"Greenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all the while. Some chance sight or sound has wrapt him away from the young greenness of the May morning, and plunged him deep into the opulent colour of September. His prophetic eye sees all the apple-buds as golden orbs of fruit, and the swallows, that now build beneath the eaves, making ready for their departure. And these future splendours ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... oak. In Shoshone Land one digs for large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures. Higher on the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon stand each apart, rounded and spreading heaps of greenness. Between them, but each to itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... Indian mound,—the single spot of strange perennial greenness, which the poor aborigines had raised above the dusty plain. A little slab of sandstone with the initials "G. T." is his monument, and one of the bearings of the initial corner of the new survey of the Espiritu ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be "that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped off; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope of greenness." "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same field that Roland crossed! In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines—two ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... on the coast, where the fogs brought in by the prevailing north-west winds keep the ground moist, foster the greenness and succulence of the native grasses during the summer, at least in the ravines, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... prevailed upon, and I bought them and walked to Morris Cove while they creaked and fretted. And here was the very shop, arising in front of me as from times before the flood. With it there arose, too, a recollection of my greenness and timidity. And mingled with all the hours of happiness of those times there were hours, also, of emptiness and loneliness—hours when, newcome to my surroundings, for fear of ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... he could not count, the words that had to be said had risen to his lips. But they had never crossed them—in spite of the wanton greenness of the woods, which should have been the very frame in which to tell a woman you loved her. But not one drop of her nervous exaltation was meant for him: she had never shown, by the least sign, that she cared a jot for him; and daily he became more convinced ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a minute, mother," he said, and she took a seat on a bank, whilst he sketched rapidly. She was silent whilst he worked, looking round at the afternoon, the red cottages shining among their greenness. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... virtue and virgin, bring down the force to modern days. It is a group containing mainly the idea of "spring," or increase of life in vegetation—the rising of the new branch of the tree out of the bud, and of the new leaf out of the ground. It involves, secondarily, the idea of greenness and of strength, but, primarily, that of living increase of a new rod from a stock, stem, or root ("There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse"); and chiefly the stem of certain plants—either of the rose ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... greenness! nurst below Tempests and winds and winter nights! Vex not, that but One sees thee grow; That One made all ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... agreeable was lost upon Isabel; the rich perfection of Gardencourt at once revealed a world and gratified a need. The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the deep embrasures and curious casements, the quiet light on dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always peeping in, the sense of well-ordered privacy in the centre of a "property"—a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where the tread was muffed by the earth itself and in the thick mild air all friction dropped out of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... too grand a word for the hundred square feet in front of his mother's house, though the grass which lay beneath the snowy carpet was very green and lovely grass, smooth enough for any lawn. In summer Alec had quite revelled in its greenness and softness, as he lay on it reading the Arabian Nights and the Ettrick Shepherd's stories: now it was "white with the whiteness of what is dead;" for is not the snow just dead water? The flag-staff he had got George Macwha to erect ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... was on one side of the Whi-Whi River. On the other side was a narrow margin, and then a sheer wall of hills in exquisite verdure. The houses were of wood, and chiefly painted white, sweet and cool in the vast greenness. Cattle wandered shoulders deep in the rich grass, and fruit of all kinds was to be had for the picking. The population was strangely mixed. Men had drifted here from all parts of the world, sometimes with their families, sometimes without them. Many of them had settled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Green Woman" (from the greenness which follows moisture); "our Mother, whose robe is of precious stones" (from the green or vegetable life resembling the ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... weeks what will have become of all this greenness and beautiful colour of flowers? The torrid sun and the hot breath of summer will have burnt up the fair garment of spring, and laid bare the arid sternness of the South again. The nightingale still warbles fitfully in the green bushes, but ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the earth and sow it soon after Christmas. Then pretty soon there comes a sort of greenness on the black land and it swells and grows and, and—shivers. Then stalks shoot up with three or four leaves. That's the way it is now, see? After that we chop out the weak stalks, and the strong ones grow tall and dark, till I think it must ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... summer, and the country was very beautiful to see in its fresh greenness as the two old people went on their way to work. The grass on the banks of the river looked like emerald velvet, and the pussy willows along the edge of the water were shaking out ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... pleasantest part of the country outside the city, in a quarter where there were many gardens and much thickness of trees and greenness of grass and coloring of bright flowers—all pleasing things, that made an agreeable background to her beauty when she went abroad in her litter. For, indeed, she was a comely creature, and one that painters would pause to look at and to praise, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... throttled earth. Marschner looked round again involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply to the little woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind the white highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A short turn—and the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though roared down by the cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in the valley like the pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell hole yawned down there. From time to time ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... upon Barry Houston. He whistled and sang, turning now and then to view the bright greenness of the new-leafed aspens, to watch the circling sallies of the jaybirds, or to stare ahead to where the blues and greens and purples of the foliage and rocks merged in the distance. The grade was ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... barren plain studded with clumps of trees led to the wood, to the little wood which had seemed to them to resemble the one at Kermarivan. Grainfields and hayfields bordered the narrow path, which lost itself in the young greenness of the crops, and Jean Kerderen would always say ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... stared, those eyes, long, narrow, and slightly oblique, their brilliant, catlike greenness sometimes horribly filmed, like the ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... about the solemn little settlements, and, no doubt, but poorly succeeded in disguising the superior air which distinguishes the new arrival in a strange land. It is but a step from a state of absolute greenness on one's arrival at a new port to a blase languor, wherein nothing can touch one further; and the step is easily and usually taken inside of a week. May the old settlers forgive ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... enjoy the gayeties of this lovely French seaport, but were marched off to the train and sent north to the big show. We thought we had never seen such lovely scenery as the south of France. I am not going to say that we have not just as good in Australia, but the wonderful greenness and the trees were such a change to us after Egypt that the boys just hung from the carriage-windows, and as there was a good number that could not get these vantage-points, they scrambled onto the roofs of the carriages, so as not to miss any of that wonderful panorama ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... famine-stricken, pine-barrens of Georgia, which had become wearisome to the sight. The soil where it appeared, was rich, vegetation was luxuriant; great clumps of laurel showed glossy richness in the greenness of its verdure, that reminded us of the fresh color of the vegetation of our Northern homes, so different from the parched and impoverished look of Georgian foliage. Immense flocks of wild fowl fluttered around us; the Georgian woods were almost destitute of living creatures; the evergreen ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race. This was the deepest abstraction old Koskoosh's barbaric mind was capable of, but he grasped it firmly. He saw it exemplified in all life. The rise of the sap, the bursting greenness of the willow bud, the fall of the yellow leaf—in this alone was told the whole history. But one task did Nature set the individual. Did he not perform it, he died. Did he perform it, it was all the same, he died. Nature ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... onward, Each sadder than the last; All the bloom of life fell from him, All the freshness and greenness passed. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... those things on the possession of which I had just been congratulating myself, pass hopelessly from me, leaving me in dreadful gloom—I will not attempt to describe in this place. Let it suffice that the world lost in a moment its joyousness, the sunshine its warmth. The greenness and beauty round me, which an instant before had filled me with pleasure, seemed on a sudden no more than a grim and cruel jest at my expense, and I an atom perishing unmarked and unnoticed. Yes, an atom, a mote; the bitterness of that feeling I ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... the sweet fountains that well up here and there in our desert world, and surround themselves with greenness, and beauty, and life, has been exhaled to heaven, still it is refreshing to know that its streams, which made glad so many hearts, have not perished, for they were of "living water, springing up" into ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... at Sidmouth goes on,—goes on, in fact, for three years,—and the life is not an unmixed joy to Miss Barrett. "I like the greenness and the tranquillity and the sea," she writes to a friend. "Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in the country. ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... a fine fellow display more ignorance on the subject. "And I should have noticed it if I had seen four calves vented fresh and not rebranded. Why in the world didn't you stick your brand on at the same time?" Billy Louise was losing patience with his greenness. ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... specimens. The leaves Robin was playing with were some he had plucked first to show her a wonderful thing. If you laid a leaf flat on the seat of the bench and were fortunate enough to possess a large pin you could prick beautiful patterns on the leaf's greenness—dots and circles, and borders and tiny triangles of a most decorative order. Neither Donal nor Robin had a pin but Donal had, in his rolled down stocking, a little dirk the point of which could ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ancient and had not yet attained his death. Then he thought he knew what le Pere had meant by saying that he must look for help from outside himself. He turned his eyes away and gazed into the sunshine, and on the greenness of the awakened country. Somehow it all looked very happy and changed from what it had been before they two had met. He vaguely wondered whether already he might not be now experiencing that help. But, as had always happened to him after tasting of a momentary joy, in turning his head he found ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... he was plannin' How he 'd gethah sassafras Jes' ez soon ez evah Springtime Put some greenness in de grass. An' he 'lowed a little soonah He could stan' a coolah breeze So 's to mek a little money F'om de ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... flights she came to a wide river, with trees bending over it. It was like a wide stream of greenness flowing down, and Ditte stood transfixed, in breathless wonder. The green of the river she quickly grasped, for this was the color poured down on all trees—and the river here was the end of the world. Over on the other side the Lord ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... onely, though you stop the lower end of that in the Air very carefully with Wax, yet shall it presently almost wither, whereas the other that seems to have a supply from the subjacent water by its small pipes, or microscopical pores, preserves its greenness for many days, and ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness on the water. Faded waterlilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... the small inclosure was like a chalice into which the sun poured a living stream. Here the lawn early achieved a startling greenness as well as a cutable height; here a pair of peach trees dared to put out leaves despite any pronouncement of the calendar; and in the Close, even before open cars began their run along the near-by avenue, a swinging-couch with a shady awning was installed at ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... resembling the one on which we had encamped; and noticed that all these turned off toward the eastward, making their way to a main stream. In this direction, too, I saw a few stunted trees, with here and there an appearance of greenness on the surface of the plain. On the way I saw an antelope, and another animal resembling a deer, but differing from all the deer I had ever seen, in having a long tail like a cow. I knew not at the time what sort of an animal it was, as I had never ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the memory, never sere, But fresh as after fallen rain, Of those who learned their lesson here And may not ever come again, Gives to this garden, bruised and browned, A greenness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... almost too late but he just caught sight of him, the flash of red-breasted bird with something in his beak. He darted through the greenness and into the close-grown corner and was out of sight. Colin leaned back on his cushion ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... cultivated spots around the villages. Wherever there is a permanent supply of water, there also is certain to be found a mud-built village, with fields of wheat and barley, pomegranate orchards, and vineyards. In a country of universal greenness these would count for nothing, but, situated like islands in the sea of sombre gray about them, they often present an appearance of extreme beauty that the wondering observer is somewhat puzzled to account ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... the stillness. A swift zigzagged across the cattle trail he was following. Out of a blue sky the Arizona sun still beat down upon a land parched by aeons of drought, a land still making its brave show of greenness against ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... greenness, and perhaps on the simplicity of his nature as they had read it in the sheep country, Swan had prepared this trap days ahead. He had run a small band of the same breed as Sullivan's sheep—for that matter but one breed was extensively grown on the range—over to the border of ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... and me with the books by me; but mostly in the summer we would hold school at the Wee Hill, for there was a green place as level as the page of a book, and a little turf dyke enclosing it nearly, that we called the Wee Hill. Wae's me, now they have hens scarting about the place, and the greenness is ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... to each other in consultation, and Gerald gathered that the greenness of the pump and the enamelled character of the dustbin made, in their ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... mangled offals on the place. Soon as she saw the goddess gay and bright, She fetched a groan at such a cheerful sight. 80 Livid and meagre were her looks, her eye In foul, distorted glances turned awry; A hoard of gall her inward parts possessed, And spread a greenness o'er her cankered breast; Her teeth were brown with rust; and from her tongue, In dangling drops, the stringy poison hung. She never smiles but when the wretched weep, Nor lulls her malice with a moment's sleep, Restless in spite: while watchful to destroy, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... spring morning, and remembered how bright the valley had looked when he passed through it for the first time; and now, in strong contrast with that day, the heavy sky above him was a leaden gray, there was no greenness about the hills, which were still waiting for the cloak of winter snow that invests them with a certain beauty of its own. There was something painful in all this bleak and bare desolation for a man who was traveling to find ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... far-away regions of town and civilisation suggested by the smoke wreaths of Whinborough on the southern horizon, was lined with masses of the white heckberry or bird-cherry, and ran, an arrowy line of white, through the greenness of the sloping pastures. The sides of some of the little becks running down into the main river and many of the plantations round the farms were gay with the same tree, so that the farmhouses, gray-roofed and gray-walled, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sternly setting his thoughts on the errand that was taking him to the salt-works, he began to think of the place in which they were situated, and to wonder why so bare, so brown, and so desolate a spot should have been called Green Lick. There was no greenness about it, and not the slightest sign that there ever had been any verdure, although it still lay in the very heart of an almost tropical forest. It must surely have been as it was now since time immemorial. Myriads of wild beasts coming and going through numberless ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... of all fair places, Sweetest of all sweet towns! With the birds and the greyness and greenness, And the men ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... prosecute we advertise our own greenness," said Ajax. "After all, if Laban did fleece us, he kept at bay other ravening wolves. And there is Mrs. Skenk. That plucky old soul must never hear the story. It would ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... I began, but could say no more, for the door was already shut between us. I stood and looked out on the long-neglected garden. I could just see the bright greenness of Seaton's old tadpole pond. I wandered about the room. Dusk began to gather, the last birds in that dense shadowiness of trees had ceased to sing. And not a sound was to be heard in the house. I waited on and on, vainly speculating. I even attempted to ring the bell; but the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... from under them were flowers, dainty wildings we had not before seen there. A bit of the tropics or a gem out of fairyland it looked to our sun and sand weary eyes. Outside were the burning sun of June, a withering hot wind, and yellow and dead vegetation; within was cool greenness and a mere rustle of leaves whispering of the gale. It was the loveliest bit of greenery we saw on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. It was ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... delectably green meadow-land, broken here and there by groves of trees; and in the valley's middle part, reaching from side to side of it, was a lovely lake, whereof the blue was flecked by white reflections of certain little idly drifting clouds: the sight of all which greenness and fair water and broad range of sky—after being for so long a season pent up in rocky fastnesses and wandering over brown, sun-baked plains—fairly brought tears into my eyes because of its fresh and ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... enchanted with his Venetian days, pictures the northern lagoon, some six miles from Venice, as "a revel of pastoral greenness, with briery hedges, numberless wild flowers and the most captivating of sinuous creeks, overarched by an occasional bridge, so old that you greet with respect every moss-grown inch of its drowsy and sagging brickwork. The cathedral, the ineludible cathedral of all Italian settlements, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... those who have gone through the exile, and been separated, as I had been for years, from all that made the happiness of my early life. Every English tree and flower one comes across on first landing is a distinct and lively pleasure, while the greenness and freshness are a delicious rest to the eye, wearied with the deadly whitey-brown sameness of dried-up sandy plains, or the all-too gorgeous colouring of eastern cities ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... they were already on the march, or he might have been less troubled in mind about them. His other duty, not quite so plain, was to explore the valley a little and see how many buffaloes and deer and all that sort of thing were in it. He wondered at the greenness of the grass, not knowing that the mountain range east of it took care of that, taking the water out of the winds from the west so that they were often sponge-dry when they passed over upon the parching plains beyond. He had never heard of Eden and he could not make any ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... opened. An old woman had entered. She held in her hand a stout cane. She walked stiffly across to the window and threw back a shutter. The window opened into the soft greenness of a Munich garden. She stood for a minute looking into it. Then she came over to the fireplace and looked up to the pictured face. ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... gate, or mingled with the people of the little town, in their evening assemblies round it. The memories of boyhood rose up radiant before him, and as he was immersed in the past, the grim present, the perils that threatened his life, the savage, gaunt rocks without a trace of greenness that girded him, the privations to which he was exposed, were all forgotten, and he longed for one more draught of the water that tasted so cool and sweet to memory. Three of his 'mighty men,' bound to him by loyal devotion and unselfish love, were ready to die to win for their chief ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this unpleasant account with the good words of old Barbot: 'Axim, in my opinion, is the most tempting of any on the coast of Guinea, taking one thing with another. You have there a perpetual greenness, which affords a comfortable shade against the scorching heat of the sun, under the lofty palm and other trees, planted about the village, with a sweet harmony of many birds of several sorts perching on them. The walk on the low flat strand along the seaside is no less ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... that floated through it, became edged with gold as the sun rose from his bed in the eastern sea—that burnished sea from which the cool fresh breeze swept over the level coast. The fields were assuming a vernal greenness, the buds were swelling on hedge and tree, and the vegetation of the summer that was to come—the summer that Lemercier might never see—was springing from amid the brown remains of the autumn that had gone, an autumn that he had passed with Athalie amid the gayeties and gardens ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the youthful blood of this country been so profusely lavished as it has been in this contest,—never has a greater sacrifice been made, and for ends which more fully sanctify the sacrifice. But we can hardly hope now, in the greenness of the wound, that even these reflections can serve as a source of solace. Young women who have become widows almost as soon as they had become wives—mothers who have lost not only their sons, but ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... followed the sound, and it took her to the glass extension, which, to her astonishment, was all alight, and fragrant with flowering plants and towering palms. The "old trunks and things" that had littered the place were gone, and in their stead was all this soft greenness and bloom, while from above hung graceful lanterns, sending out a tender light that made the leaves look shadowy and waxen, and gave the spot a peculiar ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... time. Both felt the magic of the place so strong upon them that speech seemed profanation. The flight of the little birds, however, loosened the spell. Hildegarde spoke, but softly, almost under her breath. "Captain! Do you see the lizard? Look at him, on the log there! The greenness of him! soul ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his finger-tips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefimitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitritch, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality—and ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... had not travelled much, I felt quite at home on the train. I was not troubled with any of that disagreeable quality called "greenness," for I had read the newspapers every day regularly for five years; and, through them, a person may know the world without seeing much of it. Besides, nearly all my schoolmates had come from places more or less distant; and, being of an inquiring mind, I had "pumped" ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... a perfect May day, an English May day; the grass, green beyond all ordinary greenness, the fragrant hawthorn hedges scenting the air, the thrush and the linnet singing in the trees, cowslips and daisies dotting the sward. A fresh, cool breeze swept over the uplands, and brought a faint trace of life and color ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... such a pebble, or plate, into fragments, these will behave like the unbroken mass: grind the pebble to powder, every particle will yield its modicum of green; and if the particles be so fine as to remain suspended in the water, the scattered light will be a uniform green. Hence the greenness of shoal water. You go to bed with the black water of the Atlantic around you. You rise in the morning, find it a vivid green, and correctly infer that you are crossing the Bank of Newfoundland. Such water is found charged ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... upon the rock, nearer heaven than earth. It is curious to hear that it was "without verdure"; but perhaps the young ladies took no account of the trees that clothed the precipices below them, or the greenness that edged the Nor' Loch deep at their feet, but sighed for the gardens and luxuriance of Dunfermline, where all was green about their windows and the winding pathways of the dell of Pittendreich would be pleasant to wander in. This first ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... water, regarded as "the universal mother." The "robe of precious stones" refers to "the green or vegetable life" resembling the green of precious stones. Another of her names is the "Green Woman,"—a term drawn from "the greenness ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... itself are its precincts: the long resounding cloisters, the still, discreet lanes populous with clerics, and most of all that little terrace of ecclesiastical residences parallel with South Street, in the shadow of the mighty fane, covered with creeping greenness, from wistaria to ampelopsis, with minute windows, inviolable front doors and trim front gardens, which (like all similar settlements) remind one of alms-houses carried out to the highest power. Surely the best of places in which to edit Horace afresh or ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... people could sit comfortably at one time, a wardrobe, some book-shelves, and a hammock swung across one corner. There may have been a chair or two, but the wide window-sills made pleasanter resting-places. Here in the summer time you looked out into the soft greenness of the maple trees, getting glimpses of the quiet street, but when the branches were bare a fine outlook was to be had all over the neighborhood, and you saw how big houses and little houses stood sociably side by side, while an old gray church kept guard at one corner. Here Bess ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... we were moored to a buoy in the middle of the waterway, with all sorts of shipping round us, mostly French warships, there being at least a dozen of that nationality, the only British men-of-war being the two we saw enter. The transparency and greenness of the water are remarkable. The whole harbour is dotted over with "bum boats" which are said to be peculiar to Malta, and have high boards at their stem and stern, and are worked by one or two men standing upright. Most sell ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... kindly shadow over it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude, that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... just followed around the world, was permitted now to separate himself from him! He began to accuse and abuse himself, and, as if he were director of police, administered to himself a sound lecture for his greenness. ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... a grape-vine be planted in the neighborhood of a well, its roots, running silently underground, wreathe themselves in a net-work around the cold, clear waters, and the vine's putting on outward greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is all that tells where every root and fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with unheeded quietness, every thought and fibre of our life twines gradually around some human soul, to us the unsuspected ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... natural grit came to his rescue, and it was well it did, for the presence had assumed shape, and now sat on the window-ledge in the form of a hag, glaring at him from out of the depths of her unfathomable eyes, in which, despite their deadly greenness, there lurked a tinge of red caused by small specks of that hue semioccasionally seen ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... heaven, all of us with whom the mortal mind does not cake and obstruct into cecity. No, no, no. I protest against anything I have not reprinted. The Prometheus poems bear the mark of their time, which was one of greenness and immaturity. Indeed, the responsibility for what I acknowledge in print is hard enough to bear. Don't put another stick on the overloaded—ass, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... late afternoon sun, down which he was fated to wander in a lethargic dream. One dominant feeling of tenderness; one indifference to the baying of reason—merely love, and the soft, warm earth, and the greenness of living things, and the woman whose dress brushed his arm. Ah! that was sweet and ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... every breast. His delight is a feeling that all doors are open to all, that he is no favorite, but the rest are late sleepers, and he only earlier awake. Depth of genius is measured by depth of this conviction. Egotism is incurable greenness. An artist is one who has more, not less, respect for the common eye. The seer points always from his own to a public privilege,—says never, "I, Jesus, have so received," but, "The Son of Man must so receive"; and Shakspeare cuts himself into fragments till there is no Shakspeare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... evidently different with plants. They are intended fixedly to occupy many places comparatively unfit for them, and to fill up all the spaces where greenness, and coolness, and ornament, and oxygen are wanted, and that with very little reference to their comfort or convenience. Now it would be hard upon the plant if, after being tied to a particular spot, where it is indeed much wanted, and is a great blessing, but ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... autumn colors that she will often put on a scarlet or crimson streamer in July or August. One brilliantly-colored branch will be seen on a green tree, or the leaves of an entire tree will turn red while all the other trees around it are clothed in summer greenness." ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... successful commonplace, I hope. But that's all. We don't know how to try to be anything but what we naturally are. I dare say we are laughed at here and there about this and that. Sometimes I hear criticisms, now and then more or less serious ones. Much of it comes of our greenness; some of it from the very nature of the situation. Those who expect to find us brilliant are, of course, disappointed. Nor are we smart, and the smart set (both American and English) find us uninteresting. But we drive ahead and keep a philosophical temper and simply ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... forest, whose thick shade With lively greenness the new-springing day Attempered, eager now to roam, and search Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank; Along the champaign leisurely my way Pursuing, o'er the ground, that on all sides Delicious odor breathed. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents deg. deg.68 Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as deg. to balk 70 All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... or emphasized by an oath; and what struck with a death chill to her heart was, that Moses swore too, and seemed to show that desperate anxiety to seem au fait in the language of wickedness, which boys often do at that age, when they fancy that to be ignorant of vice is a mark of disgraceful greenness. Moses evidently was bent on showing that he was not green,—ignorant of the pure ear to which every such word came like the ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of a particularly dignified State even the trees of Belgrave Square seemed at that moment a trifle too conventionally perpendicular. If they would but dance and wave their boughs he would have greeted their greenness more gladly. A good-looking nursemaid wheeled a perambulator beneath their shade, and though she never looked his way, he took a wicked pleasure in surreptitiously closing first one eye and then the other in her direction. This might ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... was confusion in the New England camp,—the consequence of March's incapacity for a large command, and the greenness and ignorance of both himself and his subordinates. There were conflicting opinions, wranglings, and disputes. The men, losing all confidence in their officers, became unmanageable. "The devil was at work among us," writes one of those ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... cultivated taste gives symmetry and grace to borders, trellises, and walks,—decking the first with floral gorgeousness, hanging the second with festoons whose perfumes load the atmosphere, and lining the third with edgings that wear an ever-flashing greenness even under the frigid temperature of a wintry sky. It is not by their own hands that these marvels are wrought. It is of their passionate fondness for tree and fruit and flower that such humanizing results are born. They spring from the mind, the heart, the understanding, not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... mind's eye how distinctly do I behold that humble shop in all the greenness and beauty of ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... the weird film, which sometimes became visible in his eyes, now obscured their greenness, and lent him the appearance of ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... wandering, came to rest upon her uniform, so cool and comforting in its greenness. A flicker of light gleamed from the metallic insignia on her sleeve: "To Care for the Aged." Somewhere inside him an association clicked, a brief fire of response to a past event kindled into a short-lived flame, lighting the way through ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... on our small plot has reached the last limit of endurance and greenness, and is sprouting weeds at a great rate; also our one bush, though still full of chirpiness, is beginning to show signs ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... shall be riven up; the Chestnut Avenues shall fall: time-honoured boscages, under which the Opera Hamadryads were wont to wander, not inexorable to men. Paris moans aloud. Philidor, from his Cafe de la Regence, shall no longer look on greenness; the loungers and losels of the world, where now shall they haunt? In vain is moaning. The axe glitters; the sacred groves fall crashing,—for indeed Monseigneur was short of money: the Opera Hamadryads fly with ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Sally good, and she saw other people, and watched some children playing touch until the Park bell rang to show that the gates were going to be closed. Even then she lingered, watching the moving figures and noticing the greenness of the grass under the ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... such luxuriant greenness; such diverse and plentiful wild flowers. Nell pointed out the brilliant fire-weed, blending from crimson to purple, the wild sunflower, the lovely painted-cup, old-rose in colour; and there were other strange and showy plants she could not name. Occasionally they passed ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... time "when the imagination shall lay aside words and pigments and clay, as raiment needless during the festivals of the spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which inhabit words—as light inhabits water or as greenness inhabits grass." Not only does he foresee such a time, but he foreshadows it, heralds it in some of his sketches, "Aileen" for one, by attempting it. Perhaps he has succeeded, perhaps not. To me the attempt is ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... drop all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with the brown-eyed solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all their simple consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass, and life turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,—no individual mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the great calm cattle-sense of all time and all places that know the milky smell of herds,—if he could be like ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this beautiful neighbor, and had enjoyed it all that summer,—the first she ever spent in the hot city. She felt the grace its greenness gave to all it touched, and half unconsciously imitated it in trying to be brave and bright, as she also climbed up from the dismal place where she seemed shut away from everything lovely, till she was ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... brickwork of the place is in fact very poor—inferior to that of the North Italian towns and quite wanting in the wealth of tone which this homely material takes on in general in the climates of dampness and greenness." And then my note-book goes on to narrate a little visit to the Capitol, which was soon made, as the building was in course of repair and half the rooms ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James |
