"Sylvan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Druid lies. Where slowly winds the stealing wave; The year's best sweets shall duteous rise To deck its poet's sylvan grave. Ode on the Death ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... abyss, some old, tiny, mysterious pagoda, half hidden in the foliage of the overhanging trees, bringing to the minds of new arrivals, like ourselves, a sense of unfamiliarity and strangeness, and the feeling that in this country the spirits, the sylvan gods, the antique symbols, faithful guardians of the woods and forests, were ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... is now, busy in her tiny garden, with the birds twittering about her, and the yellow leaves falling; and her thick gauntlets on her slender hands. How fresh and pretty she looks in that sad, sylvan solitude, with the background of the dull crimson brick and the climbing roses. Bars of sunshine fall through the branches above, across the thick tapestry of blue, yellow, and crimson, that glow so richly ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Wrandall, grey and gaunt and somewhat wistful, rode slowly through the leafy lane, attended some little distance behind by Griggs the groom, who slumped in the saddle and thought only of the sylvan dell to curse it with poetic license. (Ever since Mr. Wrandall had been thrown by his horse in the Park a few years before his wife had insisted on having a groom handy in case he lost his seat again: hence Griggs.) It sometimes got on Mr. Wrandall's nerves, ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... indulges herself. The Irish, the Welsh, the Gael, or Scottish Highlander, all tribes of Celtic descent, assigned to the Men of Peace, Good Neighbours, or by whatever other names they called these sylvan pigmies, more social habits, and a course of existence far more gay, than the sullen and heavy toils of the more saturnine Duergar. Their elves did not avoid the society of men, though they behaved to those who associated ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... concerned, or his sixteenth part of a race, it does not greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the Southern cabins. In either case, the wonder of their beauty is the same; and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader's heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these enchanting tales. Character, the most precious thing in fiction, is as faithfully portrayed against the poetic background as in the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... which together rose like a flattened dome and lantern from the lighter-hued plain of stubble. It was far too dark to distinguish firs from other trees by the eye alone, but the peculiar dialect of sylvan language which the piny multitude used would have been enough to proclaim their class at any time. In the lovers' stealthy progress up the slopes a dry stick here and there snapped beneath their feet, seeming like ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... who, conscious of his grandeur, loves to see his image in the mirror, the scarped and weather-beaten summit gazes sternly down from above and sees his splendors reproduced, and even enhanced, in the limpid depths below. Often, on a hot day, have I resorted to this sylvan retreat. At this altitude, how deliciously cool is the air; how icy cold the water! It has come pouring down the cataract from the melting snows above! For, strangely enough, the winter rains and the summer suns conspire to keep it always ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... navigators, who, after the example of the Argonauts, explored the dangers of the inhospitable Euxine. On these banks tradition long preserved the memory of the palace of Phineus, infested by the obscene harpies; [4] and of the sylvan reign of Amycus, who defied the son of Leda to the combat of the cestus. [5] The straits of the Bosphorus are terminated by the Cyanean rocks, which, according to the description of the poets, had once floated on the face of the waters; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... at noon in a sylvan glade, and Aggie was pathetic. She dipped a cracker in a cup of tea, and sat off by herself under a tree. Tish, however, had recovered ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... half-hour between dinner and the moment for my appointment to run up and down my mental keyboard under what to me are the most favorable conditions possible—an evening walk through the streets of a great city. Some men can invite their souls only in sylvan solitudes, but the flare of light, the clash of traffic, the kaleidoscopic procession of humanity, with its challenging contrasts shifting and seething on great metropolitan highways, breed in my mind a sense of calm, cool remoteness in which all the glitter and excitement ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... with us over the plain, and pointed out Salisbury spire, visible close to Stonehenge. Under his guidance we returned by a different road from that which brought us thither,—and a much more delightful one. I think I never saw such continued sylvan beauty as this road showed us, passing through a good deal of woodland scenery,—fine old trees, standing each within its own space, and thus having full liberty to outspread itself, and wax strong and broad for ages, instead of being crowded, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... path; his mustang's hoofs sank in deep pits of moss and last year's withered leaves; trailing vines caught his heavy-stirruped feet, or brushed his broad sombrero; the vista before him seemed only to endlessly repeat the same sylvan glade; he was in fancy once more in the primeval Western forest, and encompassed by its vast, dim silences. He did not know that he had in fact only penetrated an ancient park which in former days resounded to the winding fanfare ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... pulled down) in Brick Court. The Temple Gardens, fronting the river, are laid out as extensive shrub and tree-bordered lawns, which are generously thrown open to the public in the summer. A more charming sylvan retreat, there is not in any city ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... path to the right of the shelter, crossed the road, struck the path again, came to a rustic bridge that humped high in the middle, spanning a cool green stream, willow-bordered. The cool green stream was an emerald chain that threaded its way in a complete circlet about the sylvan spot known as Wooded Island, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... so dishonorable. Why should you bury me alive? Is it because one friend still comes with no scheme for the devastation of our sylvan home?" ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... it would be very unsafe to lay undue stress on technique alone. Yet compare the close, sculptural modelling in the figure of Antiope with the broader, looser handling in the figure of Europa; compare the two landscapes, which are even more divergent in style. The glorious sylvan prospect, which adds so much freshness and beauty to the Venere del Pardo, is conspicuously earlier in manner than, for instance, the backgrounds to the Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Calisto ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... inner side, the Ridge dropped to an Alpine meadow that billowed up another slope through mossed forests to the snow line of the Holy Cross Mountains. What the girl saw was a sylvan world of spruce, then the dark green pointed larches where the jubilant rivers rioted down from the snow. What ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... excellent Dr. Small or some other reverend gentleman to myself—the collegiate to the sylvan, the male ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... they contain. Here are materials in abundance for our garland; advance forward, and fear not the issue;"—and, gathering leaves from the boughs of trees of a species unknown to his new acquaintance, he twined them into a wreath, and placed the sylvan diadem on Carl's head. The instant that he felt the light pressure on his temples, all his fears vanished; and he followed his guide, conversing pleasantly through wide avenues and over broad glades of fresh turf, which seemed to be laid out like a royal chase, till they came to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... point—that is to say, to Pittsburg Landing, where Corinth got to it by a road worn through a thickly wooded country seamed with ravines and bayous, rising nobody knows where and running into the river under sylvan arches heavily draped with Spanish moss. In some places they were obstructed by fallen trees. The Corinth road was at certain seasons a branch of the Tennessee River. Its mouth was Pittsburg Landing. Here in 1862 were some fields ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... Jem and Faith trysted there considerably; Jerry and Nan went there to pursue uninterruptedly the ceaseless wrangles and arguments on profound subjects that seemed to be their preferred method of sweethearting. And Rilla had a beloved little sylvan dell of her own there where she ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... on visiting New Harmony, in Indiana, where our friend B—— had been for some time enjoying the delights of sylvan life, and the refinements of backwoods-society, T—— and I purchased a horse, and Dearborne, a species of light waggon used in this country for travelling. We furnished ourselves with a small axe, hunting knives, and all things necessary ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... sylvan picture was rudely disturbed for him. A stag, wild and furious, dashed suddenly forth from among the trees, scattering the does in swift alarm. The vicious beast eyed the green-and-gold tunic of Robin, and, lowering it head, charged at ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and five recalls. The main thing was the acting and the dance—it was the funniest thing in New York for five months. Delmars's song, 'I'll Woo Thee to My Sylvan Home,' while he and Miss Carroll were cutting hide-and-seek capers among the tropical plants, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... and green rides opened vistas into cool depths of shade which had never changed but with the seasons for many ages. It was quite old-world scenery here. Neither clearings nor enclosures had been thought of, and the wild sylvan beauty had all its own perfect way. Presently there were signs of habitation. A curl of smoke from a low roof so lost in its orchard that but for that domestic flag it might have escaped observation altogether; a triangular green with a pond, geese and pigs; more thatched cottages, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... not much, certainly, but it persisted. The impression, defective as I give it, had been pleasing; an impression of warm femininity, of graceful motion. It had had the quality, besides, of the unexpected and the fugitive, and the advantage of a sylvan background. Anyhow, it pursued him. He went on to his journey's end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... Bowery, New York, is a very high-sounding address. It is one that any European might imagine as a retreat of aristocratic refinement and sylvan beauty; there is nothing in the name to suggest the Seven Dials of London in its old days; and yet the place is its counterpart, the only difference being that the Five Points, as it is called, is two degrees worse than the Seven Dials ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... perpendicularly, boughs in search of the light intercepted by the deep shade above. The boughs bore leaves of green, that for want of sunshine had faded into almost lily-white; and from the underside of this natural sylvan bridge depended long and beautiful tresses of ivy, which waved gently in the breeze, that might, poetically speaking, be called the breath of the waterfall. This motion varied, of course, in proportion to the power of water in the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to comprehend, also, that she was entirely contented sitting here by the side of this smiling giant eating delicious fruit in a sylvan paradise far within the remote depths of an African jungle—that she was contented ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quite true—the highly sylvan surroundings of the Trinidad "Sentinel" office—a little clearing in a pine forest—and its attendant fauna, made these signals confusing. An accurate imitation of a woodpecker was also one of ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... substantial shade, Abash'd I heard, and with respect obey'd. 260 From themes too lofty for a bard so mean, Discretion beckons to an humbler scene; The restless fever of ambition laid, Calm I retire, and seek the sylvan shade. Now be the Muse disrobed of all her pride, Be all the glare of verse by truth supplied. And if plain nature pours a simple strain, Which Bute may praise, and Ossian not disdain,— Ossian, sublimest, simplest bard of all, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Answered the blushing Claire, "Fit for my bridal hair, Bloom 'mongst the barley; Hark! 'tis the hunter's horn, Waking the sylvan morn, And through the yellow corn ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... resort in the summer time is Marina Rotze, a species of sylvan garden about two versts from Moscow, and thither, tempted by curiosity, I drove one fine evening. On my arrival the Ziganas came flocking out from their little tents, and from the tractir or inn which has been erected for the accommodation ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... echoing from haunted Spring and Dale, as ne'er smote human Ears before nor since: Nymphs and Wood-Gods, or they that had passed for such, breaking up House and retreating to their own Place. I warrant you, there was Trouble among the Sylvan People that Day—Satyrs hirsute and ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... long after Ackronnion sang again in the sylvan palace of the Queen of the Woods, having first drunk all the tears in his agate bowl. And it was a gala night, and all the court were there and ambassadors from the lands of legend and myth, and even some from ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... tree, talking together with animation. It was his sister-in-law, Sylvia, with her little dog, and Woodville. Before they saw him, Sylvia got up and walked quickly towards the Row with the dog. Woodville looked after her, and then strolled slowly towards the bridge. How well the sylvan surroundings suited them! Sylvia was a wood nymph in a fashionable dress; Woodville, a faun in Bond Street clothes. Chetwode smiled to himself. Then for a moment he was surprised.... It seemed odd to see the ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... pleasant and beautiful exterior usually signifies pleasantness and peace within. While well-fenced and well-tilled farms are always pleasing to the eyesight, and neatly dressed roadsides are generally desirable, it does not follow that no shrubbery or sylvan tangles of trees should be allowed to grow on farms or by the wayside. A bare and rocky hill or knoll suggests images of bleak and barren desolation, cold blasts, and parching sun; while a hill clothed ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... fell, and she danced again and yet again. I forget what she danced, but it spoke to me of a thousand forgotten things of childhood. I know that I touched finger-tips with something more generously pure and happy than I had met for years. Through the hush of lights the sylvan music stole, and Marjorie Carpenter stole with it, and every step of her whispered ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... from the everlasting pillory of art. It was the hour of releases, and I found myself in a moment in the midst of a "classic revival," whimsical beyond description. Aeneas hastened to deposit his aged father in a heap on the gravel and ran after the Sylvan Nymphs; Theseus gave the Minotaur a respite; Themistocles was bending over the dying Spartan, who was coming to life; Venus Pudica was waltzing about the diagonal basin with Antinous; Ascanius was playing marbles with the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... old were curious and unhappy beings who, while carelessly strolling amidst sylvan shades, caught a hasty glimpse of some spirit of the woods, and were doomed ever afterwards to spend their lives in fruitlessly searching after it. The race of Fanatics are somewhat akin to these restless seekers. There is a wildness and excessive ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses in sylvan dells. To call a halt eighteen times in the middle of the romantic duet between the unhappy innkeeper's daughter and the prince. To marry them all smoothly in B flat in the finale, and keep the brass down and the strings up in the apotheosis when the heart of the man behind the baton has been cured ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... abjure? But thou art placed above me; thou art Lord; From thee I can, and must, submiss, endure Cheek or reproof, and glad to scape so quit. Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song; 480 What wonder, then, if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore. Permit me To hear thee when I come (since no man comes), And talk at least, though I despair to attain. Thy Father, who is holy, wise, and pure, Suffers the hypocrite ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... Hence let those Sylvan poets glean, Who picture life without a flaw; Nature may form a perfect scene, But Fancy must the ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... discovery; travels in the East; everything, in short, that partook of adventure and romance. I well remember with what zest I entered upon that part of my studies which treated of the heathen mythology, and particularly of the sylvan deities. Then indeed my school books became dear to me. The neighborhood was well calculated to foster the reveries of a mind like mine. It abounded with solitary retreats, wild streams, solemn forests, and silent valleys. I would ramble about for a whole day with a volume of Ovid's Metamorphoses ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... renewed energy, they rode on, and about noon entered the welcome heavily timbered forest—the surface of which was uneven and rolling, sometimes rising in gentle hills, then towering in precipitous cliffs, interspersed with sylvan dells, through which streamlets wound, sometimes in quiet beauty, and again dashing down ledges of rock, lashing their waters to ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... usual cloud of smoke and flame that hung night and day above the blast furnaces was replaced by a brilliant, hard blue sky. The works were shut down. They had reached the end of Blue Grass Avenue at the south line of the park. It was a spot of semi-sylvan wildness that they were fond of. The carefully platted avenues and streets were mere lines in the rough turf. A little runnel of water, half ditch, half sewer, flowed ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... strange and unaccountable condition of things, however, connected with the prepuce that does not exist with the other vestiges of our arboreal or sylvan existence. Firstly, the other conditions have nothing that interferes with their disappearance; whereas the prepuce, by its mechanical construction and the expanding portions which it incloses, tends at ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... steep and almost inaccessible, but clothed with thickets of wood, and infested by wild boars; that these herdsmen, being oppressed by the tyranny of the Turks of a village called to this day Gardichi, took the resolution of flying for a distance of six hours' journey to this sylvan and inaccessible position, of sharing in common the few animals which they had, and of suffering voluntarily every physical privation, rather than submit to the slightest wrong from their foreign tyrants. This resolution, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Harvard, published in book form in 1907. In 1917 he collected in one attractive volume, Grenstone Poems, the best of his production—exclusive of his plays and prose—up to that date. One who knew Mr. Bynner only by the terrific white slave drama Tiger, would be quite unprepared for the sylvan sweetness of the Grenstone poems. Their environment, mainly rural, does not localize the sentiment overmuch; for the poet's mind is a kingdom, even though he is bounded in a nutshell. The environment, however, may be partly ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... to be heralded by the arrival, ten days before the end of Advent, of the Calabrian minstrels or pifferari with their sylvan pipes (zampogne), resembling the Scottish bagpipe, but less harsh in sound. These minstrels were to be seen in every street in Rome, playing their wild plaintive music before the shrines of the Madonna, under the traditional notion of charming away her labour-pains. Often they would stop ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... hear those wild and sylvan notes When morn's full chorus pours Rejoicing from a thousand feathered throats, And the lark ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... displeased with me. I ought to have remembered that this was too rough for her and taken the other path." Indeed, she had felt rather guilty as Mrs. Potts's back, the ridge of its high stays strongly marked by the slanting sunlight, descended among the sylvan scenery. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... have denied altogether the existence, at any period, of such a person as Robin Hood. They make him either a mere hero of romance—the 'creation of some poetical mind;' or else, led by a similarity of names, they discover in him merely one of the embodiments of popular superstitions—a sylvan sprite, a Robin Goodfellow, or a Hudkin. Only two years ago, a historical writer of no small acumen, Mr Thomas Wright, published his opinion, that Robin Hood, in his original character, was simply 'one ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... neighb'ring pool: This gives us hope, all views of town to shun - No! here are tokens of the Sailor-son; That old blue jacket, and that shirt of check, And silken kerchief for the seaman's neck; Sea-spoils and shells from many a distant shore, And furry robe from frozen Labrador. Our busy streets and sylvan-walks between, Fen, marshes, bog, and heath all intervene; Here pits of crag, with spongy, plashy base, To some enrich th' uncultivated space: For there are blossoms rare, and curious rush, The gale's rich balm, and sun-dew's crimson blush, Whose velvet leaf with radiant ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... other, and disengaging by their shock, the thunder and lightnings. Then fell, not the slender needles of water we call rain, but veritable floods, that were to our heaviest European showers what the cataracts of the Rhine, at Staubach, or the falls of Niagara, are to the gushings of a sylvan rivulet. In a few minutes the Jackal river had converted the valley into a lake, in which the plantations and buildings appeared to be afloat, and rendering ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling. Millet would not even have taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan solitudes of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wild solitariness would be quite proportionate to ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... the open space within the hanging wall of the vines,—perfect sylvan temple,—there lay a mounded grave, covered from head to foot with articles he knew at once to be the gifts of Indians to some great chief gone to the shadowy hunting-grounds. Rich they were, these gifts, in workmanship and carving, though mean and poor ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... is no outlaw in the proper sense of the term. The phrase has survived, but the fact is obsolete," said Seymour, who was both a prig and a purist, a man of leisure, and bookish, but a good shot, and vain of his sylvan accomplishments. "Our law places no man beyond the pale of its protection. He has a constitutional right to plead his ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... gigantic palms. Thickly surrounded by dark shrubs with a silvery sheen, enormous hedges, and groves of bamboo, a fountain reared the fluttering banner of its spray from the midst of a black pool confined within a white curb; but the bubbling pillar did not attain to the height of its dark sylvan background. In the dim background, however, above the cold deep green of the park, rose a mighty erythrina like a rose-colored flame into the rich blue air, like a monstrous, fiery syringa. The light coursed hotly down the smooth trunks of the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... shepherds, is as fair As sylvan nymphs who haunt the vale; As sylphs who dwell in purest air, As fays who skim the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... every one. Hans loved its quiet and sylvan beauty. It was just such a place as he would choose to ramble in, book in hand, and dream away many a pleasant hour. Hendrik liked it much, because he had already observed what he termed "extensive spoor" about the spot: in other ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... of Virgil and of Theocritus—but it hurt him to have these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling the wheat loose from its husk with bounding ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... horses had to pick their way carefully through them. Copper mines, whose furnaces had been half destroyed by the English, were now overgrown with vines and half hidden by fallen trees, showed the combined ravages of war and nature. A few yards in advance of them the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheater, waving with firs and pines, and rendered almost impassable by underbrush. A short turning in the road suddenly brought them in front of a romantic waterfall. The cousins drew rein, watching the fall of the water in silence, for the sound of the cascade ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... No machinery, no tearing saws are in these early days destroying their noble symmetry. But they are doomed. Fires and wanton destruction are yet to come, to leave blackened scars over once lovely areas. Man mutilates the lovely face of Nature's sweetest sylvan retreats. Down the great gorge of the Yosemite, Valois rides past the giant Big Trees of Calaveras. He finds no hidden treasures, no buried deposits. The camps near Lagunitas disclose only some concealed supplies. No arms, valuables, and treasures, torn from the murdered travellers, in the two ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the War. I've crossed the Strand at 11 p.m. when the theatre crowds are just out. And to my mind the corner of State and Madison streets between twelve and one, mid-day, makes any one of these dizzy spots look bosky, sylvan, and deserted. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... invariably seems to pull the wrong string and get the whole team into an inextricable tangle of horns and yokes. Sometimes of a quiet Sunday morning these teams and wagons I see "out-spanned" on the green slopes around Maritzburg, making a picturesque addition to the sylvan scenery. Near each wagon a light wreath of smoke steals up into the summer air, marking where some preparation of "mealies" is on foot, and the groups of grazing oxen—"spans," as each team is called—give the animation of animal life which I miss so sadly at every turn in this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... vows Grappled and grafted me unto thyself. Oh how shall I, not knowing where thou art, Be all myself—thou dost dissever me. Yonder I'll rest awhile, for now I see, Through meshes of the internetted leaves, A little plot, girt with a living wall; A sylvan chamber, that the frolic Pan Has built and bosomed with a leafy dome, And windowed with a narrow glimpse of heaven. Its floor, sky-litten with the noontide sun, Shows garniture of many colored flowers, More dainty than the broidered webs of Tyre; And all about, from beeches, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... a window which overlooked this sylvan aspect, modified if not fashioned by man, a young woman with seeming conscientiousness, told her beads. The apartment, though richly furnished, was in keeping with the devout character of its fair ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... apart, and the Torquati were most conservative among all the great houses. From childhood up—and in years she was scarcely more than a child—all these had been very real to her. Pomona wandered through every orchard beside her beloved Vertumnus; Pan and his sylvan brood sported behind the foliage of every copse. She would as soon have thought of questioning their presence as of doubting her own being. Marcia believed; the average Roman patrician affected to believe and indulged in his polite, Hellenic ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... their gales after, the bearded grasses that shook in the wind, all gave me their secret sigh; all the sweet land around, the distant hill, the distant shore, said, "Redeem me from my chains!" I came across a sylvan statue, some faun nestled in the forest: the rains had stained, frosts cracked, suns blistered it; but what of those? A vine covered with thorns and stemmed with cords had wreathed about it and bound it closely in serpent-coils. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... fortune. He waited long and to good purpose. It was fitting that such a man should marry a poetess; and he found her, not in her rose-garden or some romantic sylvan retreat, but in the city of New York. Miss Julia Ward was the daughter, as she once styled herself, of the Bank of Commerce, but her mind was not bent on money or a fashionable life. She was graceful, witty and charming in the drawing-room; but there was also a serious vein in ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... our creek to-day. We were now near some of the higher cones of the main chain, and could see that they were all entirely timberless, and that triodia grew upon their sides. The spot we were now encamped upon was another scene of exquisite sylvan beauty. We had now been a month in the field, as to-morrow was the 4th of September, and I could certainly congratulate myself upon the result ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... to escape from Jackson with my little family," said the colonel at length, "and I thought that in this, so to say, sylvan retreat I might drop all undesirable acquaintances that ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... soon pushed across the waters of the lutulent Don. Arrived at the opposite banks of the river, they mounted, and, guided by Luke, after half an hour's sharp riding, arrived at the skirts of Rookwood Park. Entering this beautiful sylvan domain, they rode for some time silently among the trees, till they reached the knoll whence Luke beheld the hall on the eventful night of his discovery of his mother's wedding ring. A few days only had elapsed, but during that brief space ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... we reached our sylvan home just as darkness set in. My father looked sternly at Jose, and asked where he had been going. The wretched man, falling on his knees, then acknowledged his intended treachery, and, begging my father to forgive him, said he would ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... alone: around him grew A sylvan tribe of children of the chase; Whose young, unwakened world was ever new, Nor sin, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view A frown on Nature's or on human face: The ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... days. The Innocent was holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d——d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... our sense. And yet a fortnight ago this sylvan retreat was the scene of murder and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and aged courtiers whom her watchful father sent, Mounted on her golden chariot unto sylvan woodlands went. ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... the wing—the artificial stream, the brook taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into the glassy lake, with the yellow leaf sleeping upon its bright waters, and occasionally a rustic temple or sylvan statue grown green and dark with age, give an air of sanctity and picturesque beauty to English scenery that is unknown in the United States. The very labourer with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground-plot before the door, the little ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... to the woods of England,—the cuckoo,—is undoubtedly destitute of family affection, as are others of its relatives; but this is not the case with the whole tribe. As the spring advances, from the sylvan glades of Pennsylvania a curious note, constantly repeated, is heard, resembling the word "cow-cow." It is the note of a bird, and from the sound it resembles it is generally known as the "cow-bird." It is also called the "yellow-billed ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... thought of the special license, splendid saloon, and bridal pomp that would have attended her union with the Duke. But the rapturous expressions which burst from the impassioned Douglas made her forget the gaudy pleasures of pomp and fashion. Amid the sylvan scenes of the neighbouring lakes the lovers sought a shelter; and, mutually charmed with each other, time flew for a ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... pines surrounded a large sheet of water, dipping their lowest branches into it. Mrs. Hyde stood among them, and the white, stately birds were crowding to her very feet. He reined in his horse to watch her, and though accustomed to her beauty, he marvelled again at it. Like a sylvan goddess she stood, divinely tall, and divinely fair; her whole presence suffused with a heavenly serenity and happiness! Upon the soft earth the hoofs of his horse had not been audible, but when he came within her sight, it was wonderful to watch ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... day of the great festival, Ernest, with all the other people of the valley, left their work, and proceeded to the spot where the sylvan banquet was prepared. As he approached, the loud voice of the Rev. Dr. Battleblast was heard, beseeching a blessing on the good things set before them, and on the distinguished friend of peace in whose honor ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... sought some beautiful retreat, Remote from cities and the din of men,— Some tranquil shore where lake and forest meet By limpid stream or flower-lit, sylvan glen, And would have reared, where none could e'er intrude, A shrine ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... to awaken the sentiment of ruin, and to this feeling of the human soul we may trace the pleasure we derive from the sight of this bird in his appropriate scenery. Two Doves upon the mossy branch of a tree in a wild and beautiful sylvan retreat are the pleasing emblems of innocent love and constancy; but they are not more suggestive of poetic fancies than an Owl sitting upon an old gate-post ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... not deserve the strictures of their friend of twenty years, but two things are plainly visible. They are dirty, and they have no enterprise. The island-dotted Clew Bay and the sublime panorama of mountain scenery, the sylvan demesne of the Earl of Sligo, and the forest-bordered inlets of Westport Bay, form a scene of surpassing loveliness and magnificence such as England and Wales together cannot show. The town is well laid out, the streets are ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... come in before these pursuers—and that one was a woman on a roan. Her frightened eyes, the fear that showed in every motion, her hurried flight, all contributed to the same inevitable conclusion. It was difficult to believe it, but impossible to deny. This wild, sylvan creature, with the shy, wonderful eyes, had lain in ambush to kill her father's enemy, and was flying from the vengeance on ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... golden pallor of voluptuous light Filled the warm Southern night: The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene Moved like a stately queen. So rife with conscious beauty all the while, What could she do but smile At her own perfect loveliness below, Glassed in the tranquil flow Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams? Half lost in waking dreams, As down the loneliest forest-dell ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... myrtle, ivy never sere, And fields flower-decorated all the year, And streams that carry secrets to the sea, And hills that hold back something evermore Though wild their speech with clouds in thunder-roar,— Yea, every sylvan sight and peaceful tone Are thine to give thy days their purer zest. Let not the legend grieve thee on this stone. I Death am here. What then? My name ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... padded his couch and clothed his body. He tanned the soft doe hides, making leggings, moccasins and shirts, stitching them together with deer sinew as he had seen his mother do in the long-ago. He gathered the juicy salmonberries, their acid a sylvan, healthful change from meat and fish. Month by month and year by year he sat beside his lonely camp-fire, waiting for his long term of solitude to end. One comfort alone was his—he was enduring the disaster, fighting the evil, that ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... Sire addressed They all obeyed his high behest, And thus begot in countless swarms Brave sons disguised in sylvan forms. Each God, each sage became a sire, Each minstrel of the heavenly choir. Each faun, of children strong and good Whose feet should roam the hill and wood. Snakes, bards, and spirits, serpents bold Had sons too numerous to be told. Bali, the woodland hosts who led, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... back'd by a wood-fring'd height, Where sylvan Usk runs swiftly babbling by: Here thy young eyes first look'd on earth and sky, And all the wonders of the day and night; O born interpreter of Nature's might, Lord of the quiet heart and seeing eye, Vast is our debt to thee we'll ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... sylvan cadence And sweet their simple art. The balladry of the greenwood tree Stirs memories in ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a sunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... grandeur meet, And Taw meandering flows, There is a sylvan, calm retreat, Where erst a ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... together with the botanical studies and the formation of the herbarium, suggested the plan of the "Sylvan Year," and thereby lent additional interest to these pursuits, though at that time his main work was the prosecution of "The Intellectual Life," now that he had finished the correction of the handbook on etching. [Footnote: Contributed to the "Portfolio," and afterwards published ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... ('pig-stickers'): Like the last, this tribe worship the sun, but with the moon as his wife, and the stars as their children. Besides these they revere Manes, and countless local and sylvan deities. Like Druids, they sacrifice only in ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... enterprise or impudence enough to venture from my concealment; indeed, I felt like an arrant poacher, until I read one or two of Ovid's Metamorphoses, when I pictured myself as some sylvan deity, and she a coy wood nymph of whom I was in pursuit. There is something extremely delicious in these early awakenings of the tender passion. I can feel, even at this moment, the thrilling of my boyish bosom, whenever by chance I caught a glimpse of her white frock fluttering among the ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... the blackbird and the nightingale in the copse; and then I thought I would not care to wander here quite alone, and that a whisper might steal on my ear, sweeter than the note of the thrush and the nightingale; and that there might be a somebody without whom all that sylvan beauty would be a blank, but with whom any place would become a fairyland. And then I fell to wondering who that somebody would be; and I looked at Cousin John, and felt a little cross—which was very ungrateful; and a little disappointed—which ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... his honor; but she never carried out the suggestion of her affectionate admiration; and to those who knew and loved Mendelssohn (alas! the expressions are synonymous), the glorious wood itself, where he walked and mused and held converse with the spirit of Shakespeare, forms a solemn sylvan temple, forever consecrated to tender memories of his bright genius and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... and their swains See the beauty of their plains; And command them with their flocks To do reverence on the rocks; Where they may so happy be As her shadow but to see: Bid the birds in every bush Not a bird to be at hush: But to sit, and chirp, and sing To the beauty of the Spring: Call the sylvan nymphs together, Bid them bring their musicks hither. Trees their barky silence break, Crack yet, though they cannot speak Bid the purest, whitest swan Of her feathers make her fan; Let the hound the hare go chase; Lambs and rabbits run at base; Flies be dancing in ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... herself, stretching toward the fire a pair of spotted seal moccasins. These were so small that the feet on which they were laced seemed an infant's, and sorted strangely with the mature keen face above them. Youth, age, and wise sylvan life were brought to a focus in ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of dangling glass lustres, and over the interminable carpet—it ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... third and fourth in the river, were without especial incident. The river maintained its sylvan character, though the bordering hills or bench were gradually growing higher and bolder. Stonor, by putting every ounce that was in him into his paddle, slowly gained again on the dug-out. He knew now that Imbrie, irrespective of Mary, had a second paddle to help him. It gave the dug-out an ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... Nature wore a wrinkled face, That not a leaf e'er shed its sylvan grace, But, harden'd by their northern wind, Rude, deceitful, and unkind, Thy half-cloth'd sons their oaten cake denied, Victims at once of penury ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... my wants supply— Can wealth and honour give me more? Or, will the sylvan god deny The humble treat ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... plants, flowers, trees, and fruits. The crotons, dracaenas, and ferns seemed particularly fine, and two arcades of bamboo trellis leading from the house to the river-bank made very pretty features in the sylvan scene. ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was their ideal, and they were always talking ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... the mind of the savage the world is peopled by a host of mythic beings, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic. The difference between man and brute recognized in civilization, is unrecognized in savagery. All animal life is wonderful and magical co sylvan man. Wisdom, cunning, skill, and prowess are attributed to the real animals to a degree often greater than to man; and there are mythic animals as well as mythic men—monsters dwelling in the mountains and caves or hiding in the waters, who make ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... financially. Moreover, the loneliness in my heart has become fairly overmastering. I can steel myself against it no longer. I want you with me in my declining years. I cannot leave here. I have become greatly attached to this part of the country, and have no doubt that you will be, also. Sylvan scenes, with a dash of human savagery in the foreground, form the best relief for a too-extended assimilation of books. It has been like balm to me, and will prove ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... usher'd with a shower still, When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the russling Leaves, With minute drops from off the Eaves. And when the Sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me Goddes bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown that Sylvan loves, Of Pine, or monumental Oake, Where the rude Ax with heaved stroke, Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt, Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt. There in close covert by som Brook, Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from Day's garish ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... gone a sylvan repast was hastily prepared beneath a huge oak-tree for the King of England. Amongst those who partook of the forest hospitality of the outlaws were Ivanhoe and Gurth, who just then came on the scene, the former now all but cured of his wound, thanks ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... its flitting motion in search of insect-prey, and in the jerking curves of its more prolonged flight, as also in its structure, it is a genuine Wood Warbler and keeps for the most part to what Thoreau calls the "upper story" of its sylvan domain. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... best care from its human jailer it is still a prisoner confined in a space so small that it never has an opportunity to stretch its wings in flight, nor can it ever bathe in the bright sunshine or view the blue skies above it. The whispering of the winds through the sylvan shades is lost to the captive forever. Is it strange that the nature of this ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... Amaryllises, the Dryads, the Fauns, the woolly lambs, the shepherds, the groves, the demigods, the Castalian Virgins, the loose-haired nymphs, the leafy boughs, the goat-footed gods, the Graces, the pastoral pipes, and all the other sylvan rubbish were the prime ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells |
