"Banyan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Seesum or banyan trees, shading twenty yards' width of luxuriant greensward on either side of the road, and each and every tree sheltering groups of natives, resting, idling, washing their clothes in some silent pool, or tending a few grazing buffaloes, form ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... window of this room was a tank with a flight of masonry steps leading down into the water; on its west bank, along the garden wall, an immense banyan tree; to the south a fringe of cocoanut palms. Ringed round as I was near this window I would spend the whole day peering through the drawn Venetian shutters, gazing and gazing on this scene as on a picture book. From early morning our neighbours would drop in one by one to have ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... fives" is certainly remarkable. Some form like that employed by the Nusqually[162] of Puget Sound for 1000, i.e. paduts-subquaetche, ten hundred, is more in accordance with primitive method. But we are equally likely to find such descriptive phrases for this numeral as the dor paka, banyan roots, of the Torres Islands; rau na hai, leaves of a tree, of Vaturana; or udolu, all, of the Fiji Islands. And two curious phrases for 1000 are those of the Banks' Islands, tar mataqelaqela, eye blind thousand, i.e. many beyond ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... butter scooped from an old gallipot, and a handful of onions shorn, with some pounded pepper. I was not very much tempted with the appearance of this dish, of which, nevertheless, my messmates ate heartily, advising me to follow their example, as it was banyan day and we could have no meat till next noon. But I had already laid in sufficient for the occasion, and therefore desired to be excused: expressing a curiosity to know the meaning of banyan day. They told me, that, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the ship's company ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... peculiarities into something after the similitude of her kind! Change Miss Thusa! As soon might you expect to change the gnarled and rooted oak into the flexible and breeze-bowed willow. Her idiosyncrasy had been so nursed and strengthened by the two great influences, time and solitude, it spread like the banyan tree, making a dark pavilion, where legions of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... wash teeth and mouth with orris, then to bathe, half asleep still; and yet again to lie a-thinking in my arm-chair, robed in a banyan, cheeks all suds and nose sniffing the scented water in the chin-basin which I held none too steady; and I said, peevishly, "What a fool a man is to play the fool! Do you ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... not fighting, but exploring, the price of safety was a vigilance so unremitting that it soon began to get on their nerves, and they were glad to take a whole day's rest in the spacious security of a banyan top, where nothing could come at them but leopards or pythons. Neither leopards nor pythons gave ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... their trains, and princes riding upon elephants, and Brahmins robed in their vestments, and swarms of voluptuous dancing-girls, moving to chant of kabit and damari. But whither, whither? Out of the city into the sun they passed, between avenues of banyan, down colonnades of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... older, and oldest, has a remarkable resemblance to the Tettira Jataka (ed. Fausboell, No. 37, transl. Rhys Davids, i. p. 310 seq.) in which the partridge, monkey, and elephant dispute as to their relative age, and the partridge turns out to have voided the seed of the Banyan-tree under which they were sheltered, whereas the elephant only knew it when a mere bush, and the monkey had nibbled the topmost shoots. This apologue got to England at the end of the twelfth century as the sixty-ninth fable, "Wolf, Fox, and Dove," of a rhymed prose collection of "Fox Fables" ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... brought there on bloody shields from the earth. Asgard was overshadowed by the mighty tree Igdrasil. This tree was more marvellous than any of which you ever heard; no cork, nor India rubber, nor banyan tree could begin to compare with it; for this was the Life-Tree, and had been growing before creation. The horrible dragon, Death, gnawed constantly at its roots, but three sisters, the Nornas, watering them daily from the Life-Spring, kept the tree flourishing. ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... shrub is grown there; and when one considers that every foot of its soil has been carried to its place, the wonder is how it has all been done. The blossoms seem to say, "The whole world is here and in bloom." The banyan tree grows here luxuriantly and is a great curiosity. The main trunk of the tree grows to the height of about thirty or forty feet. The first branches, and indeed many of the upper branches, strike down into the ground. These ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... upon the scene, he saw the terribly divisive system sending down its root like the banyan tree on all sides and absorbing the life and thought of the people. It repelled him, and, with all his mighty intellectual and moral energy, he attacked it. He proclaimed all men brothers and worthy of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... "Captain de Banyan, at your service," continued the officer, as he seated himself by the side of the young lieutenant, who was completely bewildered by the elegant and courtly ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... way of scenery, such as I at least had never seen before, and have but rarely met with since. I do not recollect the names of the principal trees, though they were mentioned to us over and over again. The grand Banyan, however, with which European eyes have become so correctly familiar through the pencil of Daniell, rose on every side, and made us feel, even more decidedly than the cocoa-nut trees had done in the morning, that we ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... lights were doubly festooned along the sea wall, drooping creeper-like from palm to palmetto, from flowering hibiscus to sprawling banyan, from dainty china-berry to grotesque screw-pine tree, shedding strange witch-lights over masses of blossoms, tropical and semi-tropical. Through which the fine-spun spray of fountains drifted, and the great mousy dusk-moths ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... and snuggle, trying to find the warmest and softest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a whole tiny body, but it soon reenters in another quarter, and at length the stir and chirr grow still. You see only a collection of little legs, as if the hen were a banyan-tree, and presently even they disappear, she settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence. And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the steps of this sleepy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the road bordered with beautiful banyan trees. We sat down under their shade, and waited for what would come. Some little children followed us, but before we could get a single idea clearly into their heads a man came and chased them away. "It ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... the world itself shall last, The sacred Banyan still shall spread; From clime to clime, from age to age, Its sheltering shadow shall be shed; Nations shall seek its pillared shade, Its leaves shall for their healing be; The circling flood that feeds its life, The blood that crimsoned Calvary."' [Footnote: Bishop ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... leaves of abaca rustle in the breeze; the graceful stalks of bamboo crackle like tin tubes. Around the bend the water ripples at the ford. At evening you will see the tired men from the mountains, bending under heavy loads of hemp, wade through the shallows to the cavern shelter of the banyan-tree. Through the dense mango-grove comes the faint sound of bells. The puk-puk bird hoots from the jungle, and the black crows settle in ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... back-ground of flimsy cottons, prints, calicoes, domestics and what not; or of floors crowded with ivory tusks; or of dark corners with a pile of unginned and loose cotton; or of stores of crockery, nails, cheap Brummagem ware, tools, &c., in what I call the Banyan quarter;—of streets smelling very strong—in fact, exceedingly, malodorous, with steaming yellow and black bodies, and woolly heads, sitting at the doors of miserable huts, chatting, laughing, bargaining, scolding, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... France the hut must stand as the friendly home that gathers up all the best traditions of Indian life. It takes the place of the banyan tree in the heat of the day, the village well, and the meeting place for the men in the cool of the evening. Even beyond all hopes it has proved a potent factor for unity, harmony, and peace in a time of unrest. It draws ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... forming pleasant glades. The plantations were generally neatly fenced and often extensive; as much as twenty or thirty acres in one plot. Every now and then they passed on the roadside a noble tree, with wide-spread, drooping branches, a species of banyan tree, under which was often seen a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... to the enormous length of three or four hundred feet, with short alternate branches at every foot of its length. Thus, in the stormy ocean, grows a plant, higher and of greater length than any vegetable production of the surface of the earth, not excepting the banyan tree, which, as its branches touch the ground, takes fresh root, and may be said to form a separate tree. These marine plants resist the most powerful attacks of the mightiest elements combined; the winds and the waves in vain combine their force against them; uniting their foliage on the bosom ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to a calm mournful consideration of the great sulphur question. He never gets into a lurid passion, never horrifies, but calmly saddens you, in his discourses. He is fond of quoting good old Richard Baxter and John Banyan, and he might have worse authorities. But he is very serious, and his words sometimes chill like a condensation of Young's "Night Thoughts." If he had more dash and blithesomeness in him, if he could fling a little more of this world's logic into his sermons, if ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... or traverse with blind whirr The room's dusk corners; and the leaves without Vibrate upon their thin stems with the breeze Flying towards the light. To an Eastern vale That light may now be waning, and across The tall reeds by the Ganges, lotus-paved, Lengthening the shadows of the banyan-tree. The rice-fields are all silent in the glow, All silent the deep heaven without a cloud, Burning like molten gold. A red canoe Crosses with fan-like paddles and the sound Of feminine song, freighted with great-eyed maids Whose unzoned bosoms swell on the rich air; A ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... halcyon hours when, with Marian by my side and the prospect bright before us, we voyaged through those Indian seas, down the long coast of Malabar and up the long coast of Coromandel, past the Isle of Serendib, and the reefs and foaming seas, to where the tangled banyan roots overgrow the muddy ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... for some thirty years; Their talk, beginning with a single stem, Spread like a banyan, sending down live piers, Colonies of digression, and, in them, Germs of yet new dispersion; once by the ears, They could convey damnation in a hem, And blow the pinch of premise-priming off Long syllogistic batteries, with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... areas. In the commercial heart of this world Frank Algernon Cowperwood had truly become a figure of giant significance. How wonderful it is that men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or, like banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a forest—a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand material aspects are the evidence. His street-railway properties were like a net—the parasite Gold Thread—linked together as they were, and draining two of the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... set down at home, and the Banks Islanders were again found pleasant, honest, and courteous, thinking, as it appeared afterwards, that the white men were the departed spirits of deceased friends. A walk inland at Vanua Lava disclosed pretty villages nestling under banyan trees, one of them provided with a guest-chamber for visitors from other islands. Two boys, Sarawia and another, came away to be scholars at Lifu, as well as his masters in the language, of which he as yet scarcely knew anything, but which he afterwards found ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his body, but, not being able either to see or hear anything of it, I concluded that he must have survived, and walked down the side of the kraal where we had first taken our stand, calling him by name. Now some fifteen paces back from the kraal wall stood a very ancient tree of the banyan species. So ancient was it that all the inside had in the course of ages decayed away, leaving nothing but a shell ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard |
