neighbor. And do you think that we laughed at her stiff little bouquets? No! We all loved 'em and we understood, 'cause ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper

... the red rose broidered upon their state robes, and the boy had stuck the crimson blossom in his velvet cap. He was a perfect little picture in his white velvet tunic sloshed with rose colour, his white cloth hosen laced with gold from ankle to thigh, a short cloak flowing jauntily from his shoulders, and his bright ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... Virginia is. I went with the Harlans. Anne joined us at Charlottesville. ... We visited Monticello, where Jefferson lived, and saw a country quite as beautiful as any valley I know of in California, not even excepting the Santa Clara Valley, in prune blossom time. Those old fellows who built their houses a hundred years ago knew how to build and build beautifully. We have no such places in California as some that were built a hundred and fifty years ago in Virginia, and they did not care how far they got away from ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... blossom bright with autumn dew, And colored with the heaven's own blue, That openest when the quiet light Succeeds the ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... know it moving through its mystic stations within our very bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young life striking out blade after blade, already living and wonderful, though as yet unsuspected of other eyes; to know the underground inarticulate spring, sweeter far than spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all seems barren winter in the upper air; to hear already the pathetic pleadings of the young life, and to send back soothing answer along the hidden channels of tender tremulous affinities; to lie ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... laughed his young friend; "don't you know that Ned Preston, Wild Blossom Brown, and all the folks over in Kentucky who know you, will tell their friends and children what you have done; and here on this side the river it will be the same; till some time it will all be gathered together and put in a book that will be read by hundreds ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... Let me be Partner in thy destiny: That whene'er the fatal cloud Must thy radiant temples shroud; When deadly damps, impending now, Shall hover round thy destin'd brow, Diffusive may their influence be, And with the blossom blast the tree!" ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... preparations for the voyage, was there to meet the ships on their arrival. It is possible, of course, that Cushman's wife and son came on the SPEEDWELL from Delfshaven; but is not probable. Among the passengers, however, were some who, like Thomas Blossom and his son, William Ring, and others, abandoned the voyage to America at Plymouth, and returned in the pinnace to London and thence went back to Holland. Deducting from the passenger list of the MAYFLOWER those known to have been of the English contingent, ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... exquisite Japanese dress of dove-coloured silk crepe, with a pale pink under-dress of the same material, which showed a little at the neck and sleeves. Her girdle was of rich dove-coloured silk, with a ghost of a pale pink blossom hovering upon it here and there. She had no frills or fripperies of any description, or ornaments, except a single pin in her chignon, and, with a sweet and charming face, she looked as graceful and dignified in her Japanese costume as she would have ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... started a little trade in it. Of strawberries, guavas, Cape gooseberries, and other small fruit we have a little. The former fruit so plenteously here, that the leaves are entirely hidden by the clusters of berries and blossom. The second is a bush; and the last a plant like a nettle, which sows itself all over. The ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... No, fairest, we have trifled here too long; And, lingering to see your roses blossom, I've ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... centuries. There are some fine old mosques and an ancient palace or two, but compared with other Indian capitals it lacks interest. The most beautiful and attractive of all its buildings is the tomb of Anar Kali (which means pomegranate blossom), a lady of the Emperor Akbar's harem, who became the sweetheart of Selim, his son. She was buried alive by order of the jealous father and husband for committing an unpardonable offense, and when Selim became the Emperor ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... dignity, with an appearance of conscious greatness, which made the metamorphosis, though in itself sufficiently farcical, irresistibly comic. He afterwards displayed the same humour in his frolics with the fairies, and the intercourse which he held with Messrs. Cobweb, Mustard-seed, Pease-blossom, and the rest of Titania's cavaliers, who lost all command of their countenances at the gravity with which he invited them to afford him the luxury of scratching his hairy snout. Mowbray had also found a fitting representative for Puck in a queer-looking, small-eyed ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... attention, matronly eyes being turned in his direction with not unkindly purport. The marquis perceived the stir his presence occasioned and was not at all displeased; on the contrary, his manner denoted gratification, smiling and smirking from bud to blossom ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... of Righteousness, was the service to which George Fox devoted his whole life. As his own being blossomed in the spiritual sunshine of his great discovery, he was able to persuade hundreds and thousands of other frozen hearts to yield themselves and turn to the Light, and open and blossom also in that same sunshine. A greater wonder followed. Those other lives, as they yielded themselves, began to ripen too, in different ways, but silently and surely, until they in their turn were ready to scatter the new seed, or, in the language of their day, to 'Publish Truth' up and down all ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... is more, I heard Miss Sissie sing at her hall—a pretty domestic song, most childish and charming. She impressed me not unfavourably, in spite of what Hilda said. Her peach-blossom cheek might have been art, but looked like nature. She had an open face, a baby smile and there was a frank girlishness about her dress and manner that took my fancy. "After all," I thought to myself, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... along the pleasant country lanes, By wooded heights and blossom-covered plains. See! said he, there's my house among the trees, Sheltered, yet open to the southern breeze. In that beyond, with other two, you see, Whose grounds close round my own so pleasantly, ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby

... aid, and love them. Many of them have learned, many more are learning, the misery and shame of slavery. That truth once acknowledged and digested, their hearts will grow glad in the peace of the just, and their desolated land blossom like the rose. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... or grumbled at the whole thing and advanced pecuniary loans with good or ill grace, as the case might be; but the mothers, whose interest in their children's pleasure is a sort of evergreen that no snows of time can kill, sewed spangles by the bushel, made wildernesses of tissue-paper blossom as the rose, kept tempers sweet, stomachs full, and domestic machinery working smoothly through it all, by that maternal magic which makes them the human providences of this ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott

... response to the appeal of beauty was abnormally quick and keen. It could hardly be otherwise with the son of these two. He loved, with a fervour beyond his years, the clear pale oval of his mother's face; the coils of her dark hair, seen always through a film of softest muslin—moon-yellow or apple-blossom pink, or deep dark blue like the sky out of his window at night spangled with stars. He loved the glimmer of her jewels, the sheen and feel of her wonderful Indian silks, that seemed to smell like the big sandalwood box in the drawing-room. And beyond everything ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... myself. That lends a zest to pride. The alloy of greatness is baseness. They combine in perfection. Despise me, you who are despised. Nothing can be better. Degradation on degradation. What joy! I pluck the double blossom of ignominy. Trample me under foot. You will only love me the more. I am sure of it. Do you understand why I idolize you? Because I despise you. You are so immeasurably below me that I place you on an altar. Bring the highest and lowest depths together, and you have Chaos, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... had told himself, in his way of escaping the difficult issue, that the pang of leaving her was his alone. She, in her innocence of love, could hardly feel the death of what lived so briefly. Now, as it sometimes happened when his anodyne ceased to work, he knew he had snipped the blossom of her life and she had borne no fruit of ecstasy; and in the instant of sharp regret it came upon him that no other woman, through him, should tread the way of love denied. He stooped to Nellie, standing there before him, and kissed her on the cheek. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... morning we started for Deir el Belah, which was to be our jumping-off place for the attack on Gaza, whither the Turks had now retreated. It was a beautiful trek. If there were not "roses, roses, all the way," the green fields and the almond blossom made very acceptable substitutes. But for the cactus and prickly pear which lined the lanes we might have been riding leisurely over an English countryside. We saw as many trees during this nine or ten miles' ride as during the whole of our time in Egypt. There were few palms. The sycamore, ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... trembled in his bosom, for he felt that to this incongruous mass was to be confided the first blossom of his wedded love; and that for one month the dynasty of 24, Pleasant-terrace was transferred from his hands to that of Mrs. Waddledot, his wife's mother, and Mrs. Pilcher, the monthly nurse. There was a short struggle for supremacy between the two latter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... to me, my sweet blossom, recline your head against my breast. See, evening approaches!—Night will spread its protecting veil over us, and God will be our conductor and safeguard! I shall save you, my angel, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... man smiled. "But don't you like," he asked with deference, "this slow, orderly advance of the Italian spring, where the flowers seem to come out one by one, and every blossom has ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells

... stain. E'en as an elephant who loathes the stake And the strong chain he has no power to break, I cannot brook this cry on every side, That spreads like oil upon the moving tide. I leave the daughter of Videha's King, And the fair blossom soon from her to spring, As erst, obedient to my sire's command, I left the empire of the sea-girt land. Good is my queen, and spotless; but the blame Is hard to bear, the mockery and the shame. Men blame ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie: There I couch, when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly, After summer, merrily: Merrily, merrily, shall I live now Under the blossom, ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor

... the mighty Czar Of Moscow, took five spouses to his bed, In the long years that spared him to the throne. The first, a lady of the heroic line Of Romanoff, bare him Feodor, who reigned After his father's death. One only son, Dmitri, the last blossom of his strength, And a mere infant when his father died, Was born of Marfa, of Nagori's line. Czar Feodor, a youth, alike effeminate In mind and body, left the reins of power To his chief equerry, Boris Godunow, Who ruled his master with most crafty skill. Feodor was childless, and ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller

... risk of dying of hunger; for at those seasons the most delicious fruits, grapes, plums, peaches, and others, are to be found in abundance. But we were now in early spring, and although I saw numbers of peach and plum-trees, they were only in blossom. Of game also there was plenty, both fur and feather, but I had no gun, and nothing appeared more probable than that I should die of hunger, although surrounded by food, and in one of the most fruitful countries ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... boundary. Even in winter it was a sheltered and snugly sequestered spot; but when arrayed in the verdure of spring, the earth sending forth all its wild flowers, the shrubs spreading their waste of blossom around it, and the weeping birches, which towered over the underwood, drooping their long and leafy fibres to intercept the sun, it must have seemed a place for a youthful poet to study his earliest sonnet, or a pair of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... contingencies which led him to my door, and enabled me to save from death a being of such rare endowments, my heart overflowed with joy, not unmingled with regrets and trepidation. How many have been cut off by this disease, in their career of virtue and their blossom-time of genius! How many deeds of heroism and self-devotion are ravished from existence, and ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... barren, though they had flowered copiously, and the season, was favourable for a crop. I was informed that the failure was owing to the fernshaws (the provincial name for the beetle), which are accused of eating the anthers and interior parts of the blossom. In the same garden my attention was also called to the ravages committed by this depredator on the apples, by gnawing holes in the young fruit; which consequently dies and falls of, or at least becomes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various

... solution of ammonio-nitrate of copper, previous to its application to the paper, the color obtained is pale purplish pink or peach-blossom color. By mixing it in the same way with ammonio-oxalate of sesquioxide of iron, we get a dull green picture, changeable through intermediate stages into brown by alkaline carbonates, and that into a dirty black by gallic acid. It may be well ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois

... surprisal, though expected long. Her coming startles. Long she lies in wait, Makes many a feint, peeps forth, draws coyly back, Then, from some southern ambush in the sky, With one great gush of blossom storms the world. A week ago the sparrow was divine; The bluebird, shifting his light load of song 10 From post to post along the cheerless fence, Was as a rhymer ere the poet come; But now, oh rapture! sunshine winged ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... how, when the Copperashun fust took possesshun of it, it was nothink but a Baron Swomp, but that, what with the spending of lots of money, and the souperintending genus of Major MAKENZIE, in two years it was maid to blossom like a rose. I spent a werry plessant arternoon there, and drove home in style on the Box Seat of a reel Company's Bus. The nex day I went to Higate Wood, another of the grate works of the good old Copperashun. And lawks, what a difference! No swarms of children a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various

... next shop, a fancy draper's, I acted with cunning. In the centre of the window, on a raised background of silver paper, was displayed a wreath of orange-blossom veiled with tulle. I bought it. The young ladies were hysterical. "May I ask permission to put this little handbill in its place?" I said. They appealed to the shopwalker. "In the absence of the head of the firm I cannot see my way to accede ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various

... is the mummy hyacinth which you declared that we should never see blossom in this world. It has budded; whether or not it will ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... found, old writers say, A yew tree where his body lay, But a wild apple hid the grass With its sweet blossom where hers was; And being in good heart, because A better time had come again After the deaths of many men, And that long fighting at the ford, They wrote on tablets of thin board, Made of the apple and the yew, All the love stories that ...
— In The Seven Woods - Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age • William Butler (W.B.) Yeats

... beautiful there, my Benjamin, and I doubt he was never beautiful before. And I have planted him so firmly. I think if we leave him there he may grow and blossom. Do not dig him up again yet. Imagine Benjamin in flower! A thing ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey

... is indeed a pretty Thing: But what's more monstrous than an old Maid? If your Mother had not shed that Blossom, we should never have had this fine Flower, yourself. And if we don't make a barren Match, as I hope we shan't, there will be never a Maid the less ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... pink, a blossom blue, Make all there is in love so true. 'Tis fit, methinks, my heart to move, To give it thee, sweet girl, I love! Now, take it, dear, this morn and wear A wreath of beauty in thy hair; Think on it, when from bliss we part— The emblem ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones

... began blowing; the scarlet skirt of my turkey-girl fluttered above her wooden shoes, and on her head the silk bow quivered like a butterfly on a golden blossom. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... oaks and acacias there, cursing the Wen-devils and place-men and pensioners, the reptiles, toad-eaters and tax-eaters, and yet the sheer honesty and affection of the man shine from every page. There never was such a mixture of execration and the scent of bean-blossom. But Rural Rides remains a book of the library ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... to the house, the jasmin blossom fell from the girl's hair to the ground at Jim's feet; he stooped and raised it. "May I ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... on which swains, in bands youthful and gay Danc'd 'round the trunk of the sweet blossom'd poplar, With greater rapture inspir'd my heart, Than Alps dazzling heights in ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... find out what there is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the "Merchant ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... love in hair, though it be dead. It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread Of our frail plant,—a blossom from the tree Surviving the proud trunk;—as though it said, Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... home his father said, 'I knew you had delivered your brother, for all of a sudden the golden lily reared itself up and burst into blossom.' ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... Virginia, a tall, graceful, languishing girl. "How could they send me to such a place, where it is winter all the spring? Why, at home the violets are in blossom, the trees are coming ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards

... lips. He recognized everything, to the windy spot where the gorse flourished on the crown of the cliff. The clean sky told him from whence the wind blew; the gray gull above was flying with it upon slanting wings. And Joan stood below in a blaze of sunshine and yellow blossom. A reflection from the corner of her sunbonnet brightened her face, though it was shaded from direct sunlight by her hand; her blue eyes mirrored the sea and the sky; and they met Joe's, like a question. She was looking away to the edge of the world; and he knew from the name of ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... out of frozen earth; From the dead branch never did blossom start: If thou lovest not the land that gave thee birth, Within thy breast thou bear'st a frozen heart; If thou lovest not this land of ancient worth, To love aught else, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... remark upon the mirror, saying "it made it appear as if there was two of you," a remark which Mrs. Noah fully appreciated. He saw the silk chairs, slyly touching one to see if it did feel like the gored, peach-blossom dress worn by his wife forty-two years ago that very spring. Then he tried one of them, examined the rare ornaments, and came near bowing again to the portrait of the first Mrs. Remington, so natural and lifelike it looked ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes

... blossoming clouds of cherry-tree, hawthorn, and lilacs, she let herself down to earth, dead-tired, and dropped in a bed of red tulips, where she held on to one of the big flowers. With a great sigh of bliss she pressed herself against the blossom-wall and looked up to the deep blue of the sky through the ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels

... beautiful creatures, striped and ringed with a thousand colors in a thousand various ways: one has only to see the riddled appearance of every leaf and flower to harden one's heart. Just now they have cleared off every blossom out of the garden except my zinnias, which grow magnificently and make the devastated flower-bed still gay with every hue and tint a zinnia can put on—salmon-color, rose, scarlet, pink, maroon, and fifty shades besides. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... blossom, an' the year was at the June, When Flap-jack Billy hit the town, likewise O'Flynn's saloon. The frost was on the fodder an' the wind was growin' keen, When Billy got to seein' ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... longed, All else was well, for she-society. They boated and they cricketed; they talked At wine, in clubs, of art, of politics; They lost their weeks; they vext the souls of deans; They rode; they betted; made a hundred friends, And caught the blossom of the flying terms, But missed the mignonette of Vivian-place, The little hearth-flower Lilia. Thus he spoke, Part banter, part affection. 'True,' she said, 'We doubt not that. O yes, you missed us much. I'll stake my ruby ring upon it ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... poet, and assures the public that he "is a deserving object of patronage." Again, in June 11, 1803, some sonnets and odes are quoted from Hunt's Juvenilia, Hunt being then a lad of 19 years, and the author is said to be a "blossom from our own garden." Although the editor lays claim to Leigh Hunt as a Philadelphian and to his works as American, he is advised to abide in London: "Let him remain in London, 'the metropolis of the civilized world,' and remember ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... career too fleet, And all heaven's host of eyes Entranced, but fearful all, Saw thee, sweet Hebe, prostrate fall Upon the bright floor of the azure skies; Where, mid its stars, thy beauty lay, As blossom, shaken from the spray Of a spring thorn, Lies mid the liquid sparkles of the morn. Or, as in temples of the Paphian shade, The worshippers of Beauty's queen behold An image of their rosy idol, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... fires among which he labored, and his black eyes sparkling with a keen and merry light. Times had changed since the day he pushed little Kala into the mud, and he looked upon her now as some frail and delicate blossom, that to handle would be desecration. Yet Kala was no rare flower, but a common plant, with nothing remarkable about her except her beauty; and, once married, Sigmund would be prompt enough to recognize this fact. Gabriel, with a chivalrous and imaginative soul, might perhaps retain his ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... I've always suspected them the same gang. None of us ever seen Cheseldine—an' thet's strange, when Knell, Poggin, Panhandle Smith, Blossom Kane, and Fletcher, they all ride here often. No, Poggin doesn't come often. But the others do. For thet matter, they're around all ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... we have been much accustomed to consider any thing as capable of giving happiness, it is not easy to restrain our ardour, or to forbear some precipitation in our advances, and irregularity in our pursuits. He that has cultivated the tree, watched the swelling bud and opening blossom, and pleased himself with computing how much every sun and shower add to its growth, scarcely stays till the fruit has obtained its maturity, but defeats his own cares by eagerness to reward them. When we have diligently laboured for any purpose, we are willing to believe that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... fearful and wonderful thing—doubly fearful when we reflect, that every moment we expend for good or evil is a seed sown to blossom in eternity. As I thought on these things, something which Mr. Frampton had said, and which at the time I let pass without reflection, recurred to my mind. He had asked me whether I was certain that the words I heard Clara ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... me," said the stranger, "is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The sweet, tender blossom that flowers in the heart of the young—in hearts such as yours—that, too, is beautiful. The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is ...
— Passing of the Third Floor Back • Jerome K. Jerome

... suggested the idea of the former, as the latter in a state of detachment, to our late poetical and theoretical brother; yet a something, that approaches to a graver plausibility, is given to this fancy of a flying blossom; when we reflect how many plants depend upon insects for their fructification. Be it remembered, too, that with few and very obscure exceptions, the irritable power and an analogon of voluntary motion first dawn on us in the vegetable world, in the stamina, and ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge



Words linked to "Blossom" :   orange-blossom orchid, efflorescence, golden age, prime, period of time, pistil, bud, unfold, period, reproductive structure, rum-blossom, apetalous flower, flowering plant, burst forth, effloresce, develop, blossom out, ovary, floret, carpel, peak, chlamys, ray floret, angiosperm, flush, flower, ray flower, perigone, stamen, blossom forth, perigonium



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