"Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who would never see eighty again, and whose wife was even older. Their two sons lived with them in the capacity of loafers and, as things go in these rapid times of ours, appeared to be even older and more sere than their parents. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... shall return to these last, as to more vulgar companions. In this lonely glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-embedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and to such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... Thus Mourzuk is not quite one of those oases, or Hesperian gardens, where the happy residents quaff the elixir of immortal health and virtue. Contrarily, it is a sink of vice and disease within, and a sere foliage of palms and vegetation without, overhung with an ever forbidding sky, of dull ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... holes at all, but only clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear—but still there was no horizon—and there was brownish earth with small green patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... hair across her brow, She went into the garden fading now; Vanity of vanities the Preacher saith— And if one sighed to think that it was sere, She smiled to think that it would bloom next year! She feared thee not, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the flowers of Summer, And the forest robes grew sere; Still in darkness knelt the maiden, Pleading, ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... of mutual love only the night before, and Will was power-fully moved to glance often toward the house, but feared somehow the jokes of his companions. He worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on the future-the rustle of the oak tree nearby, the noise of whose sere leaves he could distinguish beneath the booming snarl of the machine; on the sky, where great fleets of clouds were sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to some land ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... shrill yet mellow pipe, That in the voiceless calm of the young morn, Commingles with my dreams:—lo! as I draw Aside the curtains of my couch, he sits, Deep over-bower'd by broad geranium leaves, (Leaves trembling 'neath the touch of sere decay,) Upon the dewy window-sill, and perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... tho' sere and dead, Can by their fragrance bring Remembrance of the days long fled Again on Memory's wing. So many a kindly smile I'll mourn With deep and fond regret; For though I never may ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... slowly into the west, leaving behind him a deep red glow that illuminated the hills, and burnished the windows of the sick-chamber. The wind moaned, and, sweeping the sere leaves at intervals, threatened a tempest. There was a solemn stillness in the parsonage, around whose gate—weeping in silence, without heart to speak, or wish to make their sorrow known—were collected a host of humble creatures—the poorest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... "The sere wounded one, O sweetest Dulcinea of Toboso, sends thee the health which he wants himself. If thy beauty disdain me, I cannot live. My good Squire Sancho will give thee ample account, O ungrateful fair one, of the penance I do for love of thee. Should ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... o'er head sat a raven, On a sere bough, a grown great bird, and hoarse! Who, all the while the deer was breaking up So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous; Swore it was Mother Maudlin, whom he met At the day-dawn, just as ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... from his bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a lustrous blur in ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Divinity that guides her must protect their new evolving creatures. A too sudden revelation and they might perish from sheer wonder.... Yes, truth must come softened, as a dream, to the man child's brain. Its naked light would sere and blind him forever.... But to me it has been given to see—to hear—and keep sane in the light. Oh, from what planet is the call? From what one of the hundred million spheres? How many centuries has it been sent outward ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... exhilarating freshness which made the spirits rise and the blood dance healthily in the veins. The old orchard wore its holiday attire. Goldenrod and asters fringed the mossy walls. Grasshoppers skipped briskly in the sere grass, and crickets chirped like fairy pipers at a feast. Squirrels were busy with their small harvesting. Birds twittered their adieux from the alders in the lane, and every tree stood ready to send ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe is already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... in plague and famine some. Earth's cities had no sound or tread, and ships were drifting with the dead to shores where all was dumb. Yet, prophet-like, that Lone One stood, with dauntless words and high, that shook the sere leaves from the wood as if a storm passed by, saying—"We are twins in death, proud Sun! thy face is cold, thy race is run, 'tis mercy bids thee go; for thou ten thousand years hast seen the tide of human tears—that shall no longer flow. What though beneath ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these are all ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... warehouse in their own line, and a desk at an insurance office. This sounded best, but had the smallest salary to begin with, and locality had to be taken into account. Mr. Dutton's plan was, that as soon as Mark was no longer necessary for what Annaple was pleased to call the fall of the sere and withered leaf, the pair should come to stay with him, so that Mark could see his possible employers, and Annaple consider of the situations. They accepted this gratefully, Mark only proposing that she should go either to his stepmother ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The trees turned into naked black ghosts; or, rather, into many-stringed harps whereon the northwest gales alternately shrieked and roared. The fire-blue lake was a sheet of leaden ice, twenty inches thick. The fields showed sere and grayly lifeless in the patches between sodden snow-swathes. Nature had flown south, with the birds; leaving the northern world a lifeless and empty husk, as deserted as last ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... swift way keeping, Like sere leaves down thy current sweeping, Are lost for aye, and sped— And Death the wintry soil is heaping As fast as flowers are shed. And she who wandered by my side, And breathed enchantment o'er thy ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... know what you're thinking. You're thinking that forty's just the right age for me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and he ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Let's smile it away, Bring not a withered rose from yesterday; Flowers are so fresh from the wayside and wood, Sorrows are blessings but half understood. Say! Let's not mind it, however it seems, Hope is so sweet and holds so many dreams; All of the sere fields with blossoms shall blaze One of ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... sorrows in her sight. And earth was bitter, and heaven, and even the sea Sorrowful even as he. And the wind helped not, and the sun was dumb; And with too long strong stress of grief to be His heart grew sere ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... age so sad? Has Schopenhauer carried the judgment of mankind by his favorite motto, "It is safer to trust fear than faith?" Is it because our age has lost faith in God? Have doubt and skepticism burned the divine dew off the grass, and left it sere and brown? Nay, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... quid sere recusent Quid valeant humeri. And, Ego nec studium sine divite vena, Nec rude ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... then, too, of woodlands lover, Dusk October, berry-stained; Wailed about of parting plover,— Thou then, too, of woodlands lover. Fading now are copse and cover; Forests now are sere and waned. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... Philanor, verily even the glory of thy fleet feet would have fallen into the sere leaf unrenowned, abiding by the hearth of thy kin, as a cock that fighteth but at home, had not the strife of citizen against citizen driven thee from ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a breath of chill came out of the hollows ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... vanish—the stately dinner parties grow dim, Masters of Horses and Hounds go to battle, the plate is melted down, and all is sad and sere. The young lord is sent by King Charles abroad, and Parliamentary Fairfax comes thundering at the gate, where admittance is refused by the venerable old marquis. Fairfax besieges boldly and is gallantly attacked by repeated sallies. I had rather the Puritans, with whom ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... No hastening night that knows, She hath a never-ending year Which feels no blight of autumn sere, Nor chill of ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... clerks watched him with mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the inner shut space. It was a large light room with windows on Charter Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... still the memory, never sere, But fresh as after fallen rain, Of those who learned their lesson here And may not ever come again, Gives to this garden, bruised and browned, A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... them and the water. Many hills were covered with a thin forest of oaks and very little underbrush. At a distance the ground appeared as if carefully trimmed for occupation, especially as it had a few open places like fields. In the sere and yellow leaf of autumn these groves were charming, and I presume they are equally so in ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... her were a sweet relief, The bride of a single year. Oh! would she might, with her weight of grief, Lie down in the dust, with the autumn leaf Now trodden and brown and sere! ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... of Yellow Old Bald up came the sun, bannered and glorious; the distant ranges glowed in his splendours; the sere fields about the place were all gilded. The small-paned eastern window of the sick-room let in a flood of morning light. Gone was the bird choir that used to welcome his earliest rays, swept south by the great tide of migration. Those that remained, snowbird, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... a piece of lint wetted with glycerine or spread with spermaceti ointment, the part being at the same time carefully preserved from dirt, cold, and wind. It is said that a once favorite actress, celebrated for the beauty of her hands, even when in the "sere and yellow leaf," covered them nightly with the flare of a calf or lamb, with the fat attached, over which was drawn a glove or mitten of soft leather. The application of a little glycerine or fatty matter, in the way just indicated, would ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... colour, so long as they are not conspicuous. In a majority of cases, however, the colour is undoubtedly protective, the brown hue being of a shade that assimilates very closely to the surroundings. There are pale yellowish browns, lined and mottled, in species living amidst a sere, scanty vegetation; earthy browns, in those frequenting open sterile or stony places; while the species that creep on trees in forests are dark brown in colour, and in many cases the feathers are mottled in such a manner as to make them curiously resemble ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... old, this "child of hate," as Wotan long ago called him, sere and pallid, totally unglad and hating the glad. He is the tool created by Alberich—even as Siegmund was Wotan's tool,—to win back for him the Ring. From his Nibelung father he has more than human powers and knowledge. In the conversation which we overhear between ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... leaves were sere, Or scattered by the Autumn wind, Fierce lightnings struck its glories down, And left ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid Candour, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also in these days declaring itself nought, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... bravely recognised that any statement of truth which is so framed as to be falsely understood conveys a lie. If the dramatist says quite truly, "This particular leaf is sere and yellow," and if the audience quite falsely understands him to say, "All leaves are sere and yellow," the gigantic lie has illogically been conveyed that the world is ever windy with autumn, that ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... fire Of maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed With rumpled feathers down the wind again. Oh, were the ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... this time, the fields of force took a sere planet, of barren, blistered rock, and with a concept made it into the garden of man's dreams. On one island, they set up a crystalline structure, a thing, this much concession to the mind of man; ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... 'mong the fern-stalks green,— Or dreameth of elves 'neath the forest treen: He wrappeth him up when the oak leaves sere And the ripe acorns fall, at the wane o' the year; And he tippleth at Yule, by the log's cheery glow.— Come, jollily trowl The brown round bowl, And pledge the bold swineherd ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... with fair remembrances of summer, and the earth was golden and red; and the sky was folded in lawny clouds, which the breeze was lifting, revealing beautiful spaces of blue. All the abundant hedgerows were red with the leaf of the wild cherry, and the oak woods wore masses of sere and russet leafage. Spreading beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood. Sprays trembled on naked rods, ferns and grasses fell about ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... a gal—runned arter the gypsies! But she'm sobered now. Funny to think her mother, as seemed like a woman robbed of her right hand when Chris went, an' beginned to graw into the sere onusual quick for a widow, took new life as soon as her gal comed back. Just shaws what strength lies in a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Sleeping? There was one who had no rest that night. An upper window of the house of Morelos looked out upon a court in which two palm trees grew. They had been tall and flourishing. One might see them from the court-room. But for a year they had been shedding their leaflets and turning sere. Tonight their yellow stems had clashed and whispered until the wind was down, leaving the night sullen, brooding, thick, starless, with dashes of rain and a raw chill on the ground that brought out ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... opens to the sides in lofty Gothic arches, and is defended by a low rail of enclosure. At one extremity of it, a tall, thriving young cypress rears its spiral form. Creeping plants of different kinds, "with ivy never sere," have spread themselves very luxuriantly over every part of the Abbey. Amongst other decorations, we observed a plum-tree, which was, perhaps, at one period, a prisoner, chained to the solid masonry, but which having long since been emancipated, now threw out its wild, pendant branches, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... the year is new, Nor changes, when its frosts appear: For the star still shines in its ground of blue, And the pine tree lives when the rest are sere. From the pine my thoughts ascend above To the Tree of LIfe that Heaven adorns; From the star to the Star of my Saviour's Love, That grandly shone in a crown ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... hesitated—then looked up frankly—"I would rather you spoke no more of it, Harry! I've made my confession. I admit I nearly struck Leveson for slandering an innocent and defenseless woman,—and I believe you'll forgive me for that. Next, I own that though I am getting into the sere and yellow leaf, I am still conscious of a heart,—and that I feel a regretful yearning at times for the joys I have missed out of my life—and you'll forgive me for that too,—I know you will! For the rest, draw a curtain over this ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... fostering love is found, And the Hagi tree is dead and sere, The motherless deer lies on the ground, Helpless and weak, no ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... attention, had taken in every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that we are a good deal hampered with 'old blood.' Sir Allan {44} will not be in our way, however. He is very reasonable, and requires only that we should not in his 'sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside. This I would never assent to, for I cannot forget his ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... we cannot afford to go about with black eyes, except as an occasional indulgence. Then it is that single-stick comes in. Boxing is the game of youth, and fencing with foils, we have been assured, improves as men fall into the sere and yellow leaf. Single-stick, then, may be looked upon as a gentle exercise, ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... radiating from its centres—powdering in the fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black species?—or a black-parched state of other species, perishing for the sake of Velasquez effects, instead of accumulation of earth? and, if so, does it die of drought, accidentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally? and how is it related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to such ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... became aware, as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking a ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers, clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the spontaneous conflagration ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... lieth in knowing and loving of God, in light and ghostly brenning of Him, in transforming of the soul in to the Godhead; but also many other comforts, savours, sweetnesses, and wonderful feelings on sere[160] or sundry manners, after that our Lord vouchethsafe to visit His creatures here in earth, and after that the soul profiteth and waxeth in charity. Some soul, by virtue of charity that God giveth it, is ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... soldiers remaining busied themselves over their mess fires. Jacques looked down a cove not quite as steep as the rest of the cliff, yet as nearly perpendicular as any surface on which trees and bushes can take hold. It was clothed with a thick growth of sere weeds, cut by one hint of a diagonal line. Perhaps laborers at a fulling mill now rotting below had once climbed this rock. Rain had carried the earth from above in small cataracts down its face, making a thin alluvial coating. A ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... at once be seen: Trees, at one time, shall be both sere and green: Fire and water shall together lie In one self-sweet-conspiring sympathy: Summer and winter shall at one time show Ripe ears of corn, and up to th' ears in snow: Seas shall be sandless; fields devoid of grass; Shapeless the world, as when all chaos was, Before, my dear Perilla, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... the cannonading ceased and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after him another ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Sere'na, allured by the mildness of the weather, went into the fields to gather wild flowers for a garland, when she was attacked by the Blatant Beast, who carried her off in its mouth. Her cries attracted to the spot Sir Calidore, who compelled the beast to drop its prey.—Spenser, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... old cedars yonder by the way-side, beneath their weight of snow. Wherever the eye can pierce their white vesture, all is still deep spring-green beneath; unchanged at heart—strong and true. So I like to look on you, Sere Leaf.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Lonely and poor, shalt thou roam, For a loving friend hast thou found in me, And rest in my little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower lay ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... powers of imagination in endeavoring to picture the positions of the troops,—how they look, how they act, how they stand amid the terrible storm, braying death, how they rush into the thickest fire, how they fall like the sere leaves of autumn,—you will fail in your conceptions of the conflict. You must see it, and be in it, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear, Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon? Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere? For your sake, I would go and seek the year, Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune, Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon Streaks with a ghostly finger, and her sneer Pulls at my lengthening shadow. Yes, 'tis that! My shadow stretches ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... resolved, the peasants were enjoined Sere-wood, and firs, and doddered oaks to find. With sounding axes to the grove they go, Fell, split, and lay the fuel in a row; Vulcanian food: a bier is next prepared, On which the lifeless body should be reared, Covered with cloth of gold; on which was ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... red glare of the flames upon every object for miles around, tinging each with a lurid gleam like nothing in nature. The dark neutrals of the far-off mountains, the gray-green of the pines, the sere colors of the parched valley, the dark dull-green of the oaks, garlanded with hoary moss, and the gay foliage of the wild grape; all came out distinctly in this furnace-glow, but with quite new effects. In the strong and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... evening was very beautiful. The cold November day was dying into night. Clear, clear was the sky save for some black and heavy snow clouds that floated on it driven before the easterly wind that piped through the sere grasses and blew the plovers over him as though they were dead leaves. Where the sun had vanished long bars of purple lay above the horizon; to his excited fancy they looked like the gateway of another and a better world, set, as the old Egyptians ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... Cemetery, on Wednesday, the 22nd February. During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the still form cold ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... possibilities which the well-laid-out kitchen garden at the rear of the house promised to afford. Everything at present was bare and sere, but when the spring opened it would require but little labor, and that of a pleasant description, to prepare a garden that should delight the heart of any housekeeper; and the flower-beds in the front of the house, which ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... and alway, night and morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds twittering all around,— (Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!)— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... fiftieth birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... into night. Along the sere and melancholy wood, the autumnal winds crept, with a lowly, but gathering moan. Where the water held its course, a damp and ghostly mist clogged the air, but the skies were calm, and chequered only by a few clouds, that swept in long, white, spectral ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the corner of the demolished abode, made his way through a press of sere cabbage palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blinding expanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a bright rim over corrugated and pitted rock, where shallow ultramarine pools spread gardens of sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. The land curved in upon ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which shocked contemporaries, and which, by the way, has the very large first title of Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... pine lying across the trail. Roy remembered the tree. It had stood on a little knoll, strong and graceful, reaching straight toward heaven with a kind of gallant uprightness. Now its trunk was snapped, its boughs crushed, its foliage turning sere. An envious wind had brought it low. Somehow that pine reminded Beaudry poignantly of the girl they were seeking. She, too, had always stood aloof, a fine and vital personality, before the eyes of men sufficient to ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... how our poor eyes fall, Nor how our cheeks are sunk and sere . . . Dear, when you waken, will you call? . . . Alas! we ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... to weave her nest, She seeks and gathers there or here; But spins it from her faithful breast, Renewing still, till leaves are sere. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... with a species of borrowed light, seem like scenery which one has seen in the glance of a mid-day sun, presented again to the dreamy "evening sense" under the soft blue effulgence of the waning harvest-moon; the trees with the sere leaf rustling under the fluttering wing of the night bird; and the dead silence, which is not broken by the internal voice speaking the words that have been spoken by those who lie under the yew tree. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crisped and sere, as I sat in the porch chair and regarded our neighbor's patch of woodland; and I thought: The skies may be ashen and sober, and the leaves may be crisped and sere, but in a maple wood we may dispense with the sun, such irradiation is there from the gold of the crisped leaves. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... three other ladies at table to-night, each of whom sat by her husband's side. Though they were all in what Dr. Spinks afterwards termed the sere and yellow leaf, both he and the good captain really vied with each other in paying kindly ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... maple-buds along the misty hills, And that immortal call which fills The waiting wood with songs? The snow-drops came so long ago, It seemed that Spring was near! But then returned the snow With biting winds, and all the earth grew sere, And sullen clouds drooped low To veil the sadness of a hope deferred: Then rain, rain, rain, incessant rain Beat on the window-pane, Through which I watched the solitary bird That braved the tempest, buffeted and tossed, With rumpled feathers, down the ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... crime, anhungered and athirst, Blank miles of moor sweep inland, sere and blind, Where summer's best rebukes ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... hemlocks, or through the fairyland the gay woods made on either side. Two large boats and two small ones held them all, and away they went, first up through the three bridges and round the bend, then, turning, they floated down to the green island, where a grove of oaks rustled their sere leaves and the squirrels were still gathering acorns. Here they often met to keep their summer revels, and here they now spread their feast on the flat rock which needed no cloth beside its own gray lichens. The girls trimmed each ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... refused to dwell upon a phase of life that was like autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart things to think back, not too far, and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... stealing steps go by? Came not faint whispers near? No!—The wild wind hath many a sigh Amid the foliage sere." ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... but one rival—Fear; Who follows ever on his footsteps, sent By jealous Fate who calls great joy a crime. While in far ways 'mong leaves just turning sere, With gaze serene and placid, walks Content. No heart ere held these two ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Lachner] in accordance with "classical" custom, permitted this concise and concentrated theme, a contrast of power and gentle self-content, to be swept away by the rush of the Allegro, like a sere and withered leaf; so that, whenever it caught the ear at all, a sort of dance pace was heard, in which, during the two opening bars the dancers stepped forward, and in the two following bars twirled about in "Laendler" [Footnote: ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... to the scene; this was given by shrubs, not by trees. The tints were certainly, in the larger growths, less delicate here than there; the poplar's chrome was darker, the willow's mottled chrome more sere. But there was the exquisite pale canary of the birch, the blood-red and yellow of the wild rose, which glows in both hues, the rich crimson of the red willow, with its foil of ivory berries, and ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... Lord Jasper continued, coming over to Henry and taking hold of his arm. "Thirty-one. I'm getting on in years, ole f'la, that's what I'm doing ... sere and yellow, so to speak ... and a chap my age doesn't want to be bothered with a damn play. He wants something ... something substansl!..." He fumbled over the word "substantial" and then fell on it. "Something substansl," he repeated. "Now, if you ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... had not taunted her, and he had not called her Die for many a day before. She put down the decanter and cowered back with a sense of guilt which made her glowing beauty pale, fade, wither, like the sere leaf washed by the heavy tears of ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... blood From sunset light in a crimson flood, We wandered under the young teak trees Whose branches whined in the light night breeze; You led me down to the water's brink, "The Spring where the Panthers come to drink At night; there is always water here Be the season never so parched and sere." Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men? I fain would ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a repressive, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... of the boatmen, pointing to a dark object which floated among the tangled debris of sere weeds and woodwork collected against the ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... few, and, which was worse, the fodder in store was, in prospect of a long siege, scanty. But the worst of all, indeed the only weak and therefore miserable fact, was, that the spirit, I do not mean the courage, of the castle was gone; its enthusiasm had grown sere; its inhabitants no longer loved the king as they had loved him, and even stern-faced general Duty cannot bring up his men to a hand-to-hand conflict with the same ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... beginning to fall; hedgerows glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the rare one), flowers of many sorts, but almost of one tint, still ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... sorrows of men, the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... somewhat overcast by tho mists which announce coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere's house. Many leaves were yet left on the boughs; but they were sere and withered. And the birds chirped at times; but their note was mournful and complaining. All within this house, until Harley's arrival, had been strange and saddening to Helen's timid and subdued spirits. Lady Lansmere had received her kindly, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... the day dawns, my Rose, I will go and look for herbs. I marked some sorrel on the hill yester e'en, albeit something dry and sere." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... rather than among birds and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges are growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and matronly ripeness—if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very landscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the middle age no poet could say enough, our modern poets ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... day of rest, and I sit here Among the trees, green mounds, and leaves as sere As my own blasted hopes. There was a time When Love and perfect Happiness did chime Like two sweet sounds upon this blessed day; But one has flown forever, far away From this poor Earth's unsatisfied desires To love eternal, and the sacred fires With ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... looked out. I perceived a strip of pale, watery blue through a rift in the storm-laden clouds, and I chose to see that, and that only, ignoring the wind-lashed trees of the allee; the leaves, wet, and sodden and sere, hurrying panic-stricken before the gale, ignoring, too, the low wail promising a coming hurricane, which sighed and soughed beneath the wind's ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... matter, from Columbus's discovery in 1492. It's my opinion, I asserted, that some of us had been there thousands of years before, but nobody had had the sense to discover us. We couldn't discover ourselves,—though if we could have foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would taunt us with youth and inexperience, we should have had to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... staring in amaze; the blacksmith strode to the door and looked out, himself a massive, dark silhouette upon the shimmering neutrality of the background. There was no figure in sight; no faint foot-fall was audible, no rustle of the sere leaves; only the voice of the mountain torrent, far below, challenged the stillness with ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... package wrapped in a threadbare shawl and carefully bound with home-twisted twine and this she deposited on her knees and began to unfasten with trembling fingers of expectancy. When she had opened up the thing she rose eagerly and shook out a gown that was as brittle and sere as a leaf in autumn and that rustled frigidly as the stiffened ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... around them spoke of autumn. The sea was roaring hollowly in the distance, the fields were bare and sere, scarfed with golden rod, the brook valley below Green Gables overflowed with asters of ethereal purple, and the Lake of Shining Waters was blue—blue—blue; not the changeful blue of spring, nor the pale azure of summer, but a clear, ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and wooden swords. Their faces and necks, bodies and arms, are ghastly white with chalk or ashes; the hair is left in its original jet, and the dingy lower limbs contrast violently with the ghostlike absence of colour above. The dress is a crinoline of palm-fronds, some fresh and green, others sere and brown; a band of strong mid-rib like a yellow hoop passed round the waist spreads out the petticoat like a farthingale, and the ragged ends depend to the knees; sometimes it is worn under the axillae, but in all cases the chalked arms must be outside. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... needless dead! That great soul whose beautiful body is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside—could it not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain devotion? Would one exception have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the divine, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of wings Bears far the fiery fear, Till scarce the breeze now brings Dim murmurings to the ear; Like locusts' humming hail, Or thrash of tiny flail Plied by the fitful gale On some old roof-tree sere. ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... the season when nature Is all in the sere, When her snow-showers are hailing, Her rain-sleet assailing, Her mountain winds ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... verdict with becoming meekness. I remember that when we first went to house-keeping Poultney Briggs was in the van of artistic progress, and that no one was to be mentioned in the same breath with him; yet now, apparently, he was of the sere-and-yellow-leaf order, professionally speaking. And I was old fogy enough not to have been aware of it. Clearly, I was not fit to be entrusted with the selection of even a door-mat, to say nothing of the wall-papers and carpets. ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... takene byside a howse of religione [i.e. Whalley] in Lancashyre, by the mene of a blacke monke of Abyngtone [Abingdon] in a wode called Cletherwode [the wood of Clitheroe], besyde Bungerly hyppyngstones, by Thomas Talbott, sonne and heyre to sere Edmunde Talbot of Basshalle, and Jhon Talbott, his cosyne, of Colebry [i.e. Salebury, in Blackburn], withe other moo; which discryvide [him] beynge at his dynere at Wadyngton halle: and [he was] carryed to London on horsebake, and his leges ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... lot of gas I was wasting, but too lazy or too tired to get up to turn it down. Your little "spray" hangs right over the head of my bed, an it was it was slightly dilapidated by its journey hither, I have tucked in a bit of green fern with it to remind me that I was not always in the sere and yellow leaf, but had a spring-time once. To think of your going for to go and write verses to me in my old age! I have just been reading them over and think it was real good of you to up and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... denies, ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, to some Lady-friend: "Emilie ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... low, by autumn's wind and rain, through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed, in many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... his Maker (and his Maker's works, if ever they have any sympathy) listened to the wild outpourings of an aged but still very natural heart, which had always been proud of controlling itself. I could see his great frame through a willow-tree, with the sere grass and withered reeds around, and the faint gleam of fugitive water beyond. He was kneeling toward his shattered mill, having rolled his shirt sleeves back to pray, and his white locks shone in the starlight; then, after trying several times, he managed to pray a little. First (perhaps partly ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew, and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent. It was a last look. He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon the bright spot in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the carpet bag when I arrived all right, and much obliged. I do not think I shall take any arsenic; shall send partridges to Mr. Yarrell; much obliged. Ask Edward to BARGAIN WITH Clemson to make for my gun—TWO SPARE hammers or cocks, two main-springs, two sere-springs, four nipples or plugs—I mean one for each barrel, except nipples, of which there must be two for each, all of excellent quality, and set about them immediately; tell Edward to make inquiries about prices. I go on Sunday per packet ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... nests. Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the grey base of the mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber; the wood, dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun; the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to the shore, Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor, Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence, When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill And autumn winds are still; To watch the East for some emerging sign, Wintry Capella or the Pleiades Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; Ravished in hours like these Before thy universal ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... in 't: Like mistletoe on sere elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... vestibule, he saw something that he had never seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... drawer of her work-box, and, wrapping them in the paper which had enclosed them, held them in the flame of the lamp until they were consumed? Why? Because love, unwatched for, unbidden had entered her heart, which she thought sere as the rose-leaves, and restored light to the sunshine ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... nor I will not, hold me still; My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; 20 Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; Stigmatical in making, worse ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... in volunteering an opinion upon what in the first instance only concerns you and the Queen and Lord Canning. But having seen something of public life during a great part of my own, which is now fast verging into the "sere and yellow leaf," I may venture to say that I never knew a nobler thing than that which you have done in preferring the safety of India to the success of your Chinese negotiations. If I know anything of English public opinion, this single act will place you ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... of Poe! It is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white walls, and clothe it in a mystic veil of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the sere, yellow skeletons of last summer's ferns, if haply winter have forgotten one green leaf for our home vase—in vain we rake, freezing our fingers through our fur gloves—there is not one. An icicle has pierced every heart; and there are no fern leaves except those miniature ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe |
