"Mellowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... O ye Laurels, and once more Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear, I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... scornfully; But, as thou read'st, think what a love was mine, That made me venture on a theme, that none Can know thee, and not feel a hopeless one. Thou art most fair, though sorrow's chastening wing Hath past, and left its shadow on thy brow, And solemn thoughts are gently mellowing The splendour of thy beauty's summer now. Thou art most fair! but thine is loveliness That dwells not only on the lip, or eye; Thy beauty, is thy pure heart's holiness; Thy grace, thy lofty spirit's ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... convince any farmer that the best means of permanently deepening and mellowing the soil is by thorough drainage, to afford a ready exit for all surplus moisture. Let him take in spring, while wet, a quantity of his hardest soil,—such as it is almost impossible to plow in summer,—such as presents a baked ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... feels no greater hardness in the Parliamentary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in the stony fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern work, and refuses to be softened by any effect of the mellowing London air. It looks out over the scurry of cabs, the ponderous tread of omnibuses, the rainfall patter of human feet, as inexorably latter-day as anything in the Strand. It is only an instance of the constant futility of the restoration which, in a world ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... they had been all in all to each other. If other thoughts would creep in, and her heart grow hot and bitter within her at the memory of her wrongs, she resolutely fought for composure; no matter now what he had been or done, that life was dead. She had her boys, the sunsets and sunrises, the mellowing beauty of the year. She had her books, and above all her memories. And in these memories she found much to blame in herself, but much to pity, too. A rudderless little bark, she had been set adrift in so inviting, so welcoming ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... sought out and found, But his dear God? Who yet his glorious love Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground With showers, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in the orchard Mellowing one by one; Strawberries upturning Soft cheeks to the sun; Roses faint with sweetness, Lilies fair of face, Drowsy scents and murmurs Haunting every place; Lengths of golden sunshine, Moonlight bright as day,— Don't you think that summer's ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... long the chart have scanned? My predecessor who first ruled these Isles Did loud proclaim in optimistic tones The Philippines for Filipinos are, And so high expectations did arouse Which Time with all its mellowing pow'r did Dissapoint; and so at last Approval's Smile slowly did wane, and bitterest frown, Conceived from discontent, usurped its place. Alas! Am I to be the pliant tool To work a policy from chaos born? And on its failure, if perchance it fails, Will I too meet the cold ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... he was a feeler and a thinker; over his emotions and his reflections spread a mellowing of melancholy; more than a mellowing: in trouble and bereavement it became a cloud. He did not know much about Lucy Snowe; what he knew, he did not very accurately comprehend: indeed his misconceptions of my character often made me smile; but he saw my walk in life ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... from Aigina fare, sweet song of mine, and bear abroad the news, how that Lampon's son, the strong-limbed Pytheas, hath won at Nemea the pankratiast's crown, while on his cheeks he showeth not as yet the vine-bloom's mother, mellowing midsummer. ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... study. Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none of Alexander's doing, of course; those warm consonances of color had been blending and mellowing before he was born. But the wonder was that he was not out of place there,—that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable background for his vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in the cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright, his hair rumpled above ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... and form his own opinion as to Lady Bridget's setting. She was a woman who, whatever her surroundings, must always impress them with her personality. This bush parlour was original in its simplicity. Walls lined with unvarnished wood which was mellowing already to a soft golden brown. Boards bare, but for a few rugs and skins. A fine piece of tappa from the Solomons, of barbaric design in black and orange, made the centre of an arrangement of South ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. And there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. We had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. At the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the great house; the sloping lawns; the river winding through the park; the ivy-grown church among the trees; the distant woods and plantations; the purple outlines of the fells. Just as in the room within, so the scene without was fused into a perfect harmony and keeping by the mellowing light. There was in it not a jarring note, a ragged line—age and dignity, wealth and undisputed place: Martindale expressed them all. The Gaddesdens had twice refused a peerage; and with contempt. In their ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was just beginning to come in. She sat down on the big boulder where Reeves had fallen asleep. Beyond stretched the gleaming blue waters, mellowing into ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... October is a night sun in the empires of the Columbia and the Puget Sea. No nights in the world can be more clear, lustrous, and splendid than those of the mellowing autumn in the valleys of Mount Saint Helens, Mount Hood, and the Columbia. The moon rises over the crystal peaks and domes like a living glory, and mounts the deep sky amid the pale stars like a royal torch-bearer ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... artist—the two are indissolubly fused—and the result of such just treatment of whatever lowly themes or characters we can but love and loyally approve with all our human hearts. Such masters necessarily are rare, and such ripe perfecting as is here attained may be in part the mellowing result of age and long observation, though it can be based upon the wisest, purest spirit of the man as ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... snow,—living white, intermixed with living green. The hills and hollows beyond the Cold Spring copiously shaded, principally with oaks of good growth, and some walnut-trees, with the rich sun brightening in the midst of the open spaces, and mellowing and fading into the shade,—and single trees, with their cool spot of shade, in the waste of sun: quite a picture of beauty, gently picturesque. The surface of the land is so varied, with woodland mingled, that the eye cannot reach far away, except now and then in ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... September or early October, when we used to thresh out a few bushels of the new crop of rye to be taken to the grist-mill for a fresh supply of flour! How often we paused in our work to munch apples that had been mellowing in the haymow by our side, and look out through the big doorway upon the sunlit meadows and hill-slopes! The sound of the flail is heard in the old barn no more, but in its stead the scratching of a pen and the uneasy ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... irresistible, that he hoped by that time the writer would see the wisdom of suppressing his crude lucubrations altogether. No one knew better than Horace that first-class work never wants such protracted mellowing. ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... was not listening. He had heard Nolan air his views before. He was a trifle acid, was Nolan. He needed mellowing, a woman in his life. But Nolan had loved once, and the girl had died. With the curious constancy of the Irish, he had ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... temperament, could have been more attractive. The subdued twilight of that northern clime reigned over the face of nature, softening and mellowing all objects, but in no way obscuring them. The light was not so bright as that of the day, and yet it partook in no way of the characteristics of night. It was more like the warm light of the dawn of a summer day ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... a song; A command, not a prayer; No mellowing moonlight, but dawn, Frail, fanciful, and fair In the east of my dream and desire. At the portal of unending desire, Draped in diaphanous dreams, With a whispered word of fire That quivers and gleams Through the clouds of my longing. Longings poignant with pains and tears Enfold, and fill my soul ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... facts, and he disliked being tied down to detail, and he disliked answering questions. As a politician a great future would have lain before him. William attended a mixed school because his parents hoped that feminine influence might have a mellowing effect upon his character. As yet the mellowing was not apparent. He was roused from his day-dreams by a change in the voice of Miss Dewhurst, his form mistress. It was evident that she was not talking about the exports of England (a subject in which ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... which in the beginning he had hovered. His heart was high, swelled by the promise of her beaming looks and ready smiles. At last, in this drama of slow winning she was drawing closer, shyly melting, her whims and perversities mellowing to the rich, sweet ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... liturgy which is the sum total of all that is good and grand in the ages past, and the constant and almost imperceptible influence of her most excellent system of public worship, as indicated in the Book of Common Prayer, silently but effectively issues, in moulding and mellowing good Christian character. She teaches not only through the prayer book, but by the yearly round of feast, festival and fast, of which, like a great panorama the acts and incidents in the life of her Lord are constantly set forth before those who have ears to hear ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... sadly but surely, that Veranilda was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with Ryecroft, which represents, as it were, the summa of Gissing's habitual meditation, aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience. Not that it is a pessimistic work,—quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in rural homeliness and honest Wessex landscape, which began to operate about 1896, and is seen so unmistakably ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... prosperously; there are sweet women to kiss; There are good women to breed. In a golden fog, A large, full-stomached faith in kindliness All over the world, the nation, in a dream Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps Of well-being, and so Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down Into a rich ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... or less considerate than himself. He was the favorite of all, and was continually in communication with all of them, and was really the moderator of the family, and the healer of its feuds. At this time, too, the deep morality of his nature was growing into piety, and this sentiment was mellowing from his heart even the little of unkindness that had ever found ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... ear for this salute. Nor did he eye with delight the flowering geraniums that clustered so thickly in the pots filling the sills. Nor did he even care for the great bars of sunlight that fell in golden splendour across his bed, causing the old dog to wink, and sneeze, and smile beneath their mellowing beams. No, these were nothing to him; indeed, they never had been—he had lived for years oblivious alike to tree and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... would be a large, and often a rambling, building of one storey, except where a tower served as a store-room for the mellowing wine or a loft for the mellowing fruit. When we read in Horace about the liberal stack of wood to be kept in readiness near the hearth, and about the wine-jar drinking in the smoke in the store-room we must think of his country homestead on the Sabine Hills, not ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... From that great play on history's stage eterne, That lurid, partial act of war and peace—of old and new contending, Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense; All past—and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing, Victor's and vanquish'd—Lincoln's and Lee's—now thou with them, Man of the mighty days—and equal to the days! Thou from the prairies!—tangled and many-vein'd and hard has been thy part, To admiration has it ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... presents. It had deepened the reserve of a nature at all times undemonstrative. It had hardened a will that was already of an iron quality. It had deepened and broadened a fine understanding of human nature, and finally it had succeeded in mellowing a tolerance that had always been his. For him those bitter moments had proved to be the cleansing fires which had produced ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the younger children who kept up the home at Marlborough Place after the elder ones had married or gone out into the world, enjoyed more opportunities of his ever-mellowing companionship. Strongly as he upheld the conventions when these represented some valid results of social experience, he was always ready to set aside his mere likes and dislikes on good cause shown; to follow reason as against the mere prejudice ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... something of its former violence. There are also traces of declining powers, a greater tendency to digression, a lack of concentration and vigour, and even of dexterity of language. But the change is due in all probability not merely to advance in years nor to the calming and mellowing influence of old age, but also to a change that was gradually passing over the Roman world. The material for savage satire was appreciably less. Evil in its worst forms had triumphed under Domitian. With Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian virtue began slowly ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... drew forth his never failing flask, which he said contained a panacea for all ills of the mind, and enjoined him to partake. The man exhibited no timidity in accepting the invitation, for having taken two or three swallows, he smacked his lips in approval, and said, he already felt it mellowing his temper. He then searched in his wallet, and finding some crusts and a ham bone, threw them to his dog, who generously shared them with his companion, the pig. This done, we took seats by the roadside, while the drover began, in brief, to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... will depend upon such conditions as relate to soil, moisture and climate. On rather stiff clay soils, the other conditions being right, the most satisfactory results are obtained from sowing the seed in the spring, and on land that has been plowed in the autumn and exposed to the mellowing influences of winter. But to this there may be some exceptions. On lands so light as to lift with the wind, that season should be avoided in sowing, if possible, when lifting winds prevail. Such winds are common in some localities in the spring, and may uncover the seed in ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... ceased mellowing out the favorite medley which begins with "Casta Diva" and runs over into the lovely cadences of "Gentle Annie"; and the abrupt transition from that mournful strain to a light cotillon air warned four ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... people thus sound at heart, amid the mellowing richness of civilization, we may well expect great things in religion. Whatever the outward forms of religion, its roots ran deep down into the moral law, and must needs have borne in due time a noble fruitage. There was in fact a striking development ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... perfect nightmare. It would seem as if he had consoled himself by frequent appliances to the bottle; it would even seem that (toward the end) he had ceased to depend on Joseph's frugal generosity and called for the flagon on his own account. The effect, at least, of some mellowing influence was visible in the record: Abbas became suddenly a willing witness; he began to volunteer disclosures; and Julia had just looked up from her seam with something like a smile, when Morris burst into the house, eagerly calling for his uncle, and the next instant plunged ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conflicts of armor-clad warriors in the days of Castilian knighthood and glory. What enchantment hangs about these rude battlements, "rich with the spoils of time!" In looking back upon the ancient days it is fortunate that the mellowing influence of time dims the vision, and we see down the long vista of years as through a softening twilight, else we should behold such harshness as would arouse more of ire than of admiration. The olden time, like the landscape, appears ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the city Dagonet danced away. But thro' the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore Past, as a rustle or twitter in the ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Furthermore The Ausonian swains, a race from Troy derived, Make merry with rough rhymes and boisterous mirth, Grim masks of hollowed bark assume, invoke Thee with glad hymns, O Bacchus, and to thee Hang puppet-faces on tall pines to swing. Hence every vineyard teems with mellowing fruit, Till hollow vale o'erflows, and gorge profound, Where'er the god hath turned his comely head. Therefore to Bacchus duly will we sing Meet honour with ancestral hymns, and cates And dishes bear him; and the doomed goat Led by the horn ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... as certain attacks upon defenceless royalty (more particularly upon Prince Albert) as being both unfair and in bad taste. The courteous high-mindedness of Sir John Tenniel has made greatly for this mellowing and moderation, to the point, indeed, that many complain that Punch no longer hits out straight from the shoulder. This peaceable tendency obviously arises from neither fear nor sycophancy, but from an anxious desire to be entirely just and good-natured, and to avoid coarseness ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... grapes, and ruddy pippins, and yellow William pears had gone their rounds—all home produce—and had been admired and praised, and the Squire's full voice was mellowing after his second glass of port, when the butler came in with a letter on a salver, and carried it, with muffled footfall and solemn visage, as of one who entrusted with the delivery of a ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... ordinary way. It was a little bit of the Thames far away from London, with a bank of many-tinted trees on one side, and out beyond a range of low hills, purple in the evening light. In the sky was a rosy sunset glow, melted above into saffron color, and this was reflected in the water, gilding and mellowing the foreground of sedge and water lilies. But what made the picture specially charming was that the artist had really caught the peculiar solemn stillness of evening; merely to look at that quiet, peaceful river brought a feeling of hush and calmness. It seemed a strange ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... were made points of light in the landscape by these washes of colour which poor dwellings retain. There is a yellow which I remember on many old houses in which the stains of time and weather produced varieties of tone almost as agreeable as the mellowing of marble under the same influences, which are now stripped into native roughness and rise in sombre grey, sometimes almost black, abstracting a much-needed warmth from the aspect ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... cease to be mean and spiteful till after he had had his cocktail. It was wonderful the change that took place then—not suddenly, but with a sweet, slow, cheering inner transformation. It was a surging, a glowing, a mellowing. It was like the readjustment of the eyes of the soul. It was seeing the world as generous, kindly. It was growing generous and kindly himself, with the happy conviction that more remained to be got out of life than he had ever wrung ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... thunder-cars Assembling strength to put forth tempest soon, When the clear still warm concord of thy tune Rose under skies unscared by reddening Mars Yet, like a sound of silver speech of stars, With full mild flame as of the mellowing moon. Grave and great-hearted Massinger, thy face High melancholy lights with loftier grace Than gilds the brows of revel: sad and wise, The spirit of thought that moved thy deeper song, Sorrow serene in soft calm scorn of wrong, Speaks patience ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... with a few gift books on them, the rest of the wall space being occupied by trophies of war and the chase. But it is a most comfortable sitting-room. A row of three large windows in the front of the house shew a mountain panorama, which is just now seen in one of its softest aspects in the mellowing afternoon light. In the left hand corner, a square earthenware stove, a perfect tower of colored pottery, rises nearly to the ceiling and guarantees plenty of warmth. The ottoman in the middle is a circular bank of decorated cushions, and ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... suspended. But, apart from this, there seemed ground to believe that there was yet before Mr. Miller much honorable and noble labor. The strong man, after all his tasks, appeared to be still strong. His powers were mellowing into richness and calm, matured strength; his conceptions of great principles were growing yet wider; his store of facts, literary as well as scientific, was accumulating with every busy and laborious year ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the long expanse, More deeply purpled meet his mellowing glance, And tenderest tints, along their summits driven, Mark his gay course, and own the hues of heaven; Till darkly shaded from the land and deep, Behind his Delphian cliff ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... her knowledge of the past, had no guess, for all her many misgivings and apprehensions, of the way that things would go. Never had she been freer from a sense of the shadow of a coming cloud than when she looked out from the window while the tea she had just made was mellowing, and saw her husband and daughter coming through the little garden gate, linked together and in the best ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... four last years this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper, wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of his youth were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowledge was expanding, his character mellowing, and his genius growing daily stronger. Without losing the fire that burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience into tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age of twenty-nine, he stood upon the height of his most glorious achievement, ready to unfold his wings ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... abashing, strengthening him against temptation, shielding him from evil, ministering to his self-respect, medicining his weariness, peopling his solitude, winning him from sordid prizes, enlivening his monotonous days with mirth, or fancy, or wit, flashing heaven upon his earth, and mellowing it for all spiritual fertility,—there is the element of marriage. Wherever woman pays reverence to man,—wherever any woman rejoices in the strength of any man, feels it to be God's agent, upholding her weakness, confirming her purpose, and crowning her power,—wherever he reveals himself to ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... to take flame; but, enflamed, that burns thyself out to the end: Slow to return to the balance, once moved; not easily sway'd From the centre, and, star-like, retracing thy orbit through sunlight and shade! —Without hate, without party affection, we now look back on the fray, Through the mellowing magic of time the phantoms emerging to day! Grasping too much for self, unjust to his rival in strife, Each foe with good conscience and honour advances; war to the knife! Lo, where with feebler hand the Stuart essays him to guide The ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... re-perusing my notes (perhaps for the purpose of convincing myself that I am not in a madhouse). At present I am lonely and alone. Autumn is coming—already it is mellowing the leaves; and, as I sit brooding in this melancholy little town (and how melancholy the little towns of Germany can be!), I find myself taking no thought for the future, but living under the influence of passing moods, and of my recollections of the tempest which recently drew me ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... painful and choking sensations of sympathy, compassion, regret, admiration, all uniting, all mellowing into one fearful hope for his acquittal, made themselves ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he was in a way a great "boy" to the end—but a boy with a deepening sense of mystery mellowing his character and his utterances. And thus it was that he could say, looking back on his intercourse with the wonders of nature: "I have long enjoyed them, never I can honestly say alone, because when man was not with me I had companions in ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... interest in the fair sex, owning plainly that he had a "heart of Wax, Soft, and Soon mellowing," though he was careful on every page to make everything seem perfectly straight and proper for the suspicious perusal of his English wife; but any nineteenth-century reader can read between the lines. His famous long-winded eulogies of the Boston virgin, the wife, the widow, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... wanting, the lunar surface must be the seat of an eternal calm; where no sound breaks the stillness and where change, as we know it, does not exist. The sun beats down upon the arid rocks, and inky shadows lie athwart the valleys. There is no mellowing of the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... upon a piece of rough or newly cleared ground: No other crop is so effective in mellowing rough, cloddy land. The seed in northern localities should be sown before July 12; otherwise early frosts may catch the crops. Grass and clover may sometimes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... which hem the Magra. The upper valley is beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hill-sides breaking down into thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for nearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but the fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the still October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and the brown nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops of thunder-rain, break down ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... a reputable degree of wasteful expenditure. And it needs but little either of observation or introspection—and either will serve the turn—to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... was Whalley—one of the loveliest as well as the largest in the realm. Carefully had it been preserved by its reverend rulers, and where reparations or additions were needed they were judiciously made. Thus age had lent it beauty, by mellowing its freshness and toning its hues, while no decay was perceptible. Without a struggle had it yielded to the captor, so that no part of its wide belt of walls or towers, though so strongly constructed as to have ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... casement's tinkling pane; The sounds that drive wild deer, and fox, To shelter in the brake and rocks, Are warnings which the shepherd ask To dismal and to dangerous task. Oft he looks forth, and hopes, in vain, The blast may sink in mellowing rain; Till, dark above, and white below, Decided drives the flaky snow, And forth the hardy swain must go. Long, with dejected look and whine, To leave the hearth his dogs repine; Whistling and cheering them to aid, Around his ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... took the whisky slowly, remarking that he knew the brand, "Peach-flavoured, sir. Very good, does credit to Penhallow's taste. As Mr. Clay once remarked, the mellowing years, sir, have ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Ere long to be a crown-like, shadowy flower. For, by his songs, and joy in ancient tales, He showed the seed lay hidden in his heart, A safe sure treasure, hidden even from him, And notwithstanding mellowing all his spring; Until, like sunshine with its genial power, Came the fair maiden's face: the seed awoke. I need not follow him through many days; Nor tell the joys that rose around his path, Ministering pleasure for his labour's meed; Nor how each morning was a boon to him; Nor how the wind, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... doing for other frailties, and will come at last to the one in hand, leaving it an object of admiring and compassionate retrospect to an enlightened posterity. There are people, however, too impatient to wait for such results from the mellowing influence of progressive civilisation. Such a consideration suggests to me that I may be treading on dangerous ground—dangerous, I mean, to the frail but amiable class to whom my exposition is devoted. Natural misgivings arise in one who professes ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... burrowing like so many squirrels. If this was the season of fruit, it was also the season of bonfires. Every one burned leaves in those days, blissfully unconscious of future city ordinances. A thin sweet haze of smoke hung constantly in the air mellowing the blue of the sky, softening the outlines of the hills, aromatic as an incensed cathedral. In the evenings the fires winked bravely on both sides the streets. Figures with rakes were silhouetted against them. Smaller figures careered wildly in and out the dense smoke. It was a great "dare" to ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... night together with me canst thou rest thee Here on the verdant leaves; for us there are mellowing apples, Chestnuts soft to the touch, and clouted cream in abundance; And the high roofs now of the villages smoke in the distance, And from the lofty mountains are falling larger ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the more impervious the package containing tea is to the air, the more perfectly the finer qualities of the tea are preserved. If there is a necessity for ripening or mellowing by time, air should be rigidly excluded ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... It may smell too much of mortality and antiquity for this fast-living and forward-looking age; for it is not only a monument of the past, but an exponent of its spirit. We can look back at it, through the mellowing mist of centuries, with curiosity not unmixed with admiration; but we should turn with aversion from such a work, coming from the hands of an artist of our own day. We think, and with some reason, that we do not need ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... between; this friendly road with its ancient stone walls, all but concealed now by a mass of ferns or brake on one side, and on the other by a tangle of tall grass, goldenrod, purple-plumed Joe Pye weed, wild grape with big mellowing clusters, wild clematis in full bloom. New England in summer-time! What other land is like it? Our brook, our farm, here in the land of our fathers! There were a warmth, a glow, a poetry in the thought that cannot be put down in words—something to us new and wonderful, ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... feeling can be lost. The flower may fade, the tree may shed its leaf, the work of art may perish, the great poem may be forgotten; the lovely ancient building, with all the grace of tradition and memory, all the sweet mellowing of outline and detail, may be dismantled or restored; yet the beauty is not in the passing form, but in the spirit that expresses itself in the form on the one hand—the great, subtle, tender, powerful spirit ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we came to Monte Rotondo. The sun sank; and from the flames where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen, grew slowly into sight. Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. This changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill, and lustrous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds are floating. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the road, and then would come a stretch of checkered shade on the yellow earth, and the lifting, expectant sound of high wind in top branches. And sometimes, in the heart of such an arm of woodland, the old horse's hoofs would echo hollow on the warped and mellowing boards of a tiny bridge, and there would be a momentary slip and gurgle of water underneath, on down through the ferns. Joe felt ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... inferior to parts of England in rural beauty—the large tracts of waving yellow corn, undulating like a sea in the morning breeze—the interminable reaches of forest, upon which the shadows played and flitted, deepening the effect and mellowing the mass, as we see them in Ruysdael's pictures—while now and then some tall-gabled, antiquated chateau, with its mutilated terrace and dowager-like air of bye-gone grandeur, would peep forth at the end of some long avenue ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... summer. The last chill was gone from the air, and the last bit of frozen earth and muck from the deepest and blackest swamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory of bursting life, of springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge of yellows and greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances like the billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and swamps, the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of running waters, the sweet ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Not lovelier in my earliest visions seemed The paradise of our first parents, filled With countless angels whose celestial light Thrilled the sweet foliage like a gush of song. Look how the long and level landscape gleams, And with a gradual pace goes mellowing up Into the blue. The very ground we tread Seems flooded with the tender hue of heaven; An azure lawn is all about our feet, And sprinkled with a thousand gleaming flowers, Like lovely ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... that had stained the neglected towers with an antique tint, and had permitted many a generation of summer birds to build their sunny nests on all the coignes of vantage of the unfinished walls, had exercised a mellowing influence even on these rude accessories, and in the course of years they had been so drenched by the rain, and so buffeted by the wind, and had become so covered with moss and ivy, that they rather added to then detracted from ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Sophy's home; in a good, old-fashioned farm-house, with green moss growing out of the sloping roof, shaded by trees that looked a century old. It is autumn there now; so you see on the cellar door and under the front windows, crooked necked squashes and round yellow pumpkins, mellowing in the warm sunbeams. Strings of dried apples are festooned from chamber windows; and paper bags of catnip and spearmint and thoroughwort and penny-royal and mullen hang ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... could not help watching him. He looked so fine on his prancing black, with the sunset glow mellowing his ruddy health, and his curious habit of constantly making the thong of his horsewhip whistle through the air or smack ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... perhaps be styled 'Old,' 'New,' or 'Great'. Its architecture usually corresponds with the simplicity of its name. Plain almost to ugliness, yet not without some degree of severe dignity, stand these old barn-like structures of brick—occasionally of stone; bearing the mellowing touch of time, surrounded by a little overshadowed graveyard, they often add a peculiar quaintness and solemnity to the scene. Mrs. Gaskell has described one such in her novel Ruth, and admirers of her art should know well ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... together yesterday,—as we are used to do at least once or twice every year, for the sake of our ever-mellowing friendship, and those good old times in which it began. Like all who are ripe enough to have memories, we delight to recall the period of our vernal equinox, and to moralize, with gentle sadness and many wise wags of our frosty polls, upon the events in which that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... when he had finished. A sliding panel in the wall near the chapel had been pushed back, and the mellow music of Dr. Tallis pealed softly in, giving a sweet and melodious background, scarcely perceived consciously by either of them, and yet probably mellowing and softening their modes of expression during the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... which makes short work of any inclination to see in it an acquired habit. In an art that can leave no one to practise it in the future unless that one be perfect at the outset, of what avail are happy chances, atavistic tendencies, the mellowing hand of time? But the grey caterpillar, sacrificed one day, may be succeeded on another day by a green, yellow or striped caterpillar. There you have discernment, which is quite capable of recognizing the regulation prey ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... second week of his contract. True to her promise, Mrs. Willis had asked the three boys to Sunday dinner and, under the mellowing influence of Winnie's best cooking and the friendly atmosphere of the little white house, the tension had relaxed and the afternoon spent on the porch had been restful for at least three of the ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... use of language. In national literatures many a passage, poetry or prose, is heightened in effect by assonance, alliteration, a certain movement or rhythm of phrase. Subtle suggestion slides in sound through the ear and falls with mellowing cadence into the heart. Soothed senses murmur their own music to the mind; the lullaby lilt of the lay swells full the ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... he said quaveringly, "'at every creature on earth was as well fixed as me an' the redbird!" Clasping each other, they listened with rapt faces, as, mellowing across the corn field, came the notes of the Cardinal: "So dear! ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... chairman happens to be a pretty old stager like myself, there may be journalists in such a distinguished company as this who will look at him with the moistened eye of emotional reminiscence and murmur: "Ah, it was upon that man I fleshed my maiden pen!" [Laughter.] Thoughts like these shed the mellowing influence of time over the volumes of press cuttings which no actor's library is without. I have heard of public men who say they never read the newspapers. That remark has been attributed to a bishop, and perhaps there are kinds of abstinence quite easy to bishops but difficult to other mortals. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... though," he continued, mellowing as he mused in his recollections. "It was at the time of the Honest Injun deal—I guess you don't remember that. It must have been ten years ago. Well, I had a fellow named—why, what was his name?—oh, Riggs, ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... Youth is the critical period with religions, as with animals and plants and nations. Through that period Mormonism is passing with flattering success. That such a lusty juvenile will, by favor of the mellowing effect imposed on all creeds by early years of toil, trouble and experience, reach a middle age of presentable decency, is not a more unlikely supposition than the worthy Vermont clergyman would have pronounced, half a century ago, the idea that his jeu d'esprit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... hunger to get; Happiness is the hunger to give. True happiness must ever have the tinge of sorrow outlived, the sense of pain softened by the mellowing years, the chastening of loss that in the wondrous mystery of time transmutes our suffering into love and sympathy ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... Landscape painting exerts a mellowing influence, and leads to the observation and love of nature, while historical pictures stimulate research, and nerve the mind to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... adventures have little concern with the story of his son's life. He sailed over many seas, he visited many lands, mellowing by contact with many peoples the unyielding temper of his race. The possibility of failure never once entered into his mind. The Thayers always had succeeded, for they always had worked. In consequence, he took it quite as a matter of course that, at ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... an hour since sunset, but the twilight still lingers in softened radiance, mellowing the mountain-scenery. The camp-wagons are drawn up on a low pebbly shelf at the foot of the hills, and the kindled fire has set a great carbuncle in the standing pool. A spring branch oozes out of the rocky turf, and flows ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... the mesa, he found a corn-husk wrapper and his bag of dry tobacco and deftly rolled a cigarette, doing it with one hand, cow-boy fashion. When the cigarette was lighted, the horseman ahead was a mere khaki-colored dot, rising and falling in the mellowing distance. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... gorse and bramble, at whose base the road led away north and south until it was lost in the green of the forest. Now as Beltane stood thus, gazing down at the winding road whose white dust was already mellowing to evening, he beheld one who ran wondrous fleetly despite the ragged cloak that flapped about his long legs, and whose rough-shod feet spurned the dust beneath them so fast 'twas a marvel to behold; moreover as he ran, he bounded hither and thither, and with every bound an arrow sped ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol |
