"Couchant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this I should say Quaker—and was quiet and gentlemanly, as members of that Church—in any article but this I should, from mere habit, say sect—usually are. This is due to his memory; for, by all I heard, when he changed his religion he ceased to be Lucas couchant, and became Lucas rampant, fanged and langued gules. (I looked into Guillim[58] to see if my terms were right: I could not find them; but to prove I have been there, I notice that he calls a violin a violent. How comes the word to ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... with a man that can't get fun out of anything except a three-ring circus," said his friend, severely. "I'm contented with one elephant these days. It's all the responsibility I want." His eyes dwelt fondly on the placid Imogene, couchant amidships. Then he lighted a cigar, using his plug hat for a wind-break, and resumed his ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... inscribed: it is the seal of fate! Ha!—Had ever monster fitting lair, 'tis yonder! 170 Thou yawning den, I well remember thee! Mine eyes deceived me not. Heaven leads me on! Now for a blast, loud as a king's defiance, To rouse the monster couchant o'er his ravine! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Stapylton soon had their history at his finger-tips. He could have correctly blazoned every tincture in their armorial bearings and have explained the origin of every rampant, counter-changed or couchant beast ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... cayuse rampant; a longhorn steer regardant; two sad-eyed, unbranded calves couchant—one in each corner of the shield to kind of balance her up; gules, several clumps of something representing sagebrush; and possibly a rattlesnake coiled beneath the sagebrush and described as "repellent" and holding in his open jaws a ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... and between both, towards the middle, are figures of the Virgin Mary and St. John, the latter holding a cup with a lamb. The outer arch is adorned with knobs, and within both is a small slit or loop. At the bottom of the outer arch are two beasts couchant. If one of them by his proboscis was not evidently an elephant, I should suppose them the supporters of the Scotch arms. Parallel with the Crucifix are two plain stones, which do not appear to have had anything upon them. Here is not the least trace of a door ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... maistre Martin, Dame Luce, dame Perrete, &c. J'en prends un dans le temps qu'il pleure A quelque autre, au contraire a l'heure Qui demesurement il rit; Je donne le coup qui le frit. J'en prends un, pendant qu'il se leve; En se couchant l'autre j'enleve. Je prends le malade et le sain L'un aujourd'hui, l'autre le demain. J'en surprends un dedans son lit, L'autre a l'estude quand il lit. J'en surprends un le ventre plein Je mene l'autre par la faim. J'attrape l'un pendant qu'il prie, Et l'autre pendant qu'il renie; J'en ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... couchant, seated on wide pedestals beneath a company of noble trees, were the only visible inhabitants of the dwelling. There was a sweep of gardens: terraces that picked their way daintily down the cliffs toward the sea, a mansard roof that covered a large mansion—these were the sole aspects of chateau ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... morning a little canoe with a cat couchant in the bow, a young invalid comfortably reclining amidships and a husky youth in the stern started down the river and into the salt-water lakes. The first day's run was a short one and the camp was made on a bit of high ground ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... 'Twas levelled, when fanatic Brook The fair cathedral stormed and took; But, thanks to Heaven, and good Saint Chad, A guerdon meet the spoiler had!) There erst was martial Marmion found, His feet upon a couchant hound, His hands to heaven upraised; And all around, on scutcheon rich, And tablet carved, and fretted niche, His arms and feats were blazed. And yet, though all was carved so fair, And priest for Marmion ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... a feverish kind of excitement, which dwells violently on particular points, and makes all the lines of thought in the picture to stand on end, as it were, like a cat's fur electrified; while good work is always as quiet as a couchant leopard, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Brochard, de son cote, proteste de son exactitude. Non seulement il a demeure vingt-quatre ans dans le pays, mais il l'a traverse dans son double diametre du nord au sud, depuis le pied de Liban jusqu'a Bersabee; et du couchant au levant, depuis la Mediterranee jusqu'a la mer Morte. Enfin il ne decrit rien qu'il n'ait, pour me servir des termes de son traducteur, veu corporellement, lui, estant ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... felt your identity shrink and contract At the sound of the distant and dim cataract, In the presence of nature's immensities? Say, Have you hung o'er the torrent, bedew'd with its spray, And, leaving the rock-way, contorted and roll'd, Like a huge couchant Typhon, fold heaped over fold, Track'd the summits from which every step that you tread Rolls the loose stones, with thunder below, to the bed Of invisible waters, whose mistical sound Fills with awful suggestions the dizzy profound? And, laboring onwards, at last through ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... demon. I supposed the early dogs of this breed had been trained to night slaughter and savageness alone, and that it was a case of atavism, a recurrence of hereditary instinct. It interested me vastly, and I resolved to make him the most perfect of watchdogs. I trained him to lie couchant, and to spring upon and tear a stuffed figure I would bring into the basement. I noticed he always sprang at the throat. 'Hard lines,' thought I, 'for the ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... day the rain came down in torrents, accompanied with thunder and lightning, which kept me within my tent and caused me to exclaim with Dr. Henry, "O, ye lightnings, that brood and lie couchant in the sulphureous vapours, that glance with forked fury from the angry gloom, swifter and fiercer than the lion rushes from his den, or open with vast expansive sheets of flame, sublimely waved over the prostrate world, and fearfully lingering in the affrighted skies!" "Ye thunders, that awfully ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... home, escorted valiantly by three stout boys, who guided her by a most circuitous route across Bruntsfield Links, that she might gain a moonlight view of the couchant lion of Arthur's Seat. They amused her the whole way home with tales of High-school warfare. On reaching the garden-gate she was half surprised to hear the unwonted cheerfulness of her own laugh. The sunshine she daily strove to cast around ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... etait un roi d'Yvetot Pen connu dans l'histoire, Se levant tard, se couchant tot, Dormant fort bien ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... to wager that this is but another version of the fable of the statue of the man rampant and the lion couchant," thought Mr. Aylett, following with his wife in the funeral train down the grass-grown alley leading through the garden to the family burying-ground. "It would be an entertaining study of human veracity if I could hear Chilton's ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... sarcastic, but hardly raised much in anger; in the imperative mood it might be very successful, but it seemed as if it could never have pleaded or prayed. It matched the speaker's exterior singularly well. Had you seen him for the first time—couchant, as he was then—you would have had only an impression of great length and laziness; but as you gazed on, the vast deep chest expanded under your eye; the knotted muscles, without an ounce of superfluous flesh to dull their outline, developed themselves one by one; so that gradually ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... him through a scene of melancholy interest. Beside the mast, within a shattered palisade, lay huddled the vast corpse of the Mylodon of Patagonia, couchant amidst his fodder of chopped hay. The expression of the huge animal was placid and urbane in death. He was the victim of the ceaseless curiosity of science. Two of the five-horned antelope giraffes ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the breeze and the rapid current. They were the same; the movement and music were the same; God was still with him; was he so base as to withhold the thanksgiving that had been checked half uttered in his heart by the spring of that couchant sorrow? Then in the sum of life's blessings he had numbered that hope of his, and now he had seen the perfect fruition of that hope in joy. It was not his own,—but was it not much to know that ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... side is much fresher, but the design not so elaborate. There is a similar paling to that on the other side, the 'Park' being dotted about with several plants, ferns, and tufts of grass. Near each corner is a deer, one feeding, one 'couchant,' one 'tripping,' and one 'courant,' and one 'lodged' in the centre. There are also two snakes worked in silver thread with ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper's Knowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the grass, may hear fairy tunes ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... mutable, nor no gelid love, I keep, O Earth, thy worship, Though life slow, and the sobering Genius change To a lamp his gusty torch. What though no more Athwart its roseal glow Thy face look forth triumphal? Thou put'st on Strange sanctities of pathos; like this knoll Made derelict of day, Couchant and shadow-ed Under dim Vesper's overloosened hair: This, where emboss-ed with the half-blown seed The solemn purple thistle stands in grass Grey as an exhalation, when the bank Holds mist for water in the nights of Fall. Not to the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... There stands his suit of armour, too, newly blackleaded, whose coat of arms is a couchant ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... instead, that of Clazomenae. There is no certainty until after the time of Alyattes, that is, in the reign of Croesus. It is, as a fact, to this prince that we owe the fine gold and silver coins bearing on the obverse a demi-lion couchant confronting a bull treated similarly.* The two creatures appear to threaten one another, and the introduction of the lion recalls a tradition regarding the city of Sardes; it may represent the actual ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... The water-rat is earth-hued like the runlet Whereon he swims; and how in me should lurk Thoughts apt to neighbour thine, thou creature sunlit? If through long fret and irk Thine eyes within their browed recesses were Worn caves where thought lay couchant in its lair; Wert thou a spark among dank leaves, ah ruth! With age in all thy veins, while all thy heart was youth; Our contact might run smooth. But life's Eoan dews still moist thy ringed hair; Dian's chill ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... no female sphinxes in Egypt. The sphinx was called Neb, i. e., the lord. The lion-couchant had either a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are two arches one within the other in relief. At the top of the arch is a crucifix, and about midway from top to bottom on either side are two figures which, according to Romanist Christians, represent the Virgin Mary and St. John. At the bottom of the outer arch are two couchant beasts, the one an elephant and the other a bull. The figure on the cross has a Parthian coronet. The appearance of a crucifix on the towers of Britain and Ireland has in the past led many writers to ascribe to these singular structures a Christian origin. To the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... opposite my place of rest, Two figures faced each other, large, austere; A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast, An angel standing in the moonlight clear; 10 So mighty by magnificence of form, They were not dwarfed ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... occasion," he mused. "We have seen what we came out to see, and what more have we a right to demand? The dear people rampant, the respected mayor quiescent, but biding his time, Cobbens couchant but fanged, the President raised to a sublime apotheosis. It is always a pleasure—is it not?—to witness transcendent ability, even if it be in the line of practical politics. The perfection of each thing is worth observing. These local politicians ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... port, ou, en m'asseyant sur le sable, le dos appuye contre un petit rocher qui empechait qu'on ne put me voir du cote de la terre, je n'avais plus devant moi que le ciel et la mer. Entre ces deux immensites qu'embellissaient les rayons d'un soleil couchant, je passai en revant des heures delicieuses; et la, je serais devenu poete, si j'avais su ecrire dans ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Of that gigantic Empire, insolent Spain, spurred fiercer resentments up like steeds Revolting, on the curb, foaming for battle, In all men's minds, against whatever odds. On one side of the throne great Walsingham, A lion of England, couchant, watchful, calm, Was now the master of opinion: all Drew to him. Even the hunchback Burleigh smiled With half-ironic admiration now, As in the presence of the Queen they met Amid the sweeping splendours of her court, A cynic ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... a work of dreams that bloomed from Art; A town and her turrets rose As from the red heart Of the couchant suns where the west wind blows And worlds lie apart. Calm slept the sea-flats; beneath the blue dome Copper and gold and alabaster gleamed, And sea-birds came home. But I woke in a sorrowful day; ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... the sandy pathway we were not slow to perceive the Sphinx itself, half hill, half couchant beast, turning its back upon us in the attitude of a gigantic dog, that thought to bay the moon; its head stood out in dark silhouette, like a screen before the light it seemed to be regarding, and the lappets ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and terraces, a lake with spouting fountains, statues of twisty nymphs, glaring, many-antlered stags and couchant lions, all among cedar-trees and flower-beds whose perfumes saluted the Presidential nostril like a ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Les noms prdestins des rois que tu chris. Tu m'coutes. Ma voix ne t'est point trangre. Je suis la Pit, cette fille si chre, 20 Qui t'offre de ce roi les plus tendres soupirs. Du feu de ton amour j'allume ses desirs. Du zle qui pour toi l'enflamme et le dvore La chaleur se rpand du couchant l'aurore. Tu le vois tous les jours, devant toi prostern, 25 Humilier ce front de splendeur couronn, Et confondant l'orgueil par d'augustes exemples, Baiser avec respect le pav de tes temples. De ta gloire anim, lui seul de tant de rois S'arme pour ta ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... and found it delicious, soft and mellow as summer moonlight. While I sipped it the big Newfoundland, who had stretched himself in a couchant posture on the hearth-rug ever since Cellini had first entered the room, rose and walked majestically to my side and rubbed his head caressingly against the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the Duke, as he stood leaning against the wall, behind Zuleika's table. He saw it as a monster couchant and enchanted, a monster that was to die; and its death was in part his own doing. But remorse in him gave place to hostility. Zuleika had begun her performance. She was producing the Barber's Pole from her mouth. And it was to her that the Duke's heart went ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... statues until she found herself in another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. "For," she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information printed behind a piece of glass, "the wonderful thing about you is that you're ready for anything; you're not in the least conventional, like ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... ploughs' to the agent who was vainly trying to demonstrate to him the advantages of the modern two-horse iron plough over the great wooden local tool; and the emblem ascribed to old Sussex—a pig couchant with the motto 'I wun't be druv'—would suit the Kunbi equally well. But the Kunbi, too, though he could not express it, knows something of the pleasure of the simple outdoor life, the fresh smell of the soil after rain, the joy of the yearly miracle when the earth is again carpeted with ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... built and plastered, standing sidewise to the road, with doors on either side, we found the house apparently in charge of a little girl of nine or ten years, a weird but pretty child with very delicate well-cut features, who lay couchant upon her doubled-up arm on a low bed in a corner of the main room, and peered at us over her ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... strange existence, with its great and rapid transitions, happy events are always imminent. One may be performing her own menialities to-day, and to-morrow, in an ambassador's carriage, be folded in a fur robe with couchant lions upon it; to-day be quartered in a single attic, to-morrow be treading the tapestries of her own drawing-rooms. Thus the golden Fate turns and keeps turning; it is only when, through frigidness or fear, we refuse to revolve with it, that there ensues ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... chestnut and others—and makes a handsome addition to the garden, irrespective of its historical associations. The chalet is of dark wood varnished, and has in the centre a large carving of Dickens's crest, which in heraldic terms is described as: "a lion couchant 'or,' holding in the ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes |
