"Mullein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there was the wondrous moonwort (Botrychium lunaria), which was doubly valuable from its mystic virtue, for, as Culpepper[22] tells us, it was believed to open locks and possess other magic virtues. The mullein, popularly termed the hag-taper, was also in request, and the honesty (Lunaria biennis), "in sorceries excelling," was equally employed. By Scotch witches the woodbine was a favourite plant,[23] who, in effecting magical cures, passed their patients nine times through a girth or ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... a cold. Now let me tell you what to do for it. Make a tea out of pine straw and mullein leaves an' when you gets ready for bed tonight take a big drink of it an' take some tallow and mix snuff with it an' grease the bottom of your feets and under your arms an' behind your ears and you'll ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... Old Mr. Toad gave up and went home, where he sat under a big mullein leaf the rest of the day, feeling very miserable and lonely. He didn't have appetite enough to snap at a single fly. Late that afternoon he heard a little noise and looked up to find all his old friends and neighbors forming a circle around him. Suddenly ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... a fight as I have had with your exquisite studies, and how I have been beaten! I failed entirely in the golden-rod, and do not get the brilliant yellow of the mullein flower; one could not easily fail on the saggitarius, and the clover was tolerable. I think I will take no more lessons at present, as I have much to do in getting another boy fitted for college. After I get settled at Dorset I want to make a desperate ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... of lichen green, They creep from the mullein's velvet screen, Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touched trees, Where they swing in their cobweb hammocks high, And rocked about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest— They had driven him out by elfin power, And, pillowed on plumes of his rainbow ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... haunting river, field, and wood, for picturesque studies, and sighing for ruins to copy. She caught endless colds sitting on damp grass to book 'a delicious bit', composed of a stone, a stump, one mushroom, and a broken mullein stalk, or 'a heavenly mass of clouds', that looked like a choice display of featherbeds when done. She sacrificed her complexion floating on the river in the midsummer sun to study light and shade, and got a wrinkle over her nose trying after ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... this one only five grains. Yet these few seeds were fertile; so that in this case the first cross was almost sterile, though the hybrid when at length produced was fertile. In like manner, dissimilarly coloured varieties of Verbascum or mullein have been found by two distinct observers to be comparatively infertile. The two pimpernels (Anagallis arvensis and A. coerulea), classed by most botanists as varieties of one species, have been found, after repeated trials, to be ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... down on the floor of the uninclosed passage between the two rooms, his legs dangling over the sparse sprouts of chickweed and clumps of mullein that grew just beneath, for there were no steps, and Towse bounded up and sat upright close beside him. And as he sought to lean on Towse, the dog sought to ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... her clams an' lobsters. You can always live well in any wild place by the sea when you'd starve to death up country, except 'twas berry time. Joanna had berries out there, blackberries at least, and there was a few herbs in case she needed them. Mullein in great quantities and a plant o' wormwood I remember seeing once when I stayed there, long before she fled out to Shell-heap. Yes, I recall the wormwood, which is always a planted herb, so there must have been folks there before ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... worthy mole-catcher! come and behold the prospect of skirting Ishmael; come and look nature boldly in the face, and not go sneaking any longer, among the prairie grass and mullein tops, like a gobbler nibbling ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... life by their majesty, that hillside was open pasture, where the sunshine streamed all day long. Wild roses clambered over stumps of fallen monarchs, and scrub oak sheltered resting sheep. As it swept to the crest, the hillside was thickly dotted with mullein, its pale yellow-green leaves spreading over the grass, and its spiral of canary-coloured bloom stiffly upstanding. There were thistles, the big, rank, richly growing, kind, that browsing cattle and ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Lloyd's side, listening to her and talking to her, snapping the whip the while, or flicking the heads from the mullein stalks by the roadside with its lash, he was thinking how best he might say to her what he had come from the City to say. To lead up to his subject, to guide the conversation, to prepare the right psychological moment skilfully and without ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... the home. A cat was sitting high in a crevice in the logs where the daubing had fallen out; the moon glittered in its great yellow eyes. A frog was leaping along the open space about the rude step at Augusta's feet. A clump of mullein leaves, silvered by the light, spangled by the dew, hid him presently. What an elusive glistening gauze hung over the valley far below, where the sense of distance was limited by the sense of sight!—for it was here only that the night, though so brilliant, must attest the incomparable ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the road in its clump of pines. The coach stopped, and Rand and Jacqueline, descending, crossed a strip of short grass tufted with fennel and velvet mullein to the gate beneath the mimosa, entered the gay little yard, and moved up the path to the larger of the two porches. They were at home. On the porch to welcome them they found the white man who worked ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... Hiram at last, "he's pumpin' lies into that shipmate of yourn till even from this distance I can see him swellin' like a hop-toad under a mullein leaf. I tell you, you've got to do something. What if it should come calm and you ain't got him talked over and they should take the boat and row over to the mainland? Where'd you and your check be if he ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone—but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... shining marguerite; To haunt old fences overgrown with brier, Muffled in vines, and hawthorns, and wild cherries, Rank poisonous ivies, red-bunched elderberries, And pied blossoms to the heart's desire, Gray mullein towering into yellow bloom, Pink-tasseled milkweed, breathing dense perfume, And swarthy vervain, tipped ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... up the curtain, and I sat there all alone in the hush of the dying day and listened to a concert of nature's musicians who sing as God hath taught them to sing. The first singer that entered my stage was Signor Grasshopper. He mounted a mullein leaf and sang, and sang, and sang, until Professor Turkey Gobbler slipped up behind him with open mouth, and Signor Grasshopper vanished from the footlights forevermore. And as Professor Turkey Gobbler strutted off my stage with a merry gobble, the orchestra opened ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... milkweed with its bursting silken pods, And the stately, waving branches of the yellow goldenrod; The mullein stalk and asters, with teasels growing dense, God's garden, in the angle of the ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... changed. The New Year had come in smiling, mild as April, dust in the roads, a blue sky overhead. The withered goldenrod and gaunt mullein stalks and dead asters by the wayside almost seemed to bloom again, while the winter wheat gave an actual vernal touch. The long column, winding somewhere—no one knew where, but anyhow on the Pugh Town Road and in a northwesterly direction (even Old Jack couldn't keep ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... is a plant sufficiently common in this island, and as we have but one species, and that so generally known, I should have thought it superfluous either to figure or describe it; had I not more than once seen the leaves of Mullein[1] gathered for those of Foxglove. On the continent of Europe too, other species are found, and I have been informed that our species is very rare in some parts of Germany, existing only by ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... had a hackin' cough and a rackin' pain in my breast night and day, and I fell off till my own blood kin didn't know me. Everybody give me up; but old Miss Polly Flanders in Hancock, right j'inin' county from Greene, she sent me word to make me some mullein tea, and drink sweet milk right fresh from the cow; and from that day to this I've never know'd what weak lungs was. I reckon you'll be mighty lonesome here," said Mrs. Haley after William had returned with a fresh supply of batter-cakes, "but you'll find folks mighty neighborly, once you come to ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris |
