"Mossgrown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Italian. The view before them was lovely, and both enjoyed it (though not equally) enough to be silent for some moments. On the other side the lane, seen between gaps in the old oaks and chestnuts that hung over the mossgrown pales of Hazeldean Park, rose gentle, verdant slopes, dotted with sheep and herds of deer. A stately avenue stretched far away to the left, and ended at the right hand within a few yards of a ha-ha that divided ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the fight, yet a more interesting one than the granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the grave,—marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and another at the foot,—the grave of two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to the seat again," he said; "though the ruin is scarcely visible from here," he added, as they reached the spot; "but it is safer. It is the most beautiful ruined castle that you can imagine. It is all covered with ivy, and the stones are moss-grown, and the gray walls show through in places, and in the setting sun they flame with crimson; you've no idea how beautiful it is! I saw it once from the steamboat. It was splendid! Now listen! The last lesson I took, the teacher ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... like the folds of a white garment in the twilight. Then more distinct and permanent shapes arose;—shapes familiar to his mind, yet forgotten and remembered again, as the fragmentsof a dream; till at length, far, far below him he beheld the great city of the Past, with silent marble streets, and moss-grown walls, and spires uprising with a wave-like, flickering motion. And amid the crowd that thronged those streets, he beheld faces once familiar and dear to him; and heard sorrowful, sweet voices, singing; 'O forget us not! forget us not!' and then the distant, mournful sound of funeral bells, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and, best boon of all, an unexpected solitude—a solitude that invested the white building with a glamour of unreality and converted the slight-stemmed, moss-grown trees into spellbound sentinels. ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... his descriptions of "those venerable incumbents who hibernated during the winter season, and then crawled out during the warm days of spring to draw their pay and perform those pretended duties, for which they were engaged." There were formerly large numbers of moss-grown loafers in the government service, with whiskey-reddened noses and greasy old clothing, who would sun themselves on the door-steps, and tell anecdotes of General Jackson, Senator Benton, and other popular heroes, with whom they would intimate a good acquaintance at some remote period of their lives. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... hearthstone. The blackened remnants of many a picnic camp fire strewed the ground. A slight turn brought us to the spot where the Indian Spring welled out of the hillside. The setting was all that we could have hoped for,—great moss-grown rocks wet and slippery, deep shade which almost made us doubt the existence of the hot August sunshine at the edge of the forest, cool water dripping and tinkling. A half-dozen great trees had been so undermined by the action ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... more particularly interested. There stands the little cottage of the Hubbards, looking just as it did three years since; it is possible that one or two of the bull's-eye panes of glass may have been broken, and changed, and the grey shingles are a little more moss-grown; but its general aspect is precisely what it was when we were last there. The snow-ball and the sweet-briar are in their old places, each side of the humble porch; the white blossoms have fallen from the scraggy branches of the snow-ball, this first week in June; the fresh pink buds are ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... and he climbed up to where a tiny spring trickled down over a moss-grown rock so slowly that it took ten minutes to ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... covered, others bare. The old ten-gun battery, at the outer angle of the Juniper, very verdant, and besprinkled with white-weed, clover, and buttercups. The juniper-trees are very aged and decayed and moss-grown. The grass about the hospital is rank, being trodden, probably, by nobody but myself. There is a representation of a vessel under sail, cut with a penknife, on the corner ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... we had been, but Southlands was a mystery, a forbidden garden of delight, with the terror of an oaken staff (and unknown penalties) turning this way and that. Therefore the stunted old oak on the verge—the moss-grown merestone by the pond marked the limit—was ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... toward the bulrush island, which was nearer than the mainland, and looked firmer than any tussock round him. But he failed to reach this haven of rest, and was forced to stop at an old stump which stuck up, looking very like the moss-grown horns of the "dear departed." Roosting here, Sam began to shout for aid in every key possible to the human voice. Such hoots and howls, whistles and roars, never woke the echoes of the lonely marsh before, or scared the portly frog who resided there ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... and caressed it, pressing its head closer against her bosom. The man stood a few paces away, watching these two beautiful creatures as they sat in the hazy autumn sunlight, with their background of weeds and moss-grown paling. He felt baffled and perplexed, for he knew that he stood apart, excluded from their companionship by something he could not define. So intolerable did this feeling become that he resolved to break through it, and made a hasty movement to sit down beside them; but, as he ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... was put to clearing the creekbed. It was a tremendous job. Centuries of forest life had choked the little stream nearly to the level of its banks. Old snags and stumps lay imbedded in the ooze; decayed trunks, moss-grown, blocked the current; leaning tamaracks, fallen timber, tangled vines, dense thickets gave to its course more the appearance of a tropical jungle than of a north country brook-bed. All these things had to ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... replied, but without looking up. Eliphalet led the way. He came to the summer house, glanced around it with apparent satisfaction, and put his foot on the moss-grown step. Virginia did a surprising thing. She leaped quickly into the doorway before him, and stood facing him, framed in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... him, In joyous fury urging the keen steel Against the surface of his grinding wheel. The place was a wild hollow, circled round With barren hills, and on the bottom ground Stood the Green Chapel, moss-grown, solitary;— In sooth, it seemed the devil's mortuary! The Green Knight's back was turned, and he stirred not Till Gawayne hailed him sharply; then he shot One glance—as when, o'erhead, a living wire ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... among his old haunts, with wild, haggard look, muttering incoherent language. The people of the village began to whisper that he was going mad. At Milton Park they heard of it, and Artis and Henderson hurried to Helpstone to look after their friend. They found him sitting on a moss-grown stone, at the end of the village nearest the heath. Gently they took him by the arm, and, leading him back to the hut, told Mrs. Clare that it would be best to start at once to Northborough, the Earl being dissatisfied that the removal had not taken place. Patty's little caravan was soon ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... group of children, in charge of their nurse, are engaged in the time-honored game of "Ring-around-a-rosy." Winding walks, bordered with shrubbery, disappear among fantastic mounds of rock-work, moss-grown grottoes, and tiny dells of fern; and under a ruined arch, gray with lichen and green with vines, flows a placid streamlet, spanned by a rustic bridge. In the meadow beyond, flocks of sheep are cropping the grass, and an old negro is busily engaged ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... too soon; but by and by she will find it out for herself,' he would say, as he strolled through the galleries, or stood by some moss-grown fountain to buy flowers from a ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... mourning weeds, from out the western gate, Departs with silent pace! That spirit moves In the green valley, where the silver brook, From its full laver, pours the white cascade; And, babbling low amid the tangled woods, Slips down through moss-grown stones with endless laughter. And frequent, on the everlasting hills, Its feet go forth, when it doth wrap itself In all the dark embroidery of the storm, And shouts the stern, strong wind. And here, amid The silent majesty of these deep woods, Its presence shall uplift ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... slightest subordination to the points of the compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps and logs, like precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so very much in ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... from its centre; or we might, reversing the picture, behold Liverpool by some unthought-of calamity—some fatal, unforeseen mischance, some concatenation of calamities—dwindled down to its former insignificance: its docks shipless, its warehouses in ruins, its streets moss-grown, and in its decay like some bye-gone cities of the east, that once sent out their vessels laden with "cloth of blue, and red barbaric gold." Under which of these two fates will Liverpool find its lot some centuries hence?—which ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... to be always looking for the Celtic note in him, and not to recognize his Greek note when it comes. But if one attends well to the difference between the two notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's "moss-grown springs and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... spot—that before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and lightning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as if every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and down the moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a keeper's lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... and looked behind us. We were gathered in a kind of natural and moss-grown rocky pulpit, some thirty feet above the stream, and with an open view down its course to the distant riffles. Beyond them the river swung southward, walling our view with its flanking palisade ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... two antediluvian diplomatists and warriors, who are here striving to bolster themselves up for another year with the waters, and may be heard crowing out lamentations over her fatal passion for play, interspersed with bits of moss-grown scandal, disinterred from the social ruins of an age long past: Radetzky, Wratislaw (le beau sabreur), the two Schwarzenbergs (he of Leipsic, and the former Prime Minister), Paul Eszterhazy, Wrangel, and Blucher were friends of her youth; judging from ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... old walks we loved so well: the avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, where the midnight moon shone so softly through the dark masses of foliage and slept so sweetly on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... pink sweet peas beside them, to set one's teeth on edge. By the way, my sweet peas are in!" Her voice proclaimed triumph, and she led the way down one of the damp, moss-grown paths to a sunny spot where a long strip of freshly raked earth showed that somebody had lately been at work. "Bob dug it up for me, Uncle Timmy fertilized it, I raked it and planted the seeds, while the whole family stood around and gave advice. Max wanted them sowed ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... loitered on the lawn by the flower-beds and the fountain; some visited the stables and the home-farm, with its cow-houses and dairy and piggeries; some the neglected greenhouses, and some the equally neglected old- fashioned alleys, with their clipped yews and their moss-grown statues. No one belonging to the house was anywhere visible to receive them, until the great bell at length summoned them to the plentiful meal spread in the ruined hall. "The hospitality of some people has no roof to it," Godfrey said, when he heard of the preparations. "Ten people ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... corpse with a faint smile lingering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the village, before the last, long road began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. 'This—is as far as I can go,' she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. 'Even now it's wet with dew.' She rose again and looked strangely into his face. 'Yes, yes, here it is,' she said, 'oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We're ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... not less than ten acres might still be observed the fragments of the great abbey: these were, towards their limit, in general moss-grown and mouldering memorials that told where once rose the offices and spread the terraced gardens of the old proprietors; here might still be traced the dwelling of the lord abbot; and there, still more distinctly, because built on a greater scale and of materials still more ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... with awful rites, the hoary priest, Beside that moss-grown heathen altar stood, His dusky form in magic cincture dressed, And made the offering ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... itself runs, more or less, On the sinuous line of a letter S, Twining its little houses through The twists of the street, as our hamlets do, For no good reason, so far as I know, Save that chance has arranged it so. It's a quaint old ramshackle moss-grown place, Keeping its staid accustomed pace; Not moved at all by the rush and flurry, The mad tempestuous windy hurry Of the big world tossing in rage and riot, While the village ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... mistake, then. She opened the gate, and by a narrow, moss-grown path through the bushes, came to the door. All was still. It was impossible to ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... covered him, rubbing his whiskers again, looking back over his trail as if he heard footsteps behind him. Then another nervous dash, a squeak which proclaims at once his escape, and his arrival, and he vanishes under the old moss-grown log where his fellows live, a whole colony ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... seem to be most abundant and to grow largest on the islands of the San Juan and Whidbey Archipelago. One of the three species of maples that I have seen is only a bush that makes tangles on the banks of the rivers. Of the other two one is a small tree, crooked and moss-grown, holding out its leaves to catch the light that filters down through the close-set spires of the great spruces. It grows almost everywhere throughout the entire extent of the forest until the higher slopes of the mountains are reached, and produces ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... into the ditch, climbed half up the mound, and began to cut away at one of the rods, leaning his left arm on the moss-grown stole. The bark was easily cut through, and he soon made a notch, but then the wood seemed to grow harder, and the chips he got out were very small. The harder the wood, the more determined Bevis became, and he cut and worked away with ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... have been an enemy, my lord, With walls between us and with moss-grown moats, Now on a sudden must I kiss your mouth? I who was taught before I learned to speak That all my house was hostile unto yours, Now can I put my head against your breast Here in the sight of all who ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech- trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs' white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory - is a ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... dividing rail fence, and came, at the end of a minute's hurried walk, to the old Blake graveyard, midway of one of Fletcher's fallow fields. The gate was bricked up, after the superstitious custom of many country burial places, but he climbed the old moss-grown wall, where poisonous ivy grew rank and venomous, and landing deep in the periwinkle that carpeted the ground, made his way rapidly to the flat oblong slab beneath which his father lay. The marble was discoloured ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... since with originality enough to start a fresh one. For they ARE a pretty limited lot, you will admit that? Originality is not in their line; they can't think up anything new, anything to freshen up the old moss-grown dullness of the language lesson and put life and "go" into it, and charm ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... round in a serpentine course. They climbed over fallen and moss-grown logs; they slushed through shallow water; they crawled on their hands and knees under embankments and rocks, and at last, at Handsome's order, they stepped into a boat of some kind which the latter pushed away from the bank ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... with an unceasing, fountain-like gush, and streamed down the walls outside. There were oozings of water from the old moss-grown roof, which continued dropping on the self-same spots with a monotonous sad splash. They even soaked through into the floor inside, which was of hardened earth studded ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... and glorious pageants here, Where now grey stones and moss-grown columns lie— There have been words, which earth grew pale to hear, Breath'd from the cavern's misty chambers nigh: There have been voices through the sunny sky, And the pine woods, their choral hymn-notes sending, And reeds and lyres, their Dorian melody, With incense clouds around the temple ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... and apply his torch to them, took but a moment; and in an instant a bright, white flame flashed and lit up the little sheltered alcove. Another, and the almost overcome girl was placed on a seat of soft, dry shavings, against the moss-grown rock, under the rude roof, out of the reach of the snow or wind; and another fire was lit of the dry shingle blocks, at her feet, from which her saturated shoes were removed, and to which warmth was ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... cast-off garments of last year; part of the way with green grass, close-cropped and very fresh for the season. Sometimes the trees met across it; sometimes it was bordered on one side by an old rail-fence of moss-grown cedar, with bushes sprouting beneath it, and thrusting their branches through it; sometimes by a stone wall of unknown antiquity, older than the wood it closed in. A stone wall, when shrubbery has grown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Trinacrian embers, 55 Burn near Thermopylae's Oeta the fiery springs. Sad, these piteous eyes did waste all wearily weeping, (55) Sad, these cheeks did rain ceaseless a showery woe. Wakeful, as hill-born brook, which, afar off silvery gleaming, O'er his moss-grown crags leaps with a tumble adown; 60 Brook which awhile headlong o'er steep and valley descending, Crosses anon wide ways populous, hastes to the street; (60) Cheerer in heats o' the sun to the wanderer heavily fuming, Under a drought, when fields swelter agape ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... teeming Earth Is with a kind of cholic pinch'd and vex'd By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving, Shakes the old beldame Earth, and topples down Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth, Our grandam Earth, having this distemperature, In passion shook." 1 King Henry ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... mountain torrents That hurl them off their moss-grown altars steep, Seeking the flood with tossing, foaming riot— Here in the vale are bound in the old currents, To stream in future calm and clear ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... features of the polity which thus assumed a prominent organization have been already indicated. There was no revolution, no radical change. The ancient rugged tree of Netherland liberty—with its moss-grown trunk, gnarled branches, and deep-reaching roots—which had been slowly growing for ages, was still full of sap, and was to deposit for centuries longer its annual rings of consolidated and concentric strength. Though lopped of some luxuriant boughs, it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... out. In its expiring gleams she saw no more inky water, but only the damp, moss-grown stones, on which a pool was widening from her wet garments, and the half-defined figure of the general stooping over to squeeze the streams from his own ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the sort, however, and instead of being a hundred years old, it is less than fifty. The city visitors did not make proper allowance for the rapidity with which, in a damp, dense forest, everything made of wood becomes moss-grown and decays. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... eyes it seemed exactly adapted to its owner, and formed to hide dark and guilty deeds. It was a stern, sombre-looking mansion, built of a dark grey stone, with tall square chimneys, and windows with heavy mullions. High stone walls, hoary and moss-grown, ran round the gardens and courts, except on the side of the river, where there was a terrace overlooking the stream, and forming a pleasant summer's walk. At the back of the house were a few ancient oaks and sycamores, and in the gardens were some ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the master-player joked and laughed and pleased the boy with little things—until Nick laughed too, and let the matter go. At last, however, when they had ridden fully an hour, they passed a moss-grown abbey on the left-hand side of the road, a strange old place that Nick could ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... himself? where shall he look for his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and dumbly—till, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... Prissy had prepared for them. But Faith declared that she was not tired. It seemed to her that she could run all the way if her father would only permit. And when in the early afternoon she first heard the sound of the mill-stream she did run, until, out of breath, she had to rest on a moss-grown stump for her father to catch ...
— A Little Maid of Ticonderoga • Alice Turner Curtis
... foreign city, and conjure to his mind's eye the scenes, and prominent to his fancy, distinct to his memory, will be the bridge. He will think of Florence as intersected by the Arno, and with the very name of that river reappears the peerless grace of the Ponte Santa Trinita with its moss-grown escutcheons and aerial curves; the Pont Neuf, at Paris, with its soldiers and priests, its boot-blacks and grisettes, the gay streets on one side and the studious quarter on the other, typifies and concentrates for him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... the same class of girls at La Chatre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's oar, of guitar and serenade, and within sight of the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to the dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated houses, the wretched moss-grown roofs, the shrill concerts of the cocks, cats, and children of the little French provincial town. She dreamt also of the lovely meadows, the scented hay, the little running streams, and the floral researches ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... paths well, but now it was late autumn and I was alone. I explored the paths for hours, and traversed long glades ablaze with red and gold. I peered down through the yellow leaves to the rushing streams below, where I could see the great moss-grown boulders choking the narrow channels. But this particular spot had gone. I was almost in despair, when two labourers by great luck happened to come along one of the tracks. With their help I found the place I was searching for, and the result ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... Carl's letters from Seattle he had written: "The 'Atlantic Monthly' wants me to write an article on the I.W.W.!!" So the first piece of work he had to do after we got settled was that. We were tremendously excited, and never got over chuckling at some of the moss-grown people we knew about the country who would feel outraged at the "Atlantic Monthly" stooping to print stuff by that young radical. And on such a subject! How we tore at the end, to get the article off on time! The stenographer from the University came about two one Sunday afternoon. I sat ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... of a departed summer will glow once more, in the countenance of the wintry year, so also has his past life projected itself into the present, assuming its features as a mask. And when the ghosts, from whom, figuratively, the young pair are hiding, rise from their moss-grown graves; and the lover would disregard their remonstrant procession as only "faint march-music in the air": he becomes suddenly conscious that the past has withdrawn its gifts, and that the mere mask ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... bed, table, chair, and huge earthenware pan which I fill from the ice-cold well at the back of the cottage. Morning and night I serve with the Gibeonites, their curse my blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when their hearts were purged by service. Morning and night I send down the moss-grown bucket with its urgent message from a dry and dusty world; the chain tightens through my hand as the liquid treasure responds to the messenger, and then with creak and jangle—the welcome of labouring earth—the bucket ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Menendez and I accompanied my friend there I was charmed by the picturesque scene below. Here was a real old herbal garden, gay with flowers and intersected by tiled moss-grown paths. There were bushes exhibiting fantastic examples of the topiary art, and here, too, was a sun-dial. My first impression of this beautiful spot was one of delight. Later I was to regard that enchanted demesne with something akin to horror; but as we stood there watching a gardener clipping ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... enough," thought I, "for this morning's proceedings will have been cabled to New York ere now, and read at the breakfast-tables of every old, moss-grown naturalist in America before I see the Countess d'Alzette this evening." And I drew from my pocket the roll of paper which she had given me, and, lighting a cigar, lay back in my ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the edge of the firs, in a coppice of heath and vine, Is an old moss-grown altar, shaded by briar and bloom, Denys, the priest, hath told me 'twas the lord Apollo's shrine In the days ere Christ came down from God to the Virgin's womb. I never go past but I doff my cap and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... through an avenue of some extent, which led straight to the front of the house, the aspect of which delighted me. It was very old and massively built, and had quite a baronial look, I thought. There was a wide stone terrace with ponderous moss-grown stone balustrades round three sides of it, and at each angle a broad flight of steps leading down to a second terrace, with sloping green banks that melted into the turf of the lawn. The house stood on the summit ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... birds loved the clear old tree! Summer after summer did they return to build nests among its moss-grown branches; and the branches, glad that the songsters had come back again, would put forth green leaves to hide them from prying eyes, so that they could rest there securely. Can you wonder, then, that they sang sweet songs of ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... off her wrapper and, picking her way across the moss-grown rocks, paused for an instant on the bank, her slender figure, clad in its close-fitting scarlet bathing-suit, vividly outlined against the surrounding green of the landscape. Then she plunged in and struck out downstream, swimming with long, even strokes, ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... time, into the heart of the city, ever and anon the streets pass through some square or piazza, each like the other. In the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence the water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other some grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars before its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... length, the eye is satisfied with gazing on the prospect in its entirety, one after another, the moss-grown fortresses and other hoary relics of ancient Erse architecture claim our reverent attention; for the Hebridean chieftains, an amphibious race, almost invariably chose the extreme verge of ocean-precipice for the site of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... reverend pile, And list to the sounds of the moaning wind As it stirs the old ivy-boughs entwined,— Sighs mournful along through chancel and nave, And shakes the loose panel and architrave, While the mouldering branches and withered leaves Are rustling around the moss-grown eaves. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Joined to that vast multitude Where the great are but the good, And the mind of strength shall prove Weaker than the heart of love; Pride of graybeard wisdom less Than the infant's guilelessness, And his song of sorrow more Than the crown the Psalmist wore Who shall then, with pious zeal, At our moss-grown thresholds kneel, From a stained and stony page Reading to a careless age, With a patient eye like thine, Prosing tale and limping line, Names and words the hoary rime Of the Past has made sublime? Who shall work for us as well The antiquarian's miracle? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... wall rises from the lawn stands the ever-plashing fountain. The basin is circular, while around runs a paved path, hemmed in by smoke-blackened laurels and cut off from the public way by iron railings. The water falls with pleasant cadence into a small basin set upon a base of moss-grown rockwork. Looking south one meets a vista of green grass, of never-ceasing London traffic, and one tall distant factory chimney away in the grey haze, while around the fountain are four stunted trees. On the right stretches a strip of garden, in spring ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... met the Plymouth men yearly and held a most decorous carnival of barter. Tradition has it that the Plymouth men made the trip by sea to the nearest point on the Bay shore. I do not know if the meeting place is known, but I know a moss-grown and gnarled red cedar on the margin of Buttermilk Bay, as we now call it, which I am sure was growing there when the first swapping of commodities took place and in the shade of whose branches the grave and sturdy traders ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the region of gardens and villas, which, previous to the revolution of Kara Georg, was occupied principally by Turks. Passing down a shady lane my attention was arrested by a rotten moss-grown garden door, at the sight of which memory leaped backwards for four or five years. Here I had spent a happy forenoon with Colonel H——, and the physician of the former Pasha, an old Hanoverian, who, as surgeon ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... the plundered shrine and raise from their graves the band of martyred nuns, ceased from his ministrations, softly as a bubble frees itself from the pipe that shaped it, and floated away on the breath of the wind. Through a breach in the moss-grown wall, the first sunbeam stole in and pointed a bright finger across the cloister garth at the charred spot in the centre, where missals and parchment rolls had made a roaring fire to warm ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... through the bannered city - The King and the Commoner, And the hopes of the world were with them, And the heart of the world was astir. For the moss-grown walls seemed falling That have shut away men from Kings; And Deep unto Deep was calling For the coming ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the purple moor, Where ruddy children frolic round the door, The moss-grown antlers of the aged oak, The shaggy locks that fringe the colt unbroke, The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare Through the long tissue of his hoary hair, As with quick foot he climbs some ruin'd wall, And crops the ivy which ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... a splendid road, shaded for miles with rows of spreading elms, brings me to the charming old village of Dunchurch, where everything seems moss-grown and venerable with age. A squatty, castle-like church-tower, that has stood the brunt of many centuries, frowns down upon a cluster of picturesque, thatched cottages of primitive architecture, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... bulwark, vain the tower; In vain her gallant youths expose Their breasts, a bulwark, to the foes. In vain at that tremendous hour, Clasp'd in the savage soldier's reeking arms, Shrieks to tame Heaven the violated Maid. By the rude hand of Ruin scatter'd round Their moss-grown towers shall spread the desart ground. Low shall the mouldering palace lie, Amid the princely halls the grass wave high, And thro' the shatter'd roof descend ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... game, when they saw whither he was speeding, that they relaxed in their haste considerably, calling loudly to each other that the vampire was caught at last, for he could be easily surrounded among the old ruins, and dragged from amongst its moss-grown walls. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... overthrew its fine buildings in 1564 and the city was thereupon relocated at a distance of three miles on the bank of the Camu. The site of the old city is now private property and is overgrown with tropical vegetation. Moss-grown foundation walls protrude from the ground; a mass of brickwork some twenty feet high and having the form of a blockhouse chimney remains of the old church; and part of the circular tower erected at the corner of the fort of Columbus, well provided with loop-holes for muskets, still remains standing. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... morning, Arthur, his dog, and his portmanteau, had all arrived together in front of the Abbey House. Before his feet had touched the moss-grown gravel, the hall-door was flung open, and Angela appeared to welcome him, looking, as old Sam the ostler forcibly put it afterwards to his helper, "just like a hangel with the wings off." Jakes, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... poetical presentation, not representation, of a legendary subject, again the same feeling for the beauties of nature. How Giorgione has revelled in the glories of the setting sun, the long shadows of the evening twilight, the tall-stemmed trees, the moss-grown rock! The figures are but a pretext, we feel, for an idyllic scene, where the story is subordinated to the ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... be called a picturesque ruin, except inasmuch as every ruin is picturesque. Its bare walls rose gaunt and black out of the ground, not out of a heap of tumbled moss-grown masonry, or covered over with ivy. There were very few signs of decay about the place, ruinous as it was, and very little examination was enough to show that it had suffered not from old age, or from the cannon of an ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... weak condition the short run had exhausted him. His bruised throat was throbbing painfully, and he experienced some difficulty in breathing. He leaned up against the moss-grown wall, looking back into the ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... more clearly from the mists of these years. But they have much ground to make up. Only so lately as 1910 there were leading women in one of the large labor conferences who protested against women entering the legislature, using against that very simple and normal step in advance the very same moss-grown arguments as we hear used in this country against the conferring of ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... trees interlaced their branches, sometimes letting them droop till they brushed against Hilda's cheek, sometimes lifting them to give her a glimpse of cool vistas of dusky green, shade within shade,—moss-grown hollows, where the St. John's-wort showed its tarnished gold, and white Indian pipe gleamed like silver along the ground; or stony beds over which, in the time of the spring rains, little brown brooks ran ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... indicating some dilapidated moss-grown stones, "are a number of totally-forgotten English graves. There was desperate fighting all round this very plateau when we first came to this country, some seventy odd years ago; these dead, forgotten pioneer fellows struck ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... track of land at the crossing of three roads, its spacious front, rude and unpainted as it was, presented every appearance of an inn, but from its moss-grown chimneys no smoke arose, nor could I detect any sign of life in its shutterless windows and closed doors, across which shivered the dark shadow of the one gaunt and aged pine, that stood like a guard beside ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... worked yesterday, in any one of the old mediaeval houses; Mathilde and her hand-maidens would find no more—not so much—to distract and disturb them now in this still and tranquil town, with its sad gray streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces, Bayeux was already old. She ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... mere impressions and presumptuous hopes. I feel that a great truth is coming. Sometimes it seems as if we should have it among us in a day. Many steps of the Temple have been ascended, steps of purest alabaster, and of shining jasper, also of rough-brick, and slippery moss-grown stone. We shall reach what we long for, since we trust and do not fear, for our God knows not fear, only reverence, and his plan is ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sun was low, and a purple bluish smoke hung like a thin veil over the tops of the forest, Brita had taken out her knitting and seated herself on a large moss-grown stone, on the croft. Her eyes wandered over the broad valley which was stretched out below, and she could see the red roofs of the Blakstad mansion peeping forth between the fir-trees. And she wondered what they were doing down there, whether Grimhild ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... fields. Towers and battlements crumbled to earth; roadways heaved uneasily with grassy tufts that sprouted in the chinks of the old paving-blocks. Sometimes at decline of day a creaking hay-waggon would lumber along, bending towards a courtyard in whose moss-grown recesses you discerned stacks of golden maize and pumpkins; apples and plum-trees, nodding drowsily over walls, littered the streets with snowy blossoms or fallen leaves. Commercial life was extinct. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... huge hill of granite all overgrown with ivy and scrub oak, the deacon's house comes full in sight. It is a quaint old edifice of wood, whose architecture proclaims it as belonging to the ante-revolutionary period. Innocent of paint, its dingy shingles and moss-grown roof assimilated with the gray tint of the old stone fences and the granite boulders that rise from the surrounding pasture land. The upper story projects over the lower one, and in the huge double door that gives entrance to ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... vines, by birds that stopped to rest a moment on the old fence or to satisfy their curiosity. Stout young trees had crowded it aside and broken it. Here and there a leaning post was overgrown with woodbine. The rails were gray and moss-grown. Nature was trying hard to make it a bit of the landscape; it could not much longer retain its individuality. The wild things of the woods had long accepted it as theirs, though not quite as they accepted the ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... where, in perfect quietude, one could make acquaintance with birds and study their habits and manners without interruption. From the veranda of a large, low-ceilinged sitting-room one looked out upon a garden of the olden type, full of moss-grown apple-trees, golden daffodils, lupines and sweet herbs, that pleasant mixture of the kitchen and flower garden which always seems so enjoyable. It was an ideal home for birds, no cat was ever visible, ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... man's fate Might hear Salvation's news. I've walked within the church-yard's walls, With holy dread and fear, And on its marble tablets read "None but the rich lie here." I've wandered till I came upon A heap of moss-grown stones, And some one whispered in mine ear, "Here rest the poor man's bones." My spirit wandered on, until It left the scenes of earth; Until I stood with those who'd passed Through death, the second birth. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... that it was in this address of Lord Kelvin's that he suggested the possibility of "seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space" inoculating the earth with living organisms; and if he assumes that the whole population of the globe is to be traced back to these "moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another world," it is obvious that he believes in a form of evolution, and one in which a controlling intelligence is not very obvious, at all events not in the initial and all-important stage.) Herschel's was ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... followed in their tracks. For an hour he had watched them. No happy school-children, let loose at recess, could have embraced their freedom with more obvious delight. They drank from the running streams, for honey they explored the hollow tree-trunks, they sharpened their claws on moss-grown rocks, and among the fallen oak leaves scratched violently for acorns. So satisfied was Herrick with what he had seen, with the success of his experiment, and so genuine and unselfish was he in the thought of ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... itself in the mud of a landing-place, plashy with the tread of cows and giving on to a lane that led towards the smoke of human habitations. Edward jumped ashore, alert for exploration, and strode off without waiting to see if we followed; but I lingered behind, having caught sight of a moss-grown water-gate hard by, leading into a garden that from the brooding quiet lapping it round, appeared to portend ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... scattered towers marked the villages which dotted this part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of hundred inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar of the parish, Mr. Roundhay, was something of an archaeologist, and as such Holmes had made his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a considerable fund of local lore. At his invitation ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... such gayety as Lucca could never have witnessed in her piazza at high noon on a summer's day. Even our Campo Santo, if the Lucchese had cared to look round the corner of the meeting-house at its moss-grown head stones, could have had little to remind him of home, though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. But not for him, not for them of his clime and faith, is the pathos of those simple memorial slates with their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, Where thro' some western window the pale moon Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light; While sullen sacred silence reigns around, Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... wide departure from the genius of Christianity, as well as from the healthy instincts of humanity. In the first ages after Christ, the newborn element of thought was a pure and beautiful spring, bubbling up from the moss-grown ruins of the temple of heathendom. A hopeful, joyous tone is indicated in the symbols of the early faith preserved in the Vatican. It contained the germ of republican freedom and of a benign and beneficent civilization. But it was driven by political convulsions toward the East, and returned ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... very life: with women fainting, children screeching, Capuchins preaching. It was like a little rehearsal of doomsday. Don Marzio, a prudent housekeeper, had the latch-key of a private door at the back of the garden. He threw it open—not without a misgiving at the moss-grown wall overhead. That night the very stars did not seem to him sufficiently firm-nailed to the firmament! His family and dependents trooped after him, eager to follow. Rosalbina looked back—at one ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Climbing the moss-grown stone, he descended into a dark ravine to the spring. The sun was set by this time, and the sombre shades of twilight began to spread over the scene. His eager eyes pierced the gathering gloom and discovered that the food left had ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... night reared its dark form, and seemed, solemnly and pensively, like a thing of life, to stand before me. The moon rose at its full over the venerable wall, and scattered its bright cool light across the tall and moss-grown windows. Oh! every thing in life that wondrous night stirred up my soul to pious resolutions, and gave a wing to thought that could not find repose but in the silent and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... a tangle of railroad yards and tracks, and miles upon miles of sheds, piled to the top with stores of every sort you could imagine. A whole encampment-city covered the surrounding hills, crowned by an old, creaking, moss-grown windmill—the Middle Ages looking in ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... her grave should be Upon the bare top of a sunny hill, Among the moorlands of her own fair land, Amid a ring of old and moss-grown stones In gorse and heather all embosomed. There should be no tall stone, no marble tomb Above her gentle corse;—the ponderous pile Would press too rudely on those fairy limbs. The turf should lightly he, that ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... across the river to the moss-grown walls which had once been fortifications still visible on the side of the hill, and to the frowning donjon, the blackened towers, the ruined bastions, of what had been once the Rocca, with the amber light and rosy clouds of the ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... Leaping the sullen walls of old Cartagena, the morning beams began to glow in roseate hues on the red-tiled roofs of this ancient metropolis of New Granada, and glance in shafts of fire from her glittering domes and towers. Swiftly they climbed the moss-grown sides of church and convent, and glided over the dull white walls of prison and monastery alike. Pouring through half-turned shutters, they plashed upon floors in floods of gold. Tapping noiselessly on closed portals, they seemed to bid tardy sleepers arise, lest the hurrying midday siesta overtake ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... looking huge and far away. A few steps more, and it was within an arm's length, distinct, dark with moisture, and insignificant in size. It had the usual country- schoolhouse form—belonged to the packing-box order of architecture; had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin—a typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad as "monuments of the past." With scarcely a glance ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... knelt quickly on the soft turf or moss to look at a little plant, while the birds which she startled came back to their places directly, as if they had been quick to feel that this was a friend and not an enemy, though disguised in human shape. At last Nan reached the moss-grown fence of the farm and leaped over it, and fairly ran to the river-shore, where she went straight to one of the low-growing cedars, and threw herself upon it as if it were a couch. While she sat there, breathing fast and glowing with bright color, the river sent ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... overhead. He was moving through an avenue that led towards big iron gates beside a little porter's lodge. He saw the hollies, and smelt the laurustinus. There lay the triangle of uncut grass at the cross-roads, the long, grey, wooden palings built upon moss-grown bricks; and against the sky he just caught a glimpse of the feathery, velvet cedar crests, crests that once held nails of golden meteors ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... from the house. It lay in a sort of dip in the ground, and was surrounded on all four sides—for it was exactly square—by very steep high banks, which had been cut into by steep stone steps, now gray, and broken, and moss-grown, which led down straight into the water. This pool was called Shadonake Bath. How long the steps had existed no one knew; probably for several hundred years, for there was a ghost story connected with ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... in a measure, recovered her self-possession, she turned her head towards the river-bank and called my attention to the charming effect of a cottage embosomed in trees, from which rickety steps, moss-grown and picturesquely studded with flowers, led down to the river. One of Isabey's delicious water-colors, dropped here without his signature. Louise—for art, no matter how humble, always expands the mind—has a taste for the beauties of nature, wanting in nearly her whole sex. A flower-stand ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... one and all went down to their graves complaisantly thinking that they had had the last word in the quarrel, little suspecting how great was their obligation to Mr. Adams for having granted them that privilege. One would think (p. 219) that they might have writhed beneath their moss-grown headstones on the day when his last word at length found public utterance, albeit that the controversy had then become one of ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... with his advisers, the monarch gave out this proclamation: "He who shall succeed in getting the golden egg from the moss-grown oak in yonder mountain shall be my ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... sight of him. At first Paul could see nothing but the brambles. Examining the place more minutely, he found the bushes curiously divided in the centre. Feeling beneath them, his hand came in contact with cold iron. It was a ring, attached to a circular piece of wood, rusty and moss-grown, so that in appearance there was little to distinguish it from the undergrowth. He found little difficulty ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... referred to the boat, Hildegarde gladly followed the Ancient Mariner down the path that sloped from the garden, through a green pasture, round to the river-bank. Here she found the boat-house, whose roof she had seen from her window, and a gray wharf with moss-grown piers. The tide was high, and it took Jeremiah only a few minutes to pull the little green boat out, and set her rocking ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... stoops to clear thy moss-grown date Ere he plods on again;— Or whether, by maligner fate, Among the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... downwards. Their tail is broad. Their nests, about an inch in diameter, and as much in breadth, are very compactly formed, the outer coat of grey lichen, and lined with the fine down plucked from the stalks of the fern and other herbs, and are fixed to the side of a branch or the moss-grown side of a tree so artificially, that they appear, when viewed from below, mere mossy knots, or accidental protuberances. They are bold and pugnacious, two males seldom meeting on the same bush or flower without a battle; and the intrepidity of the female, when defending her young, is ...
— Charley's Museum - A Story for Young People • Unknown
... limit of trees proper is considered to begin first at the great bend which the river makes in 69 deg. 40' N.L., a little north of Dudino. Here the hills are covered with a sort of wood consisting of half-withered, grey, moss-grown larches (Larix sibirica), which seldom reach a height of more than seven to ten metres, and which much less deserve the name of trees than the luxuriant alder bushes which grow nearly 2 deg. farther north. But some few miles south of this place, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... undergrowth. A gloomy wood by night has terrors for the bravest, and it was only the certainty that she was leaving girl-life—chaperons, waltz-tunes, and bitter sneering, for ever—that gave courage to proceed. A bit of moss-grown wall, a singularly shaped holly-bush, a white stone, took fantastic and supernatural appearances, and once she stopped, paralyzed with fear, before the grotesque shadow that a dead tree threw over an unexpected glade. A strange bird rose from the bare ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... the Earth's self. Invoke The storm-felled forest-trees moss-grown to-day Whose roots are hillocks where the children play; Or ask the silver sapling 'neath what yoke Those stars, his spray-crown's clustering gems, shall wage Their journey still when his boughs ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... trees of that Spanish island, moss-grown and bowery, in a secluded spot which nature seemed to have set aside for secret counsels, the mutinous crew perfected their plans, and signed a round-robin compact which pledged all present to the perilous ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... glance, Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall, Nor ever lead the merry dance, Among the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... up the moss-grown steps at the end of the courtyard, and out on to the rampart. A view of infinite beauty lay before her: a vast expanse of green fields through which the river Neckar flows gently, a smiling valley ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... had returned to Mrs. Gaddesden, and to the surrender of Martindale to its new master. For the estate went to a cousin, and when the beauty and the burden of it were finally gone, Philip's gentle ineffectual mother departed with relief to the moss-grown dower-house beside Bassenthwaite lake, there to sorrow for her only son, and to find in the expansion of Elizabeth's life, in Elizabeth's letters, and the prospects of Elizabeth's visits, the chief means left of courage and resignation. Philip's love for Anderson, ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in subduing the second thoat, and as Kar Komak had never before ridden one of the beasts, it seemed a most hopeless job; but at last the bowman managed to scramble to the sleek back, and again the two beasts fled softly down the moss-grown avenues toward the open sea-bottom beyond ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... profiting by the old king's instructions. His mother's name was Aethra. As for his father, the boy had never seen him. But, from his earliest remembrance, Aethra used to go with little Theseus into a wood, and sit down upon a moss-grown rock, which was deeply sunken into the earth. Here she often talked with her son about his father, and said that he was called Aegeus, and that he was a great king, and ruled over Attica, and dwelt at Athens, which was as famous a city as any in ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... regiment, insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... the broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between marshaled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart a vague unrest is felt; the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery. Suddenly the clock strikes, and one is forced to go and prepare ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... it should have a sun-dial. For the matter of that, they are all old. Venerableness is their birthright. Whoever thinks of youth in a sun-dial? Were you unboxing one just from the maker would you not expect to find it moss-grown? ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... he could have lived anywhere else. The trees did not stand in stately avenues, nor did the antlers of the deer wave above the sombre fern; it was not the domain of a grand seigneur, but of an old, long-descended English squire. Antiquity spoke in the moss-grown palings in the shadowy groves, in the sharp gable-ends and heavy mullions of the house, as it now came in view, at the base of a hill covered with wood—and partially veiled by the shrubs of the neglected pleasure-ground, separated from the park by the invisible ha-ha. There, gleamed ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unmarred, save where a hillside has been swept by fire. In all our wanderings through the forests we saw no evidences of occupation by the Mongols except the wood roads and a few scattered charcoal pits. These were old and moss-grown, and save for ourselves the valleys ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... soul was in her eyes and, when she asked for a nearer view, I put down my work and led her through the carved gates into the ancient glory which was not only the garden of my house, but the garden of my soul. We passed a moss-grown shrine where a quaint old image looked out across the lake rimmed with flaming azaleas, and on its waters a family of long-legged cranes consulted with each other. Our way led over a bridge with a humped-up ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... of Don Juan which I had been holding, and with a sickening feeling at my heart followed Inspector Bull. He led me towards the object lying on the old moss-grown tomb, and I could not summon the words to ask him who it was. There was a strong presentiment in my mind that I should look upon the dead face of the old lady at whose wish ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... unutterably still and solitary. A robin was perched on the topmost bar of the old wooden gate, singing his joyous carol. As I approached, he hopped from the gate to the low moss-grown wall, and went on singing as I passed him. I was in the humour to apostrophise skylark or donkey, or to be sentimental about anything in creation, just then; so I told my robin what a pretty creature he was, and that I would sooner perish than ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... each other, all forest clad, and many a mighty and moss-grown trunk in that great wilderness told of the forest primeval which in the early days had covered all this part of South Germany. Elsewhere in the land, railways had been built, until there was scarcely a hamlet whose slumbers were undisturbed ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... pit, but now, at this succession of incidents, I began to rub my eyes and ask myself whether this was young Louis de Laval, late of Ashford, in Kent, or whether it was some dream of the adventures of a hero of Pigault Lebrun. These massive moss-grown arches and mighty iron-clamped doors were, indeed, like the dim shadowy background of a vision; but the guttering taper, my sodden bundle, and all the sordid details of my disarranged toilet assured me only too clearly of their reality. ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... presently saw the abbey again, with the restored wing where the noble owner lived for two or three weeks in the year, but now given over to the prevailing solitude. And then, issuing from the chase, he came upon a broad, moss-grown terrace. Before him stretched a tangled and luxuriant wilderness of shrubs and flowers, darkened by cypress and cedars of Lebanon; its dun depths illuminated by dazzling white statues, vases, trellises, and paved paths, choked and lost in the trailing growths of years of abandonment ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... in to the shore, landing on a sloping rock which was moss-grown above the mark of the last flood. Ruth fastened the tow-rope to the staff of a slender sapling. Wonota got out to help Helen gather some of the more delicately fronded ferns. Ruth turned her back upon them and ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... lake is past, Duncraggan's huts appear at last, And peep, like moss-grown rocks, half seen Half hidden in the copse so green; There mayst thou rest, thy labor done, Their lord shall speed the signal on.— As stoops the hawk upon his prey, The henchman shot him down the way. What woful accents load the gale? The funeral yell, the female wail! A gallant ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Inside the moss-grown old mill there was music and dancing going on, for, comfortably reclining on a pile of cotton seed in the rough ginning-room, with thick festoons of cobwebs everywhere, and bits of dusty lint clinging to every splinter in its walls, a young man was playing a banjo, and two others, with naked ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various |
