"Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he sought the fleece of gold, Or change from man to beast three years entire, As King Nebuchadnezzar did of old; Or else have times as shameful and as bad As Trojan folk for ravished Helen had; Or gulfed with Proserpine and Tantalus Let hell's deep fen devour him dolorous, With worse to bear than Job's worst sufferance, Bound in his prison-maze with Daedalus, Who could wish evil ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... thou fele al the peynes of age whylst yynge, 515 Unmanned, uneyned, exclooded aie the lyghte, Thie senses, lyche thieselfe, enwrapped yn nyghte, A scoff to foemen & to beastes a pheere; Maie furched levynne onne thie head alyghte, Maie on thee falle the fhuyr of the unweere; 520 Fen vaipoures blaste thie everiche manlie powere, Maie thie bante boddie ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... there, as in a dream, Which holds some boding fear of wrong, By fog-bound fen and sluggard stream I dragged my leaden steps along. My blood ran ice; I turned and spied A shrouded figure at ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Pearson? Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing any thing about ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... arc of the foul fen, between the dry bank and the slough, with eyes turned on those who guzzle the mire. We came at length to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the crawberry, ripe frae the boggy fen: He pu'd me the strawberry, red frae the foggy glen; He pu'd me the row'n frae the wild steeps sae giddy, O! Sae loving and kind was my dear Highland ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song— O you envy the blessed dead ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... Her green wide water-meads Laced by the silver of the parted Rhine; Where round the horizon low The waving millsails go, And poplar avenues stretch their pillar'd line; That morn a clinging mist uncurl'd Its folds o'er South-Fen town, and ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As we were part ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... "Fen says that these animal drawings of yours show promise and he wants to know whether you ever thought of ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... the retreat of the more zealous among the Puritanical party; and it was an order of council which obliged them to disembark and remain in England. The earl of Bedford, who possessed a large estate in the fen country near the Isle of Ely, having undertaken to drain these morasses, was obliged to apply to the king; and by the powers of the prerogative, he got commissioners appointed, who conducted that work, and divided the new-acquired land among ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... thou art a stranger," said the gratified old man. "And thou wouldest know the region round about Lincoln?" he repeated. "Thou hast come to him who can tell thee of it, for I was born and brought up in these parts. It is truly a noble region on all sides save the east, where lieth the fen country. For here cometh the king frequently to take his pleasure. And that is oft pleasure to him which would be none ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... blood, you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in—before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, to guard ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... time, singing their King; as whilome snowy swans among the thin clouds, when they return from pasturage, and utter resonant notes through their long necks; far off echoes the river and the smitten Asian fen. . . . Nor would one think these vast streaming masses were ranks clad in brass; rather that, high in air, a cloud of hoarse birds from the deep gulf was pressing to ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... regarded the foreign retinue that Alfred had brought with him, as if to owe his throne to Norman swords, rather than to English hearts. Hardicanute, who succeeded Harold, whose memory he abhorred, whose corpse he disinterred and flung into a fen [103], had been chosen by the unanimous council both of English and Danish thegns; and despite Hardicanute's first vehement accusations of Godwin, the Earl still remained throughout that reign as powerful as in the two preceding it. When Hardicanute dropped down dead at a marriage banquet, it ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice- President and others will take effective means to protect the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... from all brother-men, in the weird of the fen, With God's creatures I bide, 'mid the birds that I ken; Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea Brings a message of peace from the ocean ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... wan crescent scarcely gleams, Ghost-like she fades in morning beams; Hie hence each peevish imp and fay, That scare the pilgrim on his way:— Quench, kelpy! quench, in bog and fen, Thy torch that cheats benighted men; Thy dance is o'er, thy reign is done, For Benyieglo ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And man ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Moved through all their depths of darkness^ Sighed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" And the waves upon the margin, Rising, rippling on the pebbles, Sobbed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" And the heron, the shuh-shu-gah, From her haunts among the fen-lands, Screamed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!" Thus departed Hiawatha, Hiawatha the Beloved, In the glory of the sunset, In the purple mists of evening, To the regions of the home-wind, Of the northwest wind, Keewaydin, To the Islands of the Blessed, To the kingdom ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... drave— And others the all-nursing wave Of Nilus to the battle gave; Came Susiskanes, warrior wild, And Pegastagon, Egypt's child: Thee, brave Arsames! from afar Did holy Memphis launch to war; And Ariomardus, high in fame, From Thebes the immemorial came, And oarsmen skilled from Nilus' fen, A countless crowd of warlike men: And next, the dainty Lydians went— Soft rulers of a continent— Mitragathes and Arcteus bold In twin command their ranks controlled, And Sardis town, that teems with gold, Sent forth its squadrons to the war— Horse upon horse, and car on car, Double ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... mallard—roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money, not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University. I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body of the charge—both the wings broken, one in three places, one leg almost dissevered, and several ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... many of the people, belonging to the said parish, being no less than six or seven miles distant from their own kirk; for which and other reasons the heritors and others procured a disjunction, and called the new parish Fen wick or ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' 'a story worthy ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... spot very lately, but, according to the best of my recollection, it has not now any feature in keeping with the mythological character of the fiend of the moor and fen. The neighbouring district of down and common land would not be an inappropriate habitat for such a personage. It has few trees of any pretension to age, and is still covered in great part with a dark and scanty vegetation, which is sufficiently dreary except at those ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... dripped its poison on the ground Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool, But brought no taint and threatened ill to none. Far off adown the mountain's craggy side From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding Like sport of giant children, and the rocks Whereon ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... starvation? If we accuse the Eremites of old of wasting their lives in unprofitable wildernesses, what shall we say to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... am I so frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only cold—say dear again"— But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, And he ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... one side alone the hill gave shelter, So vast that phalanx of unconquered men, 2435 And there the living in the blood did welter Of the dead and dying, which in that green glen, Like stifled torrents, made a plashy fen Under the feet—thus was the butchery waged While the sun clomb Heaven's eastern steep—but when 2440 It 'gan to sink—a fiercer combat raged, For in more doubtful strife the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... west, from the unknown. I turned my head, and it beat against my forehead, cold and fragrant with the essence of the forest,—pine and cedar, dead leaves and black mould, fen and hollow and hill,—all the world of woods over which it had passed. The ghost of things long dead, which face or voice could never conjure up, will sometimes start across our path at the beckoning ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... variously spelt, chair, chaire, chare, or char. In the Cambridgeshire dialect it may be remarked, air or are is pronounced as "ar." Thus, upstairs, bare, are "upstars," "bar." There is a Char Fen at Stretham, laid down in Sir Jonah Moore's Map (1663). There is also a Chare Fen at Cottenham; and at Littleport is a place called Littleport Chair. This last had the name at least as early as Edward II.'s reign; as in a description of a neighbouring fen, not later ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye And blister ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... him o'er the seas, To the drear antipodes; There he saw a felon band, Chains on neck, and spade in hand, Orators, all sworn to die In "Old Ireland's" cause—or fly! Now, divorced from pike and pen, Digging ditch, and draining fen, Sky their ceiling, sand their bed, Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed. "Operatives!" he harangued; "Ere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Over bog, and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes; Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams; Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams; Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen, Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men. Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands; Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands. Master, I've ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the swain drowned in a fen, and the grief of his widow, possessing every charm which simplicity and tenderness can bestow, and give to that Ode claims to admiration which, if admitted, have ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower 5 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the romantic, A hundred thousand have run frantic— There's not a hideous highland spot, (Long fallowed to the core by Scott)— No rill, through rack and thistle dribbling, But has its deadlier crop of scribbling. Each fen, and flat, and flood, and fell, Gives birth to verses by the ell— There Wordsworth, for his muse's sallies, Claims all the ponds, the lanes, and alleys— There Coleridge swears none else shall tune A bag-pipe to the list'ning moon; On come in clouds ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... undulating hills and moist, rich meadows divided by luxuriant hedges and dotted with single spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... made life for all of mortal beings that breathe and move. So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life, till one began to fashion evils, that field of hell. Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever {1e} mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Ill fared his feud, {1f} and far was he driven, for the slaughter's sake, from sight of men. Of Cain awoke ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... in my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake; Thou know'st it well,—nor fen, nor sedge, Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge; Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink At once upon the level brink; And just a trace of silver sand Marks where the water meets ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Pickering, known as Newton Dale, with its precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related to its great precursor that carved this enormous trench out of ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... believe, by its seeds being accidentally included with the sawdust in which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens at Cambridge, whence it spread rapidly through the congenial dykes and sluices of the fen country, and so into the entire navigable network of the Midland counties. But there are other aliens of older settlement amongst us, aliens of American origin which nevertheless arrived in Britain, in all probability, long before Columbus ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... price of laud, Why should we seek, since Byfield is at hand; For works on draining either bog or fen, In Marsh and Moore we have a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... I passed round the village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. The rural peace of that brilliant ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled through ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden and his Flemings were not allowed ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... his father's ravages by costly gifts to the religious houses. And his love for monks broke out in the song which he composed as he listened to their chant at Ely: "Merrily sang the monks in Ely when Cnut King rowed by" across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their Abbey. "Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear we ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... The last time I followed the old chief, of honored memory, we held our war-council standing knee-deep in a fen. We had neither eaten nor drunk for two days, and three days' blood ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers. They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport, attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops, emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The soldiery was called in; there ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... [fields] thirty thousand shields, and smote on Colgrim's knights, so that the earth shook again. Brake the broad spears, shivered shields; the Saxish men fell to the ground.... Some they gan wander as the wild crane doth in the moor-fen, when his flight is impaired, and swift hawks pursue after him, and hounds with mischief meet him in the reeds; then is neither good to him nor the land nor the flood; the hawks him smite, the hounds him bite, then is the royal fowl ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... luve 's a flower in garden fair, Her beauty charms the sicht o' men; And I 'm a weed upon the wolde, For nane reck how I fare or fen'. She blooms in beild o' castle wa', I bide the blast o' povertie; My covert looks are treasures stown— Sae how culd my luve ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... increase in trade and poulation The Thames St. Katherine's Docks Tewkesburg Bridge Gloucester Bridge Dean Bridge, Edinburgh Glasgow Bridge Telford's works of drainage in the Fens The North Level The Nene Outfall Effects of Fen drainage ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh and swamp are ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... name. A Winkelried it was, Who slew the dragon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in the ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus gradually equipped for food-getting through long ages of practice. But of course no particular bird is thus modified by circumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the characteristics of the heron; it would simply die for lack of food. It is rather that certain minute variations take place, for unknown reasons, in every species; and the bird which happened to be hatched out in ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is. The first who settled there were the wild ducks; and they still live there by thousands. But they no longer own the entire lake, for they have been obliged to share it with swans, grebes, coots, loons, fen-ducks, and a lot ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the surge of the sea. The Anglo-Saxon poets dwell on such sights complacently; their tongue then is loosened. In "Beowulf," the longest and truest description is that of the abode of the monsters: "They inhabit the dark land, wolf-haunted slopes, windy headlands, the rough fen-way, where the mountain stream, under the dark shade of the headlands, runneth down, water under land. It is not far from hence, a mile by measure, that the mere lies; over it hang groves of [rimy] trees, a wood fast-rooted, [and] bend ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... sure, sir, we had more acres of fen than any man on this coast: but what are fens to love? What are dykes and windmills ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... city spires, and thence Came the deep murmur of its throng of men, And as its grateful odors met thy sense, They seemed the perfumes of thy native fen. Fair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight Thy tiny song grew shriller ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Isles-men carried at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... pleasant was that Pool; and near it, then, Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen. It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush: But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers; There, grassy plots, set round about with flowers. Here, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... hands inanimate objects become endowed with life and personality; the powers of nature become objects of worship such as they were in olden times; they describe the scenery of their own country, the fen, the river, and the sea, the horror of the untrodden forest, sun and moon engaged in perpetual pursuit of each other, the nightingale and the swan, the plow guided by the 'gray-haired enemy of the ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... Beast, which nursed in Tiber's fen, Did all the world with hideous shape affray; That fill'd with costly spoil his gaping den, And trod down all the rest to dust and clay: His battering horns pull'd out by civil hands, And iron teeth lie scatter'd on the sands; Backed, bridled by a ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... produced the comforts which surround me; it is I who am the author of my own happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... such blood as theirs for the shedding, In the veins of Cavaliers was its heading. You have no such stately men In your abolition den, To march through foe and fen, nothing dreading. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... compensations; for we do not discover that any considerable permanent change was produced by them. I refer to the action of beavers and of fallen trees in producing bogs, [Footnote: The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf-moss, peat-moss, quagmire, all of which, though sometimes more or less accurately discriminated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps employed, each exclusively, in a particular ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... gazelle, and the hartebeest graze, And the kudu and eland unhunted recline By the skirts of gray forest o'erhung with wild vine; Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild ass is drinking ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Fhrer waren frh auf, um dem Wetter nachzuspren und den Schnee zu prfen. Mit einiger Vorsicht konnte man es schon wagen, weiter zu ziehen. Der Assessor war schon munter und wartete auf Frulein Milla, sie hatten sich[39-1] ja noch so viel zu sagen! Milla erschlo ihr Herz dem vereinsamten Freunde ihrer Elsa, und ihm war[39-2] es, wie wenn ein lang verhaltener Strom ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... reason. Many voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... replied, "that sit in a mead (by which your ship must needs pass) circled with dead men's bones. These are the bones of men whom they have slain, after with fawning invitements they have enticed them into their fen. Yet such is the celestial harmony of their voice accompanying the persuasive magic of their words, that knowing this, you shall not be able to withstand their enticements. Therefore when you are to sail by them, you shall stop the ears of your companions ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... seaport town, dipping down to wharves and quays; and the eye almost expects a fringe of masts and shipping at the base of the steep streets. Then, too, the encircling plain is like water in its tracklessness. There are no short cuts nor footpaths in the fen. You may strike out for the village that on clear days looks so close at hand, and follow a flood-bank for miles without drawing a pace nearer to the goal. Or you may find yourself upon the edge of one of the great lodes or levels, and see the pale-blue stripe of water lie unbridged, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he lurked in the Oldtown fen Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den, Or swam in the wooded Artichoke, Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock, Nothing on record is left to show; Only the fact that he lived, we know, And left the cast of a double head In the scaly mask which he yearly shed. For he carried a head where his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the night Waking she heard the night-fowl crow; The cock sang out an hour ere light: From the dark fen the oxen's low Came to her: without hope of change, In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... are the two magnificent gold torcs found in the side of one of the raths at Tara, and these belong to a type that has been found in England and France, of which the best known examples are those found at Yeovil, Somerset,[28] and Grunty Fen, Cambridge.[29] A torc of this type was also found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy. This find has led to a good deal of speculative opinions varying as to whether the model of the ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... a fact, sir," replied Fen-ton, "which I have witnessed with my own eyes; but we have still stranger and ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian seaboard. Once it serpentined as far as the upper Pool, disappearing ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... for 'tis to him I owe That here I stand, and breath the common air, And 'tis my pride to tell it to the world. One luckless day as in the eager chace My Courser wildly bore me from the rest, A monst'rous Leopard from a bosky fen Rush'd forth, and foaming lash'd the ground, And fiercely ey'd me as his destin'd quarry. My jav'lin swift I threw, but o'er his head It erring pass'd, and harmless in the air Spent all its force; my falchin then I seiz'd, ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... west wind off the prairie; Ho, north wind off the pine; Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped, Like cups of living wine; Ho, mighty river rolling; Ho, fallow, field and fen; By a thousand voices nature calls, To fire the ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... dizhmal shwamp he spheeds— His path is rugged and sore Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds And many a fen where the serpent feeds, And birrud niver flew before— And ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tomb-stones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday—the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... man is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... time is that rival factions, family intrigues, and petty annexations at the cost of various Tartar tribes, and of small, but ancient, Chinese principalities, occupied most of its time. It must be repeated here, however, that, notwithstanding Tartar neighbours, the valley of the River Fen had been the seat of several of China's oldest semi-mythical emperors-possibly even of dynasties,-and at no time do the Tartars seem to have ever succeeded in ousting the Chinese from South Shan Si. The official name of the region after the Chou infeoffment of 1106 ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... sees the gradually encroaching bog and marsh in his land, and realises that with drainage he could reclaim this as good farm land. On the other hand some of the locals would rather see the fen remain, along with their various occupations, and the wonderful and fragile wet-land natural history. When digging begins there are a number of nasty incidents—torching of houses, malicious woundings of horses and cows, gunshot wounds ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... hedge or fence, save for a couple of upright posts, with three or four crossbars, rising up here and there at the corners of the fields where the dykes run into one another. A hundred years before all this part of Norfolk had been little better than a fen, which the Brandon Water overflowed at spring tides, till engineers had come over to us from Holland, who taught us to make these dykes and embankments after the fashion of their country. And, indeed, the people of Bury have a tradition that the ocean itself once came up over these parts, and ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... part in an enterprise as old as Abraham; as divine in its warrant, its charge, its promise, as Christ Himself. Seven years older than Carey, his friend was born a farmer's son and labourer in the fen country of Cromwell whom he resembled, was self-educated under conditions precisely similar, and passed through spiritual experiences almost exactly the same. The two, unknown to each other, found themselves when called to preach at eighteen unable to reconcile the grim dead theology of their ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And what was ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... the edge of the Fen Country, where the Conqueror found the toughest opposition to his completed sovereignty in England, the patch of raised ground just outside modern Cambridge was a suitable spot for the erection of a castle, and from here he conducted his operations against the English, ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... a shaking fen Fix'd me, in dark tempestuous night; There never trod the foot of men, There flock'd the fowl in wint'ry flight; There danced the moor's deceitful light Above the pool where sedges grow; And when the morning-sun shone bright, It shone ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... cary[8] was called; His hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... al'to hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en hur'ry tab'let ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... are the nails of his hand livid, and the eyes tearful, and he will look downwards. Give him this for a leechdom: Everthroat, cassuck, the netherward part of fane, a yew berry, lupin, helenium, a head of marsh mallow, fen, mint, dill, lily, attorlothe, pulegium, marrubium, dock, elder, fel terrae, wormwood, strawberry leaves, consolida; pour them over with ale, add holy water, sing this charm over them thrice [here follow some long charms which I need not extract]; these charms a man may sing ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... to Scotland. But the British fleet kept off the men-of-war, seized the supply ships, and advanced along the coast to support the army that was running the Jacobites down. Prince Charlie's Jacobites had to carry everything by land. The British army had most of its stores carried fen times better by sea. Therefore, when the two armies met for their last fight at Culloden, the Jacobites were worn out, while the British army was quite fresh. In Canada it was the same story when the ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... are gettin' shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as sunshine, ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... earth wendeth. So liv'd on all happy the host of the kinsmen In game and in glee, until one wight began, 100 A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil, And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight, The mighty mark-strider, the holder of moorland, The fen and the fastness. The stead of the fifel That wight all unhappy a while of time warded, Sithence that the Shaper him had for-written. On the kindred of Cain the Lord living ever Awreaked the murder of the slaying of Abel. In that feud he rejoic'd ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... in number, close bordering the water, embracing about an acre each, and situated in a low fen, draining several valleys. The excavated soil was thrown up in dykes, made tight by being beaten all over, while in a soft state, with the heavy, flat ends of Palm stalks. Lving side by side, by three ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... A Winkelried it was Who slew the dragoon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and calculated creation of man. It stands upon a little solitary hill at the head of Taw Marsh, and wins its name from the East Okement River which runs through the valley on its western flank. Above wide fen and marsh it rises, yet seen from Steeperton's vaster altitude, Oke Tor looks no greater than some fantastic child-castle built by a Brobding-nagian baby with granite bricks. Below it on this July day the waste ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... dbarrass fort vigoureusement d'un rival qui passait pour aussi redoutable en guerre qu'en amour: du moins on attribuait Mateo certain coup de fusil qui surprit ce rival comme il tait se raser devant un petit miroir pendu sa fentre. L'affaire assoupie, Mateo se maria. Sa femme Giuseppa lui avait donn d'abord trois filles (dont il enrageait), et enfin un fils, qu'il nomma Fortunato: c'tait l'espoir de sa famille, l'hritier du nom. Les filles taient bien maries: leur pre pouvait compter au besoin ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... near Ely Minster, by the sweet and solemn music of the monastery choir that floated out to them over the tranquil water. The monks of Ely, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of King Canute, tell us that he had a strong affection for the fen country and for their church, and gave the following story in that connection. It is at ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... eyes glowed in the glare Of the moon's dying light; As a fen-fire's beam on a sluggish stream 15 Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there, And it yellowed the strings of thy raven hair, That shook in the wind ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... along the flat shore, marked Port of Spain, destined hereafter to stand, not on the seaside, but, like Lynn in Norfolk, and other fen-land towns, in the midst of some of the richest ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the forest wide, Jungle, thicket, pasture, fen, Not another dared him then, Dared him and again defied; Not a sovereign buck or boar Came a second time ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... boy lost in the lonely fen, Led by the wandering light, Began to cry, but God, ever nigh, Appeared like his ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... thee, and learn to run on foot," he counselled him. "Thou shalt go with me to the greenwood through mire and moss and fen. Thou shalt go with me to the forest, and dwell with me there, until I have got our pardon from ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... beer, and smoke disgusting short pipes; and when we established the Coverley Club in Trinity, they set up an opposition, and called themselves the Navvies. And they used to make piratical expeditions down to Lynn in eight oars, to attack bargemen, and fen girls, and shoot ducks, and sleep under turf-stacks, and come home when they had drank all the public-house taps dry. I remember ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... stands towering out in lonely sublimity, like the everlasting granite of the Alps or the Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the Ganges. As the serene air that ever surrounds the head of Mont Blanc excels in purity the mists of the fen, so does the lofty theism of the Mosaic account rise high above the nature-worship of the Egyptian and Hesiodean theogonies. "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... swamps, and ponds, and marshy bogs, Up rose the wailings of the frogs. "What shall we do, should he have progeny?" Said they to Destiny; 'One sun we scarcely can endure, And half-a-dozen, we are sure, Will dry the very sea. Adieu to marsh and fen! Our race will perish then, Or be obliged to fix Their dwelling in the Styx!' For such an humble animal, The frog, I ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... for Effry?" shouted the porter, and there had been no response. If they did not stop at Effry there would be no halt for forty minutes. Now was his time. He waited a little till they had got up the speed. The line here ran through miles and miles of fen country, more or less drained by dykes and rivers, but still wild and desolate enough. Over this great flat the storm was sweeping furiously—even drowning in its turmoil the noise ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... crumbling plain, Where the sweet waters of Aegyptus glide, To those that on the Northern marches ride, And the Ceteians, and the blameless men That round the rising-place of Morn abide, And all the dwellers in the Asian fen. ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... rushing from his den, Amidst the plain of some wide-water'd fen, (Where numerous oxen, as at ease they feed, At large expatiate o'er the ranker mead) Leaps on the herds before the herdsman's eyes; The trembling herdsman far to distance flies; Some lordly bull (the rest dispersed and fled) He singles out; arrests, and lays him dead. Thus from the rage of ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of gold and of fee, Thorney the flower of the Fen Country, Crowland so courteous of meat and of drink, Peterborough the proud, as all men do think, And Sawtry by the way, that poor Abbaye, Gave more alms in one day, ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,—over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,—we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself. Nor will posterity like Browning's manners,—the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and de te fabula of most of his talking. These unpleasant ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... plucks them back, puts out their eyes, Turns them to tears and words? Ah my sweet knight, You have the better of us that weave and weep While the blithe battle blows upon your eyes Like rain and wind; yet I remember too When this last year the fight at Corrichie Reddened the rushes with stained fen-water, I rode with my good men and took delight, Feeling the sweet clear wind upon my eyes And rainy soft smells blown upon my face In riding: then the great fight jarred and joined, And the sound stung me right through ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Have I so many melancholy nights Watch'd on the top of Peter-house highest Tower? And come we back unto our native home, For want of skill to lose the wench thou lov'st? We'll first hang Envill in such rings of mist As never rose from any dampish fen: I'll make the brind sea to rise at Ware, And drown the marshes unto Stratford bridge; I'll drive the Deer from Waltham in their walks, And scatter them like sheep in every field. We may perhaps be crost, but, if we be, He shall cross the devil, ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... are universal. Boys usually have one shooter made from agate which they call a "real." To change the position of the shooter is called "roundings," and to object to this or to any other play is expressed by the word "fen." The common game of marbles is to make a rectangular ring and to shoot from a line and endeavour to knock the marbles or "mibs" of one's opponents out of the square. A similar game is to place all the mibs in a line in an oval and to roll the shooter ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... in the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... because told to rely on his own experience, is enjoined to forego the glory and delight of creation even of fantastic types. He is only told never to pretend to see what he has not seen. He is urged to follow Imagination in her most erratic course, though like a will-o'-wisp she lead over marsh and fen away from the haunts of mortals; but not to pretend that he is following a will-o'-wisp when his vagrant fancy never was allured by one. It is idle to paint fairies and goblins unless you have a genuine vision of them which forces you to paint them. They are ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... at the foot of the hill Lived Mr. and Mrs. Frog, At the head of the sparkling rill, By the side of a queachy bog; And they had children ten— All froggies as yellow as gold, Who loved to play on the fen, But they ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Connaught who is by Dermot Astore out of Cheevra, and is the dam of Ch. Cotswold Patricia. She is one of the tallest of her race, her height being 33 inches; another bitch that measures the same number of inches at the shoulder being Dr. Pitts-Tucker's Juno of the Fen, a daughter ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... I sat musing, 'twas not one but ten —- Rank on rank of ghostly soldiers marching o'er the fen, Marching in the misty air they showed in dreams to me, And behind me was the shouting and the ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... author of Ulalume. In Professor Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath—flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots overshrouds the water." The word to be noted ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... Maki of Adma, Kenti-au-ush of Khenti-keshu, and Tenus from the two lands of the Fen-khu; these are the princes who bear witness of me as to all that has passed, out of love for thyself. Does not Tenu believe that it belongs to thee like thy dogs? Behold this flight that I have made: ...
— Egyptian Literature
... Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen. And wasted fields and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... stern Ruler and Line of Rulers therefore is called in,—a stern but most beneficent perpetual House-Surgeon is by Nature herself called in, and even the appropriate fees are provided for him! Dryasdust talks lamentably about Hereward and the Fen Counties; fate of Earl Waltheof; Yorkshire and the North reduced to ashes: all which is undoubtedly lamentable. But even Dryasdust apprises me of one fact: 'A child, in this William's reign, might have carried a purse of gold ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... foot by all kinds of men; Gracing the mountain or hid in the fen; Never adorning the brow of the fair; Seldom deemed worthy some corner to share In the bouquets that are cast in the way Princely feet tread on reception's proud day; The glory of roses do not attain; Beautiful mosses, ye grow ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... emperors, from Trajan to Valens, are found everywhere below ground, while above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... district made it difficult for my men to arrange four hundred "big" cash current in Szech'wan in the Yuen-nan equivalent. After Tong-ch'uan-fu, right on to Burma, the rate of coolie pay varies considerably. Three tsien two fen (thirty-two tael cents) was the highest I paid until I got to Tengyueh, where rupee money came into circulation, and where expense of ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... that fell defiant in the fray, Among the boggy wilds of Ireland, blest By Cromwell, when his Puritanic jest Left Hell and Connaught open on their way. As I have heard so may the stranger hear! That he who drove the natives from the lawn, Must wander o'er the marsh and foggy fen Until the Irish gather with a cheer In Dublin of the Parliaments at dawn. God rest the ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... tones of thought which we might otherwise have ascribed to the influence of mountain scenery. Such causes, however, affect the lowland as much as the highland religious character in all districts far from cities; but they do not produce the same effects. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life, or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr's passion. Among ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... defeat. To return to your homes would be but to court death, and if we are to die at the hands of the Romans it is best that we should die fighting them to the end. We have therefore arranged that we will seek a refuge in the Fen country that forms the western boundary of the land of the Iceni; there we can find strongholds into which the Romans can never force their way; thence we can sally out, and in turn take vengeance. There ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... lords swear that ere a year be over ox and horse shall go free in Essex, and man and woman shall draw the team and the plough; and north away in the east countries dwell men in poor halls of wattled reeds and mud, and the north-east wind from off the fen whistles through them; and poor they be to the letter; and there him whom the lord spareth, the bailiff squeezeth, and him whom the bailiff forgetteth, the Easterling Chapman sheareth; yet be these stout men and ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... Esens. Was it connected with Bensersiel too, or the country between? I searched the ordnance map again, standing up to get a better light and less jolting. There was the road northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through dots and chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter fields, so the reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught my eye, and that was a stream running to Bensersiel. I knew it at once for the muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, issuing through the sluice or siel from which Bensersiel ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... arms and provisions; while all up the valley, as far as the eye could see, even to the faint blue distance, in the haze of which the glaciers and clouds and mountain tops seemed to commingle, troops of armed men could be seen pouring down from gorge and glen, through wood and furze and fen. On the fiord, too, the same activity and concentration prevailed, though not quite to the same extent. Constantly there swept round the promontories to the north and south, boat after boat, and ship after ship, until the bay close below Ulfstede was crowded with war-craft ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... from his cloak Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the black ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... spread Upon a tombstone, moveless as the dead; And was there found a sad and silent place, There would he creep with slow and measured pace; Then would he wander by the river's side, And fix his eyes upon the falling tide; The deep dry ditch, the rushes in the fen, And mossy crag-pits were his lodgings then: There, to his discontented thought a prey, The melancholy mortal pined away. The neighb'ring poor at length began to speak Of Abel's ramblings—he'd been gone a week; They knew not where, and little care they took For one so friendless ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... history of Prince's Tower that renders it interesting in the eyes of the islanders. In former times it was known by the name of La Hogue-Bye, and the following legend, quoted from Le Livre noir de Coutances, gives the origin of its celebrity:—In remote times, a moor or fen in this part of Jersey, was the retreat of a monstrous serpent or dragon, which spread terror and devastation throughout the island. At length a valorous Norman, the Seigneur de Hambye, undertook to attempt its destruction, which, after a terrible conflict, he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence always in view—for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen—wellnigh two hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it—one might be the pioneer of progress. What ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields and slaughtered men Along ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... the last stand of the great English leader, Hereward, against the advance of the Normans. The scene is largely laid in the Fen country, and every page is a record of fierce strife. The fall of Hereward is one of the greatest death scenes ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the nameless dead,—the men Who perished in fever swamp and fen, The slowly-starved of the prison pen; And, marching beside the others, Came the dusky martyrs of Pillow's fight, With limbs enfranchised and bearing bright; I thought—perhaps 'twas the pale moonlight— They looked as ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... Burdeus hath store of wine, Cornewall hath tinne, and Lymster wools fine. London hath scarlet, and Bristowe pleasaunt red, Fen lands hath fishes, in other place ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... gorse, it does like loving service for homely characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in the pages of Scott for a more ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... bird of night flies past them, and they hear the whooping of the owl, and see him skimming like a ghost over the waste. Then more fen fires arise, showing that other treacherous quagmires are at hand; but Crouch skirts them safely. Now the bull-frog croaks in the marsh, and a deep booming tells of a bittern passing by. They see the mighty bird above them, with his wide heavy wings and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth |
