"Mistletoe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at Mrs. Blodgett's, after the fashion of a second-rate English house of entertainment. The servants hung mistletoe about in various places, and woe to the unlucky wight that was caught under it. Hawthorne presents an amusing picture of his boy Julian, nine years old, struggling against the endearments of a chamber-maid, and believes ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... been a row of screens to hide the preparations. Now these were removed, and the most beautiful sight that the children had ever seen appeared before their eyes. A table piled with goodies of every kind decorated with holly and mistletoe and Christmas candles and candies. Three large bowls in the center of the table contained red strings which extended to every ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... says the old walls might fall in at any time; but since you told me about the lights being seen, I've been thinking that perhaps he has heard about them too, and that's why he won't come here if he can help it. But we can ask him. What is the 'Mistletoe Bough'? Is it a ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... distinguished companion. I have often seen this in life, (I am now an old and experienced rat,) I have seen a mean race following and flattering their superiors, ready to lick the dust from their feet, not from real admiration or attachment, but, like a mistletoe upon a forest tree, because they had no proper footing of their own, and liked to be raised on the credit of another. It is easier to them to fawn than to work, to flatter the great than ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... prohibition, to see Bertha occasionally, and had come to wish her a merry Christmas, chanced at this identical moment to be saying good-bye at the door, above which, in accordance with immemorial usage, a huge bush of mistletoe was suspended. What they were doing under it at the moment of the baron's appearance, I never knew exactly; but ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... gives an ancient account of Balder, the sun-god, who was slain because of the jealousy of Loki (fire). Loki knew that everything in nature except the mistletoe had promised not to injure the great god Balder. So he searched for the mistletoe until he found it growing on an oak-tree "on the eastern slope of Valhalla." He cut it off and returned to the place where the gods were amusing themselves by using Balder as ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... ideal Christmas game. In the first place, it must be a round game; that is to say, at least six people must be able to play it simultaneously. No game for two only is permissible at Christmas—unless, of course, it be under the mistletoe. Secondly, it must be a game into which skill does not enter, or, if it does, it must be a skill which is as likely to be shown by a child of eight or an old gentleman of eighty as by a 'Varsity blue. Such skill, for instance, as manifests itself at Tiddleywinks, that ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... known as the Atlantic plain, running parallel to the coast, on which the long-leaved or peach-pines flourish. This region is generally called the Pine Barrens. Wild vines encircle the trees, and among them are seen the white berries of the mistletoe. In winter these Pine Barrens retain much of their verdure, and constitute one of the marked features of the country. Amid them are numerous swamps or morasses. One of great size, extending to not less than forty miles from north ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... chop-house to chop-sueydom, from terrace to table d'hote, from rathskeller to roadhouse, from cafe to casino, from Maria's to the Martha Washington. Such is domestic life in the great city. Your vine is the mistletoe; your fig tree bears dates. Your household gods are Mercury and John Howard Payne. For the wedding march you now hear only "Come with the Gypsy Bride." You rarely dine at the same place twice in succession. You ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... mistletoe, and anyone who stands under it will get kissed whether they like it or not. Now's your time, ladies," answered the saucy Prince, keeping his place and looking sentimentally at the girls, who retired ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... and speech? By that large induction only I your law of being reach. Now I hear of this wrong action—what is that to you and me? Sin within you may have done it—fruit not nature to the tree. Foreign graft has come to bearing—mistletoe grown on your bough— If I ever really knew you, then, my friend, I know you now. So I say, "He never did it," or, "He did not so intend"; Or, "Some foreign power o'ercame him"—so I judge the action, friend. Let the mere outside observer note appearance as he ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... planted the little fir in a disused petrol-tin, and, after a visit to the canteen, decorated it with boxes of Turkish delight, sticks of chocolate, packets of chewing-gum, oranges, lemons, soap, and bits of Government candles. It was a Christmas tree of some distinction. And mistletoe? No, we couldn't find any mistletoe, but then, as Monty said, it would have no point on Gallipoli, there being no—just so; when we should be home again for Christmas of next year, we would claim an extra kiss ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... reason, and of truth, monasticism is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the spiritual, is bad when ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and she lets him fasten the skates on to her pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome cousin—a guardsman at least—and informs him that she is just eighteen to his love—and stands under the mistletoe and asks this enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like; and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr. Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... These, with the mistletoe, the favourite Druidical plant, the sorcerer is entreated, in an old balled, to lay aside, to seek no more for vain enchantments, but to remember that ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... evergreen, their tall stems in the air. The live-oak, the sycamore, the Spanish mulberry, the holly, and the persimmon—gaily festooned with wreaths of the white and yellow jessamine, the woodbine and the cypress-moss, and bearing here and there a bouquet of the mistletoe, with its deep green and glossy leaves upturned to the sun—flung their broad arms over the road, forming an archway grander and more beautiful than any the hand of man ever wove for the greatest ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... were burning, there were dozens of glasses on the table, and holly and mistletoe hanging up. The wedding party crowded in, and Tom Brangwen, becoming roisterous, poured out drinks. Everybody must drink. The bells were ringing away ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... She heard a laugh, and then her mother's voice. They were called with a gay summons to see a colossal snow-ball, that some of the younger servants had made and rolled to the window of the terrace-room. It was ornamented with a crown of holly and mistletoe, and the parti-coloured berries looked bright in a straggling sunbeam which had fought its way through the still-loaded sky, and fell upon ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... found as clean-limbed, tall and stately as elsewhere. The cottonwood, too, is common, though generally dwarfed, scraggy and full of dead limbs. A willow still more scraggy, and having many limbs destroyed with mistletoe, is often found in the same places. The elder rises above the dignity of a shrub, or under-shrub, but can hardly be found a respectable tree. Two varieties of oak are common, and the alder forms here a fine tree along the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... flats; and here and there in the valleys and on the sides of the hills the sombre, self-enwrapped live-oaks stood about, like philosophers musing amid the general lightness. Spanish-dagger, bear-grass, and persimmon-bushes freckled the sides of the rocky divides with dark spots, and mistletoe hung its fine green globes like unillumined lanterns in the branches of the mesquites. Over the plains and slopes a sparse turf of various grasses, differing in color and changing with the season, gave the airy landscape its brilliant and versatile ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Blue First emotions of love. Lily, Water Eloquence. May Flower Welcome. Marigold Sacred affection. Marigold and Cypress Despair. Mandrake Rarity. Mignonette Your qualities surpass your charms. Morning Glory Coquetry, Affectation. Mock Orange Counterfeit. Myrtle Love in absence. Mistletoe Insurmountable. Narcissus Egotism. Nasturtium Patriotism. Oxalis Reverie. Orange Blossom Purity. Olive Peace. Oleander Beware. Primrose Modest worth. Pink, White Pure love. " Red Devoted love. Phlox Our hearts are united. Periwinkle Sweet memories. ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... YY of 'A treatise on the form and material of the sickle used by the Welsh Druids in cutting the mistletoe,' being a series of quotations in Arabic, Hindoo, Greek, German, and Gaelic, cemented together by thin lines of English. This is a stock job which keeps the office going like a balance-wheel when there is nothing else specially pressing, and is rather popular, as it contains a good many ethnological ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to go back and try another way. The other way is bad enough, but all I object to is having my safety depending upon a single foothold. I like to have at least one chance of recovering myself if I slip. My walnut tree to-day is covered with mistletoe and my mind is directed to Christmas time, and all its (to us) sad associations. Three Christmases have I spent away from England, and a fourth is now approaching, one of them on the ocean, and two in the tented field, ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... to the mountain," Mary remarked to her lodger as Susan deposited her burden, "the mountain had to come to Mahomet. And here's a bit of mistletoe for your door, and of holly for ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... for the way it all begun, Two for the way it all has run, What three'll be for I do forget, But what's to be has not been yet.... So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, So holly and mistletoe, Over ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... Mistletoe Bough (The). The song so called is by Thomas Haynes Bayley, who died 1839. The tale is this: Lord Lovel married a young lady, a baron's daughter, and on the wedding night the bride proposed that the guest should play "hide-and-seek." The bride hid in an old oak chest, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... which I have found in so many different parts of England. Skulls and crossbones, sometimes skeletons or skeleton-like figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an earlier period. Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... learning, beyond which there was no going,—not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer,—not to that time, but ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the mistletoe has a healthy normal taproot. But in our rich soil it became too dainty for dirt, and chose the life of a parasite. So the little seed struck its outer roots into the bark of the oak, and lazily sucked away the tree's rich sap. Soon luxury and living upon another's life ruined the mistletoe, just ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Chopin's Funeral March was played!—a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning: wild pagan grief, desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all. Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke dealt by a blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there is the Balder element: and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my life become a cry like Chopin's march over mown-down unripened grass, and youth ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... of mistletoe, tender and fair, grew high above the field," and such a little thing it was, with its dainty green leaves and waxen white berries, nestling for protection under the strong arm of a great oak, that the goddess passed it by. Assuredly ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... just as its medical virtues were also more extensively known. The vervain, indeed, was a sacred plant among the Greeks, as well as among the Druids, who gathered it with solemn religious ceremonies, as they did the sacred mistletoe. Vervain was most esteemed, however, as a love potion, but the connection between its virtues in this respect, and its power over witches and spirits of evil, opens up a branch of inquiry away from ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... be seen on the flower-stalls, even in winter, when there was nothing else there were evergreens, holly and mistletoe of course, in plenty, as Christmas came on. And though some other parts of the market might be more amusing and exciting, where the cocks and hens, and geese and ducks, were all to be heard gabbling, ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... the fascinating feature of the man. I said to myself right away, "This man is a mystic." Though they burned brightly in their sockets, they had a trick of turning abruptly dim; a sort of film or veil, closed over them. "Druid or old Celt," I murmured. "Give him a bit of mistletoe and he'd call his gods right down into my demi-tasse and scare the poker game ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of pale blue and bright gold; the sea looked like a wide satin ribbon shaken out and shimmering with opaline tints. Flower girls trooped forth making the air musical with their mellow cries of "Fiori! chi vuol fiori" and holding up their tempting wares—not bunches of holly and mistletoe such as are known in England, but roses, lilies, jonquils, and sweet daffodils. The shops were brilliant with bouquets and baskets of fruits and flowers; a glittering show of etrennes, or gifts to suit all ages and conditions, were set forth ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Green Mistletoe! Oh, I remember now A dell of snow, Frost on the bough; None there but I: Snow, snow, and ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... displayed, sat by the fire in the old chair whose familiar creak was soothing to his ear; pretty Dolly was stirring about, gaily trimming dresser, settle, high chimney-piece, and old-fashioned cradle with mistletoe and holly; while the mother rested beside her son, with that blessed baby on her knee. Refreshed by a nap and nourishment, this young actor now covered himself with glory by his ecstatic prancings, incoherent remarks to the audience, and vain attempts to get ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... which it grows as any of the buds of the tree itself; it is fed upon the same sap as the other buds are, which sap-however much it may modify it at the last moment-it draws through the same fibres [sic] as do its foster-brothers-why then do we at once feel that the mistletoe is no part of the apple tree? Not from any want of manifest continuity, but from the spiritual difference-from the profoundly different views of life and things which are taken by the parasite and the tree on which it grows-the two are now different because they think differently-as ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... primitive ladder. This was the favourite sitting-room of the girls by day, and served for Pancho's bedroom at night. It was beautiful enough to be fit shelter for all the woodland nymphs, with its festoons of mistletoe and wild grape-vines; but Pancho was rather an unappreciative tenant, even going so far as to ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Willow, and he was very old, And all his leaves fell off from him, and left him in the cold; But ere the rude winter could buffet him with snow, There grew upon his hoary head a crop of Mistletoe. ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... began to notice queer-looking green bunches of something on the trees. As the forest had not yet put forth its foliage, we knew that growth could not be leaves, and were puzzled to imagine what it could be. But we finally learned from some of the boat's crew that it was mistletoe. So far as I knew none of the private soldiers had ever before seen that curious evergreen, and it was to us a strange curiosity. But we got well acquainted with ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... places hid the streams. The rest of the mountain was thickly wooded. Here were great oaks and splendid evergreens with trunks like mossy pillars, from the branches of which hung garlands of ivy and mistletoe, and persimmon trees, the odour of which pervaded every nook and corner of the wood—an illusive, fragrant something that made the heart glad. In places the wild muscadine and scuppernong vines stretched from tree to tree, making arbours which were ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... more than it does to-day. The visitors received a joyous welcome, not a sort of empty every-day one. Plum pudding, roast beef, and mince pies and nuts were the order of the day, for beverage various kinds of drinks. Holly and mistletoe and evergreens obtained in nearly every house; in fact it was a joyous day from morn till night. Games of various kinds were played. Toys for children, rudimentary toys and picture books, cheap, and such as the too knowing children of to-day ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... Welcome, Yule! It brings the schoolboy home from school. [N.B.—Vulgarly pronounced 'schule' in the West of England.] Puddings and mistletoe and holly, With other contrivances for banishing melancholy: Boar's head, for instance—of which I have never partaken, But the name has associations ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... extraordinary reverence for the number three, and not only the berries, but the leaves of the mistletoe, grow in clusters of three united on one stalk. Its growing upon the oak, their sacred tree, was doubtless another cause of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... mistletoe. So Loki, who always tried to do mischief, made an arrow of mistletoe, and gave it to the prince who shot and killed Baldur ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... broken bubble, Trill the carol, troll the catch; Sooth, we'll cry, "A truce to trouble!" Mirth and mistletoe shall match. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... petals to the heart; straight the mind's glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times When perchance the sunny days were even more sunny; when the stilly oaks were full of mystery, lurking like the Druid's mistletoe in the midst of their mighty branches. A glamour in the heart came back to it again from every flower; as the sunshine was reflected. from them so the feeling in the heart returned tenfold. To the dreamy summer haze love gave a deep enchantment, the colours were fairer, the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... garden down by the Castilian hedge and along the road where the shadows of the oaks, with their twisted and mistletoe-covered branches, made grotesque forms. I was very fond of these solitary walks on moonlight nights, often going as far as the divide, from which Bolinas and the great ocean can be seen, and where Larsen's wayside inn now stands, but to-night there was a new sensation of loneliness ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... bells were ringing their cheerful chimes In the old grey belfry tow'r, The choir were singing their carols betimes In the wintry midnight hour, The waits were playing with eerie drawl "The mistletoe hung in the castle hall," And the old policeman was stomping his feet As he quiver'd and shiver'd ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... they paused in a spot where a forest of trees with whorled tops were slowly being strangled to death by immense orchids of every conceivable shape and color, and by a kind of creeping mistletoe which grew almost as they watched. Here also, the ground was covered with fluffy, grey-green moss which seethed constantly as if it were a carpet of maggots. Both Ivana and Nini warned Kirby on his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... predecessors; if the leading lady was plain, they said so, whilst if one of us were to suggest that the heroine, whose beauty is talked of tiresomely during the play, in real life might sit in unflattering safety under mistletoe till the berries shrivelled he would be regarded as an ungentle manlike ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... make use of her power did not occur to her until the preceding Christmas. Roast beef and plum pudding were a bitter mockery at Coombe Oaks—a sham and cold delusion, cold as snow. A "merry Christmas"—holly berries, mistletoe—and behind these—debt. Behind the glowing fire, written in the flames—debt; in the sound of the distant chimes—debt. Now be merry over the plum-pudding while the wolves gnash their teeth, wolves that the strongest ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... remains. It also has a diversified fauna and flora. The peccary, Gila monster, tarantula, centipede, scorpion and horned toad are specimens of its strange animal life; and, the numerous species of cacti, yucca, maguey, palo verde and mistletoe are samples of its curious vegetation. It is, indeed, the scientist's Paradise where much valuable material can be found to enrich almost every ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... infusion of the mangrove, on my arrival at Caracas. The infusion in warm water had a brown colour and an astringent taste. It contained a mixture of extractive matter and tannin. The rhizophora, the mistletoe, the cornel-tree, in short, all the plants which belong to the natural families of the lorantheous and the caprifoliaceous plants, have the same properties. The infusion of mangrove-wood, kept in contact with atmospheric air under a glass jar for twelve days, was not sensibly deteriorated in ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... great Pima tribe. The Papago chiefs were my old friends and acquaintances, and received the priests with fireworks and illuminations. They knew of our coming, and had swept the church and grounds clean, and ornamented the altar with mistletoe. ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... holy night; On Christmas Eve the bells were rung; On Christmas Eve the mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the stoled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donned her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then opened wide the baron's hall To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doffed his pride. The heir, with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of "post and pair." All hailed, with uncontrolled ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... small food bodies containing oil, but instead of secreting nectar in its leaves it harbors a small insect (coccus), whose sweet secretion is much relished by the ants. Dr. Beccari mentions an epiphytal plant growing on trees in Borneo, the seeds of which germinate, like those of the mistletoe, on the branches of the tree; and the seedling stem, crowned by the cotyledons, grows to about an inch in length, remaining in that condition until a certain species of ant bites a hole in the stem, which then produces a gall-like growth that ultimately constitutes the home of the ants. ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... of the elation of the season. He was conscious that the old festal preparations were going on, but there was no response to them in his heart. Julius had arrived, and was helping Sophia to hang the holly and mistletoe. But Sandal knew that his soul shrank from the nephew he had called into his life; knew that the sound of his voice irritated him, that his laugh filled him with resentment, that his very presence in the house seemed to desecrate ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... house it was considered as the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the supporting shafts—relics of an age when they were the only architecture, the only national monuments; when savage ancestors in lion skins, with stone weapons, led by white-robed Druid priests, came solemnly here and left the mistletoe wreath upon these Houses of Death ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... distinguishes them at first sight. In many cases green matter is wanting in their tissues or is hidden by a livid tint that strikes the observer. Such are the Orobanchaccae, or "broomropes," and the tropical Balanophoraceae. Nevertheless, other parasites, such as the mistletoe, have perfectly green leaves. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... strength and courage, took him as an assistant when he went on excursions among the hills. Here Harry learned to dig pits for the capture of tigers; to smear leaves with a sticky substance, obtained from a plant resembling mistletoe, so that when a tiger or bear trod upon them and, finding them sticking to his feet, paused and rubbed these on his head, until he became blinded and bewildered with a mass of sticky foliage, a well-placed shot would ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... mistletoe makes raptures for young hearts and loving lips will soon come 'round again. Heaven grant us all to be young and confiding enough for all the love and joy and the glad music ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... laugh'd out, And from a basket emptied to the rout Clusters of grapes, the which they raven'd quick And roar'd for more; with many a hungry lick About their shaggy jaws. Avenging, slow, Anon she took a branch of mistletoe, And emptied on't a black dull-gurgling phial: Groan'd one and all, as if some piercing trial Was sharpening for their pitiable bones. 520 She lifted up the charm: appealing groans From their poor breasts went sueing to ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... having contemplated at your ease, beneath the brilliant sun of the tropics, one of those Edens overshadowed by the luxuriant verdure of palm-trees, bananas, mimosas and gigantic ferns? In your country, the bark of the trees is clad with lichens and mosses, and the parasite mistletoe suspends itself to the branches, more as a burden than as an ornament; here, numerous families of the orchis, with their singular forms, showy and variegated blossoms, climb along the knotty stems of the tall monarchs of the forests; from their feet spring up, as ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... donkey-drives to visit a solemn dolmen in a gloomy pine-wood, with mistletoe hanging from the trees, and the ghosts of ancient Druids haunting the spot. The cavalcade on such occasions was an imposing spectacle. Matilda being fond of horses likewise affected donkeys (or thought she did, till she tried to drive one), and usually ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... of the graveled way, ancient elm trees stood at regular intervals, throwing their boughs across, to unite in lifting the superb groined arches, whose fine tracery of sinuous lines were here and there concealed by clustering mistletoe—and gray lichen masses—and ornamented with bosses of velvet moss; while the venerable columnar trunks were now and then wreathed with poison-oak vines, where red trumpet flowers insolently blared defiance to the waxen pearls of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... where I sat, or go mad. That I did neither, was due to a divine inspiration which made me suddenly think of a device that I had once seen on a Druidical stone in Brittany—the sun, a hand with the index and little fingers pointing downwards, and a sprig of mistletoe. The instant I saw them in my mind's eye, the cords that held me ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... at the Millionaire's door and bethought himself. Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... intelligent young botanist of our acquaintance asserts it as his firm conviction that many a young lady who would shrink from being kissed under the mistletoe would not have the same objection to that ceremony ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... days after this, on Christmas Eve, that Sara, coming into his special den with a gay little joke on her lips and a great bunch of mistletoe in her arms, was arrested by the sudden, chill quiet of the ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Mass was sung; That only night in all the year Saw the staled priest the chalice rear. The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen; The hall was dressed with holly green; Forth to the wood did merry men go, To gather in the mistletoe. Then open wide the baron's hall, To vassal, tenant, serf, and all; Power laid his rod of rule aside, And Ceremony doft'd his pride. The heir with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... I put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... hedges and banks. Nay, the 'hedgerow elms and hillocks green' were to him as classical as Whitehall; he treated Maria's tame robins with as much respect as if they had been Howards or Percies; holly and mistletoe were handled by him with reverential curiosity; and the church and home of his ancestors filled him with a sweet loyal enthusiasm, more eager than in those to whom these ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all eyes are bright, And joyous songs abound; Our log burns high, but it glows less bright Than the eyes which sparkle round. The merry laugh, and the jocund tale, And the kiss 'neath the mistletoe, Make care fly as fast as the blustering gale That wreaths the new fallen snow. 'Tis Yule! 'tis Yule! all eyes are bright, And joyous thoughts abound; The log burns high, but it glows less bright Than the eyes which ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and that is here. Here, in these pages no good wishes spring, No well-worn greetings tediously ring— For Christmas greetings are like pots of ore: The hollower they are they ring the more. Here shall no holly cast a spiny shade, Nor mistletoe my solitude invade, No trinket-laden vegetable come, No jorum steam with Sheolate of rum. No shrilling children shall their voices rear. Hurrah ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... the garden beds empty. The park looked sodden, dank and cheerless. Summer was long dead and over, yet frosts had not begun, bringing suggestions of mistletoe ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... his dramas are the book of human life. He was an accurate observer of Nature: he notes the markings of the violet and the daisy; the haunts of the honeysuckle, the mistletoe, and the woodbine. He marks the fealty of the marigold to its god the sun, and even touches the freaks of fashion, condemning in some woman of his time an usage, long obsolete, in accordance with which she adorned her ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... staircase we looked down into a hall gaily lit with paper lanterns. Holly and ivy wreathed the broad balustrade, and the old pictures around the walls. A bunch of mistletoe hung from a great chandelier that sparkled with hundreds of glass prisms, and under it a couple of footmen in gilt liveries and powder crossed at that moment with ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... muzzles; while some of the branches of the trees would become so loaded with the white clinging snow that they would snap off and fall to the ground. Away would troop the birds in the day-time then to feast upon the scarlet berries of the holly, the pearly dew-like drops of the mistletoe, or the black coaly berries that grew upon the ivy-tod; and away and away they would fly again with wild and plaintive cries as Jack Frost would send a cutting blast in amongst them to scare them away. How ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... in charming old-fashioned country gardens was there, depicted among its graceful foliage, but not in the wild disorder in which I have enumerated them. At the bottom of the panel lay a holly-branch, whose stiff straightness was ornamented by a twining drapery of English ivy and mistletoe and winter aconite; while down either side hung pendant garlands of spring and autumn flowers; and, crowning all, came gorgeous summer with the sweet musk-roses, and the rich-coloured ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... no holly or mistletoe to remind one of Merrie England, but I drank to "the Old Folks at Home" with the sadness peculiar to wanderers on such occasions, and then gave myself up to nicotine and reflection for the rest of the ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins are obscure. For anything that we positively know to the contrary, the Druidic rites from which English Christmas borrowed the inviting mistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the recitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that several plays of Shakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of the holidays, and that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... temple, robed majestically, and wearing a wreath of mistletoe in his flowing white wig. His false beard reaches almost to his waist. He carries a staff with a ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... bright with scarlet-shaded candles and holly-hung walls; there was mistletoe on the sconces, and in the great hall there were tuneful strings. On the landing of the stairs stood Mrs. Proudfit and Miss Clementina, charmingly pretty in their delicate frocks, and wholly gay and gracious. ("They seem lively like in pictures where ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... a dirty old woman with one tooth appears from the kitchen. She is called Darlin' just for fun, as she is not at all kissable. A sprig of mistletoe, even in the ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... be quite allowable for grown-up people, ladies and gentlemen, to kiss anyone they know on New Year's Day. A Belgian lady once told me that it brought good luck to kiss an officer of the army; but, of course, there are limits to this, as there are to kissing under the mistletoe ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... fungus vegetates. Moreover, however great the cedar and the palm may be, it is not with the sap one sucks from them that one can become great one's self. A giant's parasite will be at best a dwarf. The oak, colossus that it is, can produce and sustain nothing more than the mistletoe. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... you been, you runaway?" exclaimed her husband as she re-entered the parlour. "You stayed away so long, I began to have all sorts of frightful ideas—I thought of the 'mistletoe hung in the castle hall,' and of old oak chests, and all kind of terrible things. I've been sitting here alone ever since the Ellises went: where ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... All round the ponds stood dark groves of pandanus palms, and among and beyond the palms tall grasses and forest trees, with here and there a spreading colabar festooned from summit to trunk with brilliant crimson strands of mistletoe, and here and there a gaunt dead old giant of the forest, and everywhere above and beyond the timber deep sunny blue and flooding sunshine. Sunny blue reflected, with the gaunt old trees, in the tiny gleaming seas among the lilies, while everywhere upon ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of "The Sporting Times" of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from "Kirby's Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me at least thirty years ago. I had not looked at the account, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... spirits; yet it was also looked upon with some suspicion, perhaps also arising from its use by our heathen ancestors, so that, though admitted into houses, it was not (or very seldom) admitted into churches. And this character so far still attaches to the Mistletoe, that it is never allowed with the Holly and Ivy and Box to decorate the churches, and Gay's lines ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... old country 'tis Christ- mas, and to-night I'm thinking of the mistletoe and holly berries bright. The smoke above our chimbley pots I'd dearly love to see, And those dear folks down in Devon, how they'll talk and think ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... books I had forgotten about and didn't even know I had. Look, here's an old copy of How to Be Happy Though Married, which I see the publisher lists as 'Fiction.' Here's Urn Burial, and The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, and Mistletoe's Book of Deplorable Facts. I'm going to have a thorough house-cleaning. I'm thinking seriously of putting in a vacuum cleaner and a cash register. Titania was quite right, the place was too dirty. That girl has given me a lot ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... of haute ecole was to be followed by an exhibition of "transportation throughout the ages," headed by a Gaulish chariot driven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoe wreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken out and replaced by a large placid white horse. Unluckily a heavy rain began while this instructive "number" awaited its turn, and we had to leave before Vercingetorix had led his ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Before his father's effigy in church; Of one who then used often come to hall, Ever at Yule-tide, when the great log flamed In chimney-place, and laugh and jest went round, And maidens strayed beneath the mistletoe, Making believe not see it, so got kissed— Of one that joined not in the morrice-dance, But in her sea-green kirtle stood at gaze, A timid little creature that was scared By dead men's armor. Nought there suffered change, Those empty shells of valor grew not old, Though something rusty. ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... plant life in a remarkable manner. Still more interesting is the fact, already noticed, that even among the green tribes there are to be found many and various lapses from the stated rules of their feeding. Thus what are we to say of the parasitic mistletoe, which, while it has grown leaves of its own, and can, therefore, obtain so much carbon food from the air on its own account, nevertheless drinks up the sap of the oak or apple which forms its host, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... magnolia; Maine, pine cone; Michigan, apple blossom; Minnesota, moccasin; Mississippi, magnolia; Montana, bitter root; Missouri, goldenrod; Nebraska, goldenrod; New Jersey, sugar maple (tree); New York, rose; North Dakota, goldenrod; Oklahoma, mistletoe; Oregon, Oregon grape; Rhode Island, violet; Texas, blue bonnet; Utah, Sego lily; Vermont, red ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own lapses into conventional, stereotyped religion. The Church of ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... households there are many little mysteries afoot, when parcels come and go, and are smothered away so as to be ready when Santa Claus comes his rounds; when some are busy decking the rooms with holly and mistletoe; when the cook is busiest of all, and savoury smells rise from the kitchen, telling of good things to ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... thing forgotten When all the world goes well; A thing forgotten, as long ago When the gods forgot the mistletoe, And soundless as an arrow of snow The ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... kill him; but it does not, although he flies before it. Glooskap declares that a handful of down will cause his death. The double entendre of the swoon is entirely wanting in the Western tale, as is the apparent harmlessness of the medium of death. In the Edda the mistletoe, the softest, and apparently the least injurious, of plants, kills Balder; in the Wabanaki tale it is a ball of down or a rush. The Chippewas change it, like savages, to a substantial root and a black rock, thereby manifesting an insensibility to the point of the original, which ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... pronounced to be "all right" by her husband's family, though the poor girl, of course, underwent tortures before she was sure of their decision. Fred, who with his father and mother was to join in the great feast, brought Sally home from Wallacetown that same night, and took advantage of the mistletoe which Sylvia had hung up, right before them all. Thomas and Molly, both wonderfully citified already, appeared during the course of the next afternoon from opposite directions, and Molly played, and Thomas expounded scientific farming, to the wonder of them all. And finally Mr. Gray went to meet ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... of Western Australia, with brilliant orange-coloured flowers, Nuytsia floribunda, N.O. Loranthaceae; which is also called Tree Mistletoe, and, locally, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... source that Richard Perry Stanlock was entitled to the slightest credit for these magnificent doings. He spent Christmas at home in a quiet unassuming way amid the family decorations of holly and mistletoe, and a vast litter of presents, oranges, apples, nuts, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... on the floor lay Balder dead; and round Lay thickly strewn swords, axes, darts, and spears, Which all the Gods in sport had idly thrown At Balder, whom no weapon pierced or clove; But in his breast stood fixt the fatal bough Of mistletoe, which Lok the Accuser gave To Hoder, and unwitting Hoder threw— 'Gainst that alone had Balder's life no charm. And all the Gods and all the Heroes came, And stood round Balder on the bloody floor, Weeping and wailing; ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Mrs. Muir, if she were not at this moment in the garret, might suddenly remember that she had left the door ajar, taking away the key; then she would rush back like a stout round whirlwind, and in a minute more Barrie would be a prisoner, almost like the fair bride in "The Mistletoe Bough," only there was more air in the garret than in the oak chest that shut with a spring. But Barrie was used to taking risks—risks insignificant compared with this, yet big enough to supply salt and sugar for the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ancient religions of Cornwall have honestly contrived to plunge themselves and us. It was better in the happy old days when we all believed in the Druids; when the Druids explained everything, and my excellent father grafted mistletoe upon his apple-trees—in vain, because nothing will persuade the mistletoe to grow down here. But nobody believes in the Druids just now: and the old question of the Cassiterides has never been solved to general satisfaction: and the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Little Doctor's going to help run the thing, and Rena Jackson and Lea Adams are in it—and Annie Pilgreen. Her and Happy are down on the program for 'Under the Mistletoe', a tableau—the red ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... Minnie Marsh lays it in the drawer. She shuts the drawer with decision. I catch sight of her face in the glass. Lips are pursed. Chin held high. Next she laces her shoes. Then she touches her throat. What's your brooch? Mistletoe or merry-thought? And what is happening? Unless I'm much mistaken, the pulse's quickened, the moment's coming, the threads are racing, Niagara's ahead. Here's the crisis! Heaven be with you! Down she goes. Courage, ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... Christmas with all their might, making the more noise and revelry because the Parliament had forbidden the feast to be observed at all. It was easy to tell who was for the King and who for the Parliament, for there were bushes of holly, mistletoe, and ivy, at all the Royalist doors and windows, and from many came the savoury steam of roast beef or goose, while the other houses were shut up as close as possible and ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wearing a crown and a blue mantle and carrying a sceptre. In front of him was borne the wren fastened to the top of a pole, which was adorned with a verdant wreath of olive, of oak, and sometimes of mistletoe grown on an oak. After hearing high mass in the parish church of St. Vincent, surrounded by his officers and guards, the King visited the bishop, the mayor, the magistrates, and the chief inhabitants, collecting money to defray the expenses of the royal banquet ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the feet that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older than the oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between which it passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller had crossed that morning; old as the times when people first debarred themselves from wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant impulse led them. The ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... guests of Crotchet Castle, some of Mr. Chainmail's other neighbours, all his tenants and domestics, and Captain Fitzchrome. The hall was spacious and lofty; and with its tall fluted pillars and pointed arches, its windows of stained glass, its display of arms and banners intermingled with holly and mistletoe, its blazing cressets and torches, and a stupendous fire in the centre, on which blocks of pine were flaming and crackling, had a striking effect on eyes unaccustomed to such a dining-room. The fire ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... mistletoe, about which there are so many pretty Christmas legends, is a deadly enemy of many trees. The seed of this fungus is carried, by the birds or by the wind, from one tree to another. When it sprouts, tiny roots go down through ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... a ponderous seven-course dinner at Mr. Constantine's, during which I had to kiss Aunt Belle under the mistletoe and pretend to be elated, hear several yards of grand opera torn off on the new talking machine in its nine-hundred-dollar Chinese case, take my father-in-law to the club, return to find Trudy and Gay having a Yuletide word ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... between the appearance of vegetation upon its banks and the river itself. Gray forests of cypress, the blended foliage of the oak, the cottonwood, and the ash, with a charming intermixture of that beautiful parasitic evergreen, the mistletoe, above Vicksburg, suggest the blooming grandeur of the stream. Below, the appearance of a new parasite, the Spanish moss, draping the trees with a cold, hoary-looking vegetation, casts a melancholy and matured dignity upon the scene. Like the gray locks of age, it reminds the passer ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... possibly a rich widow to wed, to say nothing of expectations; it would be a marriage into the family of Negrepelisse, and for him this meant a family connection with the Marquise d'Espard, and a political career in Paris. Here was a fair tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened, unsightly mistletoe that grew thick upon it; he would hang his fortunes upon it, and prune it, and wait till he could ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... their welfare, are incidentally revealed in these letters. For instance, "The men had a wonderful Christmas Day (1916). They were like a happy lot of children. We decorated the ward with flags, holly and mistletoe, and paper flowers that the men made, and a tree ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous
... she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest mistletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... "Here, Jake, hang this mistletoe up over the folding doors," commanded the corporal, handing him a bamboo shoot, and pointing to the tent door. "Now when she comes asailin' in to dinner, all unaware of your presence, smack her a good one, right on the ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... again, and then his face seemed to shine like the sun, and there seemed to be wreaths of holly and bunches of mistletoe sticking all over him, and he sprang into his sleigh, the reindeer shook their horns, making the bells jingle like anything, and then, off on top of the snowflakes ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... Frigg, "everything has sworn except one little shrub which is called Mistletoe, and grows on the eastern side of Valhal. I did not take an oath from that because I thought it ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... There were signs of the season in every corner of the plain but cosy little sitting-room. Mistletoe hung from the chandelier; gay bunting and strands of gold and silver tinsel draped the bookcase and the writing desk; holly and myrtle covered the wall brackets, and red tissue paper shaded all ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Adonis is pierced by the boar's tusk, while Odysseus escapes with an ugly scar, which afterwards secures his recognition by his old servant, the dawn-nymph Eurykleia; Sigurd is slain by a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle. In her cosmic palace, all is locked in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... of holly. In the time of the 'Spectator'[1020] and of Gay,[1021] and later still,[1022] rosemary was also used, doubtless by old tradition, as referring in its name to the Mother of the Lord. Nor was mistletoe excluded.[1023] In connection with this plant, Stanley says a curious custom was kept up at York, which in 1754 had not long been discontinued. 'On the eve of Christmas Day they carried mistletoe to the high altar of the cathedral and proclaimed a public and universal liberty, pardon, and ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... foresight on his part not to be shot into the lane they made in the dark forest of an evening. And the forest,—it seemed an impenetrable mystery, a strange tangle of fantastic growths: the live-oak (chene vert), its wide-spreading limbs hung funereally with Spanish moss and twined in the mistletoe's death embrace; the dark cypress swamp with the conelike knees above the yellow back-waters; and here and there grew the bridelike magnolia which we had known in Kentucky, wafting its perfume over the waters, and wondrous flowers ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I am like to mistletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about: so I by thee. What need I then to fear at all So long as I about thee crawl? But if that tree should fall and die, Tumble shall heaven, and ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... at Christmas, while ivy was used not only as a vintner's sign, but also among the evergreens at funerals." Archdeacon Nares mentions "the custom longest preserved, was the hanging up of a bush of mistletoe in the kitchen or servant's hall, with the charm attached to it, that the maid who was not kissed under it at Christmas would not be married in that year." In the north a similar custom is observed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... was busy all morning under Jane's garrulous command, getting in bunches of holly and other evergreens from the hedgerows. His last journey had been to one of the farms on the Upper Hanyards in quest of mistletoe, which grew abundantly there in an ancient orchard. On getting back he had held a sprig over Jane's head for a certain familiar and laudable purpose, and had been rewarded with a smack that sounded like the dropping of an empty milk-pail. A little ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... him safe. Long he sought it, until two doves, his mother's birds, came flying before him to show him the tree where gold gleamed through the boughs, and he found the branch growing on the tree as mistletoe grows on the thorn. ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... shouted the prices of bright truck for tree ornaments, and pushed through the crowd, offering holly and mistletoe. Circles formed around men exhibiting mechanical turtles or boxing monkeys. From a furry sledge above a shop door, Santa Claus bowed and gesticulated, shaking the lines above his prancing reindeer. I had ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... preparations were completed before the return of the church party, for the service had been unusually lengthy, and Esmeralda was champing with impatience before the latch-key clicked in the lock. There was great kissing and hugging beneath the mistletoe, and Bridgie was sent flying upstairs to take off her wraps, in preparation for the ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however, though visible from The Slopes, was outside the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... frost's sharp arrows touch the earth and lo! How diamond-bright the stars do scintillate When Night hath lit her lamps to Heaven's gate. To the dim forest's cloistered arches go, And seek the holly and the mistletoe; For soon the bells of Christmas-tide will ring To hail ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For, searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and at the hour ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... be recollected that, during the Christmas festivities at Manor Farm, after a certain amount of kissing had taken place under the mistletoe, Mr. Pickwick was "standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased countenance on all that was passing round him, when the young lady with the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies, made a sudden dart forward, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... orchard the neglected fruit-trees were running to wood, the rambling branches bore no fruit save the glistening mistletoe berries, and tall plants were growing in the garden walks. All this forlornness shed a charm across the picture that wrought on the spectator's mind with an influence like that of some enchanting poem, filling his soul with dreamy fancies. A poet must have lingered there in deep and melancholy ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... coyotes nor horses could scent him. The nearer he approached the head of the arroyo, where the well was located, the thicker grew the desert vegetation. At length a dead palo verde, with huge black clumps of its parasite mistletoe thick in the branches, marked a distance from the well that Gale considered close enough. Noiselessly he crawled here and there until he secured a favorable position, and then rose to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... question, that English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a sort of supercilious contempt ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... had dropped in, was suddenly reminded of that lugubrious old ballad, "The Mistletoe Bough," and recited large worn fragments of it impressively. It tells of how a beautiful girl hid away in a chest during a Christmas game of hide-and-seek, and how she was found, a dried vestige, years afterwards. It took a very powerful hold ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... have a large room in the second story, opening upon a generous balcony fifty feet long, into which stretch the liberal arms of a fine orange tree holding out their fruitage to our very lips. In front is a sort of open plaza containing a pretty group of gnarled live-oaks full of moss and mistletoe. ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... are things to be legitimately distinguished from the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated. Customs are far more enduring things than ideas,—witness the mistletoe at Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight of the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious institution is of much less significance to us than its present effect. The theory of a religion may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... to find himself for the first time (I quite settled that it WAS the first) in an empty silent room with no soul to care for. I could not help following him in imagination through crowds of pleasant faces, and then coming back to that dull place with its bough of mistletoe sickening in the gas, and sprigs of holly parched up already by a Simoom of roast and boiled. The very waiter had gone home; and his representative, a poor, lean, hungry man, was keeping Christmas ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... were too many plants for the ground to support, and so they grew on the big limbs of the trees all around, the same as the mistletoe on the oak, only there were ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... thus note the singular order of vegetable parasites, the Loranthaceae, an order containing some thirty genera with four hundred species, and including the mistletoe, which is traditionally venerable in our island. The great group of catkin-bearing trees (Amentaceae), contains a great assemblage of plants, familiar in England, such as the hornbeam, hazel, oak, beech, Spanish chestnut, birch, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... and wilt on the tree in mild winters, because they can't drop off of themselves without the aid of birds, while the birds are too well supplied with other food to care for them. One of the strangest cases of all, however, is that of the mistletoe, which, living parasitically upon the forest-boughs and apple-trees, would of course be utterly lost if its berries dropped their seeds on to the ground beneath it. To avoid such a misfortune, the mistletoe ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... sly bough of mistletoe We must not, cannot miss, For, privileged beneath its shade, We hope ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... was forced to admit that a Jersey Christmas had its compensations. The doors of the back parlor, mysteriously locked for days, were opened and in the room, gay with holly, mistletoe, and laurestinus, appeared a most delightful little Christmas tree, itself rather foreign in appearance since it was a laurel growing in a big pot. Real English holly concealed the base and merry ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... Livingstone. Want was stretching out its withered hand even to Poverty and found it filled. But Livingstone took no part in it. The chilly and threadbare street-venders of shoe-strings, pencils and cheap flowers, who to-night were offering in their place tin toys, mistletoe and holly-boughs, he pushed roughly out of his way; he snapped angrily at beggars who had the temerity ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... in the religions of antiquity. We are told that the mystic power of the mistletoe comes from the fact that it grows on the oak, a once sacred tree. The pine of the North, the palm and the fig tree of the South, were sacred trees at one time. John Newton made a study of tree worship, especially the ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... Persians, is spoken of in the Zendavesta as the "Word of Life," and, when consecrated, was partaken of as a sacrament. An oak was the sacred tree of the ancient Druids of Britain. We inherit their custom of gathering the sacred mistletoe at Yule-tide, while in our Christmas Tree we have a remnant of the old Norse tree-worship. During the Middle Ages the worship of trees was forbidden in France by the ecclesiastical councils, and in England by the laws of Canute. ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... for the killing of a little bird or for the finding of mistletoe berries that I heard. It was for something much more than either, or you would not have called out so joyfully. If you do not tell me at once ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and "winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe." Nothing about the canisters of tea and coffee "rattled up and down like juggling tricks," or about the candied fruits, "so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... near the Christmas season, the decorations included evergreens, holly and mistletoe, but besides these, quantities of roses and rare flowers of all sorts were used. The florists came early and worked all day, and they transformed the house into ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... the brown oak-bough Vies with the red-gemmed holly now; And here and there, like pearls, there show The berries of the mistletoe. A sprig upon the chandelier Says to the maidens, "Come not here!" Even the pauper of the earth Some kindly ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar |
