"Luxuriance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pretty frequent at chambers, and Sir Francis Clavering condescended to partake of them constantly. His own house was shut up: the successor of Mirobolant, who had sent in his bills so prematurely, was dismissed by the indignant Lady Clavering: the luxuriance of the establishment was greatly pruned and reduced. One of the large footmen was cashiered, upon which the other gave warning, not liking to serve without his mate, or in a family where on'y one footman was kep'. General and severe economical reforms were practised by ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... its application with the term Chorisis or "dedoublement," or with the "disjonctions qui divisent les organes" of Moquin-Tandon.[67] It is usually, but not always, a concomitant with hypertrophy, and dependent on luxuriance ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... achieved by Philo was broken straightway by those who professed to follow him. The skeleton of his thought was clothed with a body wherein his spirit could never have dwelt. It was the penalty which Philo paid for vagueness of expression and luxuriance of words that his works became the support of doctrines which he had combated, the guide of those who were ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... The tropical luxuriance of the foliage that dripped almost to the water's edge and the vivid colors of the blooms that shot the green made a most ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... numerous streams, has the character of a great quagmire, and men and horses floundered about in the stagnant waters, or with difficulty worked their way over the marsh, or opened a passage through the tangled underwood that shot up in rank luxuriance from the surface. The wayworn horses, without food, except such as they could pick up in the wilderness, were often spent with travel, and, becoming unserviceable, were left to die on the road, with their hamstrings cut, that they might ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... called fire-hunting, and has been practised in this State within my time, by the white inhabitants. This is the most probable cause of the origin and extension of the vast prairies in the western country, where the grass having been of extraordinary luxuriance, has made a conflagration sufficient to kill even the old as well ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 1849 passed through what seemed to them an arid desert, as they sought their Eldorado in the mountains beyond. Disappointed and homesick, many of the emigrants retraced their steps, and found their former trail through Nebraska marked by sunflowers, the luxuriance of which evidenced the fertility of the soil, and encouraged the travelers to settle ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... beauties, things that might deeply stir and move; but year by year a simpler, sweeter, healthier kind of beauty made itself felt; such beauty as lies on the bare, lightly washed, faintly tinted hillside of winter, all delicate greens and browns, so far removed from the rich summer luxuriance, and yet so austere, so pure. I grew to love different books too. In youth one demanded a generous glow, a fire of passion, a strongly tinged current of emotion; but by degrees came the love of sober, subdued reflection, a cooler world in which, if one could not ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we enter the gallery of the Louvre with a feeling that it is but a grand prolongation of the glorious array of pictured and sculptured trophies, scattered in such memorable luxuriance, through that chosen land of art; but the sensation is that of delightful surprise when we have but recently explored the dim chambers of the National Gallery, or obtained formal access to a private British collection. To cross the now ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... is called Bengal, and on the other Poorb, or the East"—a name from which the independent dynasty of Moslem kings, who once ruled in Bengal, assumed the appellation of Poorby-Shaby. He was now among the rice-fields, the extent and luxuriance of which surprised him: "There are a great variety of sorts, and if a man were to take a grain of each sort he might soon fill a lota (water-pot) with them—so innumerable are the different kinds. The cultivators who have measured the largest species, have declared ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... from foreign sources, was added; but the great bulk of the new service-book had been contained in one or other of the older manuals. The Reformers did but clip and prune, with that exquisite taste and judgment which belong by tradition to English gardeners, the overgrowth and rank luxuriance of a too long neglected, "careless-ordered" garden. But whence came the earlier formularies themselves, from which Cranmer and the rest quarried the stone for the new building?—to change the metaphor as Paul, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... her red hair—hair that was neither auburn nor chestnut but simply red. Nor would anyone have wished it otherwise, having once seen that glorious mass, with all its wonderful possibilities of rippling luxuriance. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... place, and the solemn pines and firs pointing heavenwards with their venerable age and sighing their constant hymn give an everlasting pathos to the story of man's day on earth. The hill sides, terraced into beds of flowers—many wild and more cultivated, especially dahlias, which grow in great luxuriance and richness of colour in the hills of India—form the beautiful ground-work of an Indian cemetery in a sanitarium like Mussooree. On that spot, as it lies, the visitor will behold on one side, to the south, the dark shadow of a mountain elevation, ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... "Thanatopsis" of Bryant and the "Cathedral" of Lowell may stand for individual examples respectively of the classic and the romantic styles in poetry. Compare these two productions, and in the difference between the chaste, well-pruned severity of the one, and the indulged, perhaps stimulated, luxuriance of the other, you will feel the difference between classicism and romanticism. But Victor Hugo is the great recent romanticist; and when, hereafter, we come to speak somewhat at large of him, it will be seasonable to enter more ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... divisions; the second, 27 which include every incident, episode, &c. introduced into the poem. This arrangement gives it very much the appearance of a journal versified, and effectually precludes any imputation of luxuriance of fancy ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the soil is exceedingly rich; the tobacco gardens exhibited an extreme luxuriance, and the size of the leaves formed a great contrast to the plants in the hot soil of ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... changed our course slightly, and swung in on a long slant towards the coast. We did it casually; too casually for so very important an action, for now at last we were about to touch the mysterious continent. Then we saw clearer the fine, big groves of palm and the luxuriance of the tropical vegetation. Against the greenery, bold and white, shone the buildings of Mombasa; and after a little while we saw an inland glitter that represented her narrow, deep bay, the stern of a wreck against the low, green cliffs, and strange, fat-trunked ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the house looked through it like a spirit. The woodbine seemed the only living thing about it,—the woodbine that had swung its clusters, heavy as grapes of Eshcol, along one wall, and, falling from support, had rioted upon the ground in masses of close-netted luxuriance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... first clump of brushwood he uttered a delighted exclamation. There, growing in prodigal luxuriance, was the beneficent pitcher-plant, whose large curled-up leaf, shaped like a teacup, not only holds a lasting quantity of rain-water, but mixes therewith its own palatable and ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the slopes of the hills white cupolas and terraced gardens, where the Algerine haouach still showed the taste and luxury of Algerine corsairs, rose up among their wild olive shadows on the groves of the lentiscus. In the deep gorges that were channeled between the riven rocks the luxuriance of African vegetation ran riot; the feathery crests of tossing reeds, the long, floating leaves of plants, filling the dry water-courses of vanished streams; the broad foliage of the wild fig, and the glowing, dainty blossoms of the oleander, wherever a trace of brook, or pool, or rivulet ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... summer residence of the Governor of St. Helena, lying on Sandy Bay, on the western shore of the island, and about half a German mile from the town. In this beautiful and healthful climate, every tropical plant flourishes in the greatest luxuriance. We were hospitably received at Plantation-house, a handsome, spacious, and convenient building, surrounded by an extensive park. In this delightful spot nature and art have combined at once to charm and to surprise; ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... Nevertheless the unworn Spirit is strong; Life is so healthful that it even finds nourishment in Death: these stern experiences, planted down by Memory in my Imagination, rose there to a whole cypress-forest, sad but beautiful; waving, with not unmelodious sighs, in dark luxuriance, in the hottest sunshine, through long years of youth:—as in manhood also it does, and will do; for I have now pitched my tent under a Cypress-tree; the Tomb is now my inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by the gate of which I look upon the hostile ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... for hours, unconscious of hunger; there was a profusion of wild mountain-strawberries, very tiny, which must grow almost into winter, a few of which I ate; there were blue gentianellas, and lilies-of-the-valley, and luxuriance of verdure, and a noise of waters. Occasionally, I saw little cataracts on high, fluttering like white wild rags, for they broke in the mid-fall, and were caught away, and scattered; patches also of reaped ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Beru was not what it has become since: the center of a prosperous tobacco-growing district, a tropically suburban-looking little settlement of bungalows in one long street shaded with two rows of trees, embowered by the flowering and trim luxuriance of the gardens, with a three-mile-long carriage-road for the afternoon drives and a first-class Resident with a fat, cheery wife to lead the society of married estate-managers and unmarried young fellows in the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... just her extraordinary equal and contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was afterwards to recall how, just then, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... pleasaunce, but in exquisite disorder and neglect; the shrubbery too thick and straggling, the flowers straying beyond their rightful boundaries, the statues stained and moss-grown, the balusters entangled in clinging luxuriance, the fountains dripping through fern and maiden-hair—Nature supreme, as one always sees her in this land of Art. It was the Villa d'Este, famous these three hundred years for its fountains and cypresses. Nor did the wonder cease when we forsook this enchanting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... whose ancestors, through countless ages, lived in the bright sunlight and tropical luxuriance of the warmer climes, have dark eyes, dark hair, and dark skin because nature found it necessary to supply an abundance of pigmentation in order to protect the delicate tissues of the body from injury by the actinic rays of the sun. The same soft luxuriance ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... evening. The gayest jests were throned upon her scarlet lips, the proudest light had sparkled in her large black eyes, the most radiant roses of youth had bloomed on her delicate cheeks, and the long black tresses which, with wonderful luxuriance, encircled her high white brow, had been to many the Armida nets in which their ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... knew, or that anyone else on the prairies knew. She loved all that was strong and untamed, all that was panting with wild and glowing life. Splendidly developed, softly sinewy, warmly bountiful, yet without the least physical over-luxuriance or suggestiveness, Jen, with her tawny hair and dark-brown eyes, was a growth of unrestrained, unconventional, and eloquent life. Like Nature around her, glowing and fresh, yet glowing and hardy. There ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Twelfth Street Mr. and Mrs. Gressie used to look at each other in silence when he came in, and indulge in strange, perpendicular salutations, without any shaking of hands. People did that at Portsmouth, N.H., when they were glad to see you; but in New York there was more luxuriance, and gesture had a different value. He had never, in Twelfth Street, been asked to "take anything," though the house had a delightful suggestion, a positive aroma, of sideboards,—as if there were mahogany "cellarettes" under every table. The old people, moreover, had repeatedly ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... a century like the nineteenth, so swift, so restless, so many-sided, so full of familiar personages, and of conflicts which have hardly yet receded to a distance where the historian can judge them aright. The rich luxuriance of movements and of individual characters chokes our path; it is a labyrinth in which one may well lose one's way and fail to see ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... root, and springs with the same bright vitality among the retiring snows of the Bithynian Olympus. (G. 5.) If, however, the Caucasian flower, C. 1002, be the same, it has lost its perfect grace in luxuriance, growing as large as an asphodel, and with root-leaves ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... admit her beauty? I did not think her charming, despite fine sparkling eyes and a luxuriance of brown hair. Her lips were full and her chin round, but she looked full her age, and between the brows was a line that I would call the Doctor's sign-manual. I have it myself—I have seen it in others—'t is the claw-foot of care, care never-ending ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... (especially for those who can read between the lines) a startling light on that hereditary principle which plays so important a part in our political system. All the ancillary vices flourished with a rank luxuriance. Hard drinking was the indispensable accomplishment of a fine gentleman, and great estates were constantly changing ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... which they ranged for the abode of cities in which they enjoy the comforts of social intercourse. And, indeed, what art do we find coeval with the world, and what is there of which the value is not enhanced by improvement? Why do we restrain the luxuriance of our vines? Why do we dig about them? Why do we grub up the bramble-bushes in our fields? Yet the earth produces them. Why do we tame animals? Yet are they born with intractable dispositions. Rather let us say that that is very natural which nature ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... a tall fellow, with an olive complexion, long dark hair, and very thick bushy whiskers meeting under his chin. He wore no neckerchief, as he had been playing rackets all day, and his Open shirt collar displayed their full luxuriance. On his head he wore one of the common eighteenpenny French skull-caps, with a gaudy tassel dangling therefrom, very happily in keeping with a common fustian coat. His legs, which, being long, were afflicted with weakness, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... pride— In heaven's pure azure deeply dyed; The daisy meek frae the dewy dale, The wild thyme, and the primrose pale, Wi' the lily frae the glassy lake, Of these a fragrant wreath I 'll make, And bind them 'mid the locks that flow In rich luxuriance from ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... is that the children of the genteel quarters of London, such as Kensington Gardens, have no hair, or at any rate, only skimpy little twigs of it, while the children of the East are loaded with curls and tresses of an almost tropical luxuriance, and are many times more beautiful. Does that terrifying process called Good Breeding kill all beauty? Does careful feeding and tending poison the roots of loveliness? I wonder.... Anyway, the Jews, beautiful alike in face and richness of tresses, stand to the front ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... sunken caoutchouc trees had planted the stream with frequent snags, and often heavy masses of fallen timber, still adhering to the earth at its roots, and thus preserving its vitality, and flourishing with all the luxuriance of a primitive tropical forest, covered the only part of the channel where the water was deep enough to admit of the passage of their canoe. Thus they toiled on day by day, often getting out into ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... with fiery glances. (Alas! that I can find but hackneyed phrases to describe those heart-disturbers!) And when I say that the eyebrows of a Spanish woman are not often so delicately pencilled as with many an English girl, I remember that yours were thick; and the luxuriance gave you a certain tropical and savage charm. And your hair was plentiful and curling, intensely black; I believe it was your greatest care in life. Don't you remember how often you explained to me that nothing was so harmful ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... rear of ancient New Orleans, beyond the sites of the old rampart, a trio of Spanish forts, where the town has since sprung up and grown old, green with all the luxuriance of the wild Creole summer, lay the Congo Plains. Here stretched the canvas of the historic Cayetano, who Sunday after Sunday sowed the sawdust for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... spring. The snowdrops—January flowers in Wales or Cornwall, fair maids of February in most counties—were late bloomers at Pendlemere, and were never in their prime till St. Patrick's Day. They made up for their tardy arrival by their luxuriance. They grew almost wild in the orchard, and spread like a white carpet over the grass, tossing fairy bells in the wind. Diana, promoted to help Miss Carr in the spraying of apple-trees, paused in her work to look ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... surrounded by a small domain,—small as being the residence of a rich nobleman, lying among the mountains which separate Cumberland from Westmoreland, about ten miles from Keswick, very lovely, from the brightness of its own green sward and the luxuriance of its wild woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the beauty of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... precipice, the other shore was unfolding itself. One huge mountain had been all along in sight, over against them, raising its towering head straight up some fourteen hundred feet from the water's edge; green, in the thick luxuriance of summer's clothing, except where here and there a blank precipice of many hundred feet shewed the solid stone. Now the fellow mountain, close beyond, came rapidly in view, and, as the point of the promontory was gained, the whole broad north scene opened upon the eye. Two ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... year 1790, the block-house and stockade above the mouth, of the Hockhocking river in Ohio, was a refuge and rallying point for the hardy frontiersmen of that region. The valley of the Hockhocking was preminent for the richness and luxuriance of nature's gifts, and had been from time immemorial the seat of powerful and warlike tribes of Indians, which still clung with desperate tenacity to a region which had been for so many years the chosen and beloved abode of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and morning, and their ice-cold water. Between us and them are the fir-trees, two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet high; and all around, in the burnt land, a wilderness of bloom,—the purple fireweed, that grows taller than our heads, and in the richest luxuriance, of the same color as the Alpine rose,—a beautiful ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... style. It gathered a great wealth of rich hair into a mass at the back of the head, yet leaving the top and front of the hair in soft waves; and the bound up mass behind was loose and soft and flowed naturally from the head, it had no hard outline nor regular shape; it was nature's luxuriance just held in there from bursting down over neck and shoulders; and hardly that, for some locks were almost escaping. The whole was to the utmost simple, natural, graceful, rich. But these caricatures! All that they knew was to mass the hair at the back of the head; and that fact ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... apparent; for all heavenly objects were plainly visible through it. Meantime, our vegetation had perceptibly altered; and we gained faith, from this predicted circumstance, in the foresight of the wise. A wild luxuriance of foliage, utterly unknown before, burst out upon ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of hay-ricks in trees, which I have before described. Some of them were built up in the form of an inverted cone. The luxuriance of the foliage is very striking. Nothing can exceed the beauty of the wild vines so frequent on the banks of the Danube. They fall in graceful festoons from the trees; sometimes they reach across ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... region of remarkable luxuriance, fertility, and beauty. There were crystal streams and charming lakes. Magnificent forests were interspersed with broad and green prairies. God seemed to have formed, in these remote realms, an Eden of surpassing loveliness ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... aromatic leaves, the delicious "jerked hog" of Buccaneer annals. They reared cattle and poultry, cultivated corn and yams, plantains and cocoas, guavas and papaws and mameys and avocados and all luxurious West Indian fruits; the very weeds of their orchards had tropical luxuriance in their fragrance and in their names; and from the doors of their little thatched huts they looked across these gardens of delight to the magnificent lowland forests, and over those again to the faint line of far-off beach, the fainter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... But there is something new as far as I know, and particularly ingenious here in the disposition and management of them. Those that naturally delight in the rocks, and the dry hungry soil, are here planted upon ridges of artificial rock-work; where they shew all the luxuriance of vegetation that they could amongst the Alps, the Pyrenees or the Andes. While a very different tribe, the Aquatics, display themselves in a large cistern, where they are constantly supplied with their best and most natural nourishment the rain water, conveyed to them from the eves of the richest ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... earth had remained steadfastly frozen for some hundreds of thousands of years. Wegaruk had a habit of talking when alone, but Alan thought it odd that she should be explaining to herself that the tundra-soil, in spite of its almost tropical summer richness and luxuriance, never thawed deeper than three or four feet, below which point remained the icy cold placed there so long ago that "even the spirits did not know." He smiled when he heard Wegaruk measuring time and faith in terms of "spirits," which ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... or you will trip upon the slimy Fucus that fringes the seaward side of every rock. This is one of the few Algae that grow here in luxuriance. The slate has not the deep fissures necessary to afford shelter to the more delicate kinds; and the heavy swell of the sea drags them from their slight moorings. Therefore, though Ulva, Chondrus, Cladophora, Enteromorpha, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... wheat was trampled by the hurrying feet of the dense masses of infantry, as they changed their positions during the battle. In the cornfield artillery had been stationed, and moved about as often as the enemy obtained its range. Hardly a hill of corn is left in its pristine luxuriance. The little that escaped the hoof or the wheel, as the guns moved from place to place, was nibbled by hungry horses during the bivouac subsequent to the battle. Not a stalk of wheat is upright; not a blade of corn remains uninjured; all has fallen long before the time of harvest. Another ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... that suit for another and, veiling her face in the luxuriance of her hair, loosed her lovelocks, so dark, so long that their darkness and length outvied the darkest nights, and she shot through all hearts with the magical shaft of her eye-babes. They displayed her in the third dress and she was as said of her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the solemn stillness that reigned around, save the soft gurgling of the water, as it glided over its pebbly bed. The forest was dense, the foliage above them shielding them from the sun, while the bank was smooth, mossy, and thickly studded with wild spring flowers, now in all the luxuriance of their natural loveliness. When they came to the bank of the stream where their father lost their track, they had their curiosity excited by a grove of willows on the opposite side, in the midst of which they could discern trunks of large trees piled up systematically, with a quantity of rubbish ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... only render the elevation of Trinity College more conspicuous by the inferiority with which it will be surrounded. How stunted and dwarfed the groves of our new academies when compared with the rich luxuriance of the gardens of Trinity! I had a thousand times rather you had applied your L18,000 a-year to the establishment of new fellowships and new professorships in the metropolitan and national institutions; because if you ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Knight[289] believed that his seedlings from crossed varieties of the apple exhibited increased vigour and luxuriance; and M. Chevreul[290] alludes to the extreme vigour of some of the crossed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... phase of the early history of the dragon-story and all the ingredients which in the Old World went to the making of it have been preserved in American pictures and legends in a bewildering variety of forms and with an amazing luxuriance of complicated symbolism and picturesque ingenuity. In America, as in India and Eastern Asia, the power controlling water was identified both with a serpent (which in the New World, as in the Old, was often equipped with such inappropriate and arbitrary appendages, as wings, horns and crests) ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... his peculiarly rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial. Here was an opportunity for art and labour; the luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden. His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell of training that would emaciate a poorer stock. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... inform you of my arrival in Baden, which is indeed still very empty of human beings, but with all the greater luxuriance and full lustre does Nature shine in her enchanting loveliness. Where I fail, or ever have failed, be graciously indulgent towards me, for so many trying occurrences, succeeding each other so closely, have really almost bewildered me; still I am convinced that the resplendent ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... terrible, that iron land on the other side of the mountains!—not a world of ice and frost, but one of beauty and light, with a climate that was almost tropical in its warmth, and lands that were covered with the rank luxuriance of a teeming vegetable life. I had passed from that outer world to this inner one, and the passage was from death unto life, from agony and despair to sunlight and splendor and joy. Above all, in all around me that which most impressed me now was the rich and superabundant life, ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... scene from the wild and wonderful in Nature. Its romantic luxuriance must win the attention of the artist, and the admiration of the less wistful beholder; while the philosophic mind, unaccustomed to vulgar wonder, may seek in its formation the cause of some of the most important changes of the earth's surface. Our esteemed friend and correspondent Vyvyan, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... of kindliness, of fidelity, of humanity, which flourish in unregarded luxuriance in the rich meadows of peace, receive unwonted admiration when we discern them in war, like violets shedding their perfume on the perilous edges of the precipice, beyond the smiling borders of civilization. God be praised for all the examples of magnanimous virtue ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the advancing wall. We have said how rich is vegetation all along the Frith, until we reach the sandy downs from Ardrossan to Ayr. All evergreens grow with great rapidity: ivy covers dead walls very soon. To understand in what luxuriance vegetable life may be maintained close to the sea-margin, one must walk along the road which leads from the West Bay at Dunoon towards Toward. We never saw trees so covered with honeysuckle; and fuchsias a dozen feet in height are quite common. In this sweet spot, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... discussion on this subject partly in respect to the Elephas primigenius in my "Journal of Researches" (Murray's Home and Colonial Library), Chapter V., page 85. (347/3. "The firm conviction of the necessity of a vegetation possessing a character of tropical luxuriance to support such large animals, and the impossibility of reconciling this with the proximity of perpetual congelation, was one chief cause of the several theories of sudden revolutions of climate...I am far from supposing that the climate ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Wyatt went on ahead. Paul and Jim followed in the midst of a strong guard of soldiers. The road led again through corn and grain fields where cultivation was making a struggle against the luxuriance of a semi-tropical wilderness, although with small ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with the bright yellow buttercup-looking flowers, are now in full luxuriance of bloom in wet places near running water; they may not be esteemed beautiful by all, and yet all God's works, and all his flowers, are good and beautiful. Let any one see them as I have seen them, a large flowerbed of an acre and more, one mass of the brightest ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... imperials, goatees, side-whiskers and Galways are unknown, a fact which was to me strange considering the luxuriance of other vegetation until I learned that, from infancy, it is the custom of the Filbertine mother to scour her offspring's face with powdered coral which discourages the facial follicles. These eventually give up and, turning inward and upward, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... of Time—later by perhaps some two or three hundred thousand years. Monstrous mammals now held sway over the fresh, green round of the young earth, so exuberant in her youthful vigor that she could not refrain from flooding the Poles themselves with a tropical luxuriance of flower and tree. The supremacy of ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Agsan, a small amount of maize in season, or even some beans,[10] so that it is seldom he has to have recourse to the forest for his maintenance. But the mountain Manbo is occasionally compelled to draw his sustenance from the various palm trees and vines that are found in such luxuriance throughout his forest domain. I have seen poisonous tubers gathered in time of famine by the Manbos of the upper W-wa region and eaten, after they had been scraped on a prickly rattan branch, and the poison had been removed by a series of washings ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Hotel de Ville and belfry which puts the market-house and belfry of Bruges quite in the shade from an impressive architectural point of view. There is not the quiet, splendid severity of its more famous compeer at Bruges, but there is far more luxuriance in its architectural form, and, at any rate, it was a surprise and a pleasure to find that any such ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season. Some of them wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of different nuances of green luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation of vegetable coloring. Indeed, as already intimated, the view from the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably beautiful, and well worth ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... northern lights are reflected on the snow. The summer of Labrador has a beauty of its own, far unlike that of more genial climates, but which its inhabitants would not forego for the warm life and lavish luxuriance of tropical landscapes. The dwarf fir-trees throw from the ends of their branches yellow tufts of stamina, like small lamps decorating green pyramids for the festival of spring; and if green grass is in a great measure wanting, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... favors us with a wonderful description of the tropical forest, with its huge trees, brilliant flowers, strange birds and monkeys, all of which gives the reader a vivid impression of the color, beauty, perfume, and luxuriance ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... ideal scene of tropical luxuriance; cattle and sheep were feeding upon the abundant grasses; but they suddenly took to their heels, with uplifted tails and terrified eyes, at the sight of his white face, a spectacle never before seen on this oasis, peopled hitherto exclusively ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... with a distinct and glorious vision of the Faries' Land! I found myself in a country more enchantingly beautiful than the warm, romantic dream of the poet has ever yet conceived:—therein bloomed trees, and plants, and flowers, in beauty and luxuriance never to fade; therein was the soft air strongly imbued with the ambrosial odour of the orient rose; but ever as a gentle breeze enfolded me, it seemed on its refreshing wings to bear the heavenly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... but little vegetation, and the primitive grass, though of good quality, is thin and scarce. Now, however, under a competent system of irrigation, the whole aspect of the landscape is changed from what it was thirty years ago, and it has all the luxuriance of ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... dealing, was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic, uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered squirearchy; the firm founding of a ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... heat of summer always brings with it, to the idler and the man of leisure, a longing for the leafy shade and the green luxuriance of the country. It is pleasant to interchange the din of the city, the movement of the crowd, and the gossip of society, with the silence of the hamlet, the quiet seclusion of the grove, and the gossip ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Kingozi looked about him for shelter. A gorgeous, red- flowering vine had smothered one of the flat-topped thorn trees in its luxuriance. The growths of successive years had overlaid each other. Kingozi called two men with pangas who speedily cut out the centre, leaving a little round green room in the heart of the shadow. Thither Kingozi ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... individual was free from it, and which can only be used as a remedy against some disorders. The soil of the Society Isles in the plains and vallies is rich, and the rivulets which intersect it supply abundance of moisture. All sorts of vegetables, therefore, thrive with great luxuriance upon it, and require little attendance or cultivation. This profusion is become the source of that great luxury among the chiefs, which we do not meet with at Tonga-tabboo. There the coral rock is covered only with a thin bed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... world and it was a very costly one, for it was made of the finest porcelain, and was so brittle that you had to be very careful if you touched it. It was surrounded by such a large garden that the gardener himself did not quite know where it ended. Lovely flowers grew in luxuriance, and, lest people should pass the most beautiful without noticing them, peals of silver bells were tied to ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... belong to them, the poplars of Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any of the wilder groupings of the hills; so also, there are certain conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and avenue, rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the mountain superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete as it is in water; for exactly as there are some expressions in the broad reaches of a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the region between the tropics, produces an incredible profusion of climbing plants, of which the flora of the Antilles alone presents us with forty different species. Among the most graceful of these shrubs is the passion-flower, which, according to Descourtiz, grows with such luxuriance in the Antilles, as to climb trees by means of the tendrils with which it is provided, and form moving bowers of rich and elegant festoons, decorated with blue and purple flowers, and fragrant with perfume. The Mimosa ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... resurrection of the dead, but the coming of the animals to defile them. Round about may be noted signs of recent excavations; here the earth is sunken, there it forms a low mound. There grow in all their luxuriance the tarambulo to prick the feet with its spiny berries and the pandakaki to add its odor to that of the cemetery, as if the place did not have smells enough already. Yet the ground is sprinkled with ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... aisle! And constantly from bough to bough twined a great scarlet-flowered creeper, glowing redly in all this mystery of shade. The banks were thick with vegetation, one thing growing over another, with tropical luxuriance, until sometimes here and there groups of plants, weary with the struggle each to assert itself, had all fallen together over the bank and trailed their long strands ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... small bight of the inner edge of the reef was a sheltered nook, where every coral was in full life and luxuriance. Smooth round masses Moeandrina and Astroea were contrasted with delicate leaf-like and cup-shaped expansions of Explanaria, and with an infinite variety of Madreporiae and Seriatoporae, some with more finger-shaped projections, others with large ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... with which it is connected by a high-road. Having disclosed my intentions to La Trape, I left this road and struck into a woodland path which promised to conduct us in the right direction. But the luxuriance of the undergrowth, and the huge chaos of grey rocks which cumber that part of the forest, made it difficult to keep for any time in a straight line. After being an hour in the saddle we concluded that we had lost our way, and were confirmed in this, on reaching a clearing. In place ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... to me to have a richness of foliage, a color and substance and shine, that compare only with the excellence of two other products of the same State—the peach and the watermelon. The long summer and the plenitude of sunshine seem to weave into these products luxuriance found nowhere else; and when one sees for the first time a happy, rollicking bunch of round-eyed negro children, innocent alike of much clothing or any trouble, mixing up with the juicy Georgia melon under the shade of a luxuriant oak, he gets a new conception ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... in the farmer's eyes, Drawing off the nurture from the grain they prize, And their great luxuriance sore ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... to sea he establishes his reign by bloodless victories, he is attended by Fauns and Satyrs and the jovial Pan; wine and honey are his gifts; and all the earth is glad in his gracious presence. Hence he was ever associated with Oriental luxuriance, and was worshipped even among the Greeks with a large infusion of Oriental extravagance, though tempered by the more ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the side of the cliff looking towards the south, in the form of an arch, eighty feet wide and seventy-two in height. The summit of the cliff is covered with trees of gigantic size, and with shrubs and plants growing in all the luxuriance of a tropical vegetation, while a variety of creeping plants hang in elegant festoons before its entrance. Visitors can proceed for upwards of 430 feet without being compelled to light their torches. When ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... sculpturesque, the Romantic picturesque. The virtues of the Classical are exquisiteness and incisive significance; of the Romantic, richness and splendor. The dangers of the Classical are coldness and formality; of the Romantic, over-luxuriance, formlessness and excess of emotion. [Footnote: All these matters, here merely suggested, are fully discussed in the present author's 'Principles of Composition and Literature.' (The A. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... open its soul to the air. So must you press forward to open your soul to the eternal. But it must be the eternal that draws forth your strength and beauty, not desire of growth. For in the one case you develop in the luxuriance of purity, in the other you harden by the forcible passion ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... brought to the ground each time we fired. We did not forget the crocodiles, nor did Aboh, who was very wary when picking up the birds. As we made our way through the forest, I was especially struck by the variety and luxuriance of the trees and shrubs, the number of vines which hung from the branches in wreaths and festoons, the length of the leaves, some rising from the ground, others forming crowns on the summits of tall trees, surmounted by flowers of bright red ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... of this island is generally allowed to be remarkably fine, and it is very deep; indeed, the luxuriance with which almost every thing grows sufficiently indicates a very rich soil: it seems to be composed principally of a deep, fat clay, and decayed vegetable matter; in short, without pretending to natural knowledge, that unhappily I do not possess, I shall ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... can bestow, and pursuing my scientific investigations with as much ease as if I were in my study, or in the Museum at Cambridge,—with this enormous difference, that I am writing on deck, protected by an awning from the hot sun, and surrounded by all the luxuriance of the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... nooks and pastures, till he came to the base of the Hill. It was all skirted by a low wall of piled stones covered with grey lichens, where the brambles grew freely; but the grass upon the Hill itself had a peculiar richness and luxuriance, as though it was never trodden or crushed underfoot. Gilbert climbed the wall, but the brambles clung to him as though to keep him back; he disentangled them one by one, and in a moment he found himself in a little green glade, among small crags, that seemed to lead to the top of the Hill. ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... grow in luxuriance, and hence dairying and beef production are profitable. Poultry pays as well as anywhere else; chickens often run on green clover all ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... the bloom and vitality and radiance of this adolescent beauty. And so there is extreme loveliness in this figure of Love by Mr. Stanhope, and the whole picture is full of grace, though there is, perhaps, too great a luxuriance of colour, and it would have been a relief had the girl ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... rapid, murmuring brook. The Fiord, surrounded by mountains, lay beneath us, and, far away, we could see the boat that had brought us hither, floating, like a white feather, slowly homewards to the yacht. The blue-bell and fox-glove were growing on every hand, and the heath throve in luxuriance, but, flowerless, seemed to miss the golden ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... other land, Africa lies in the tropics, with a warm, dry climate, save in the central Congo region, where rain at all seasons brings tropical luxuriance. The flora is rich but not wide in variety, including the gum acacia, ebony, several dye woods, the kola nut, and probably tobacco and millet. To these many plants have been added in historic times. The fauna is ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... luxuriance of this desert place was owing to a few springs and the dammed-up waters of the Rio Forlorn. Before he had come to the oasis it had been inhabited by a Papago Indian tribe and a few peon families. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... by Mrs Pansey. The missionary, after introducing himself as a plain and unlettered man, launched out into a wonderfully vigorous and picturesque description of those Islands of Paradise which bloom like gardens amid the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. He described the fecundity and luxuriance of Nature, drew word-portraits of the mild, brown-skinned Polynesians, wept over their enthralment by a debased system of idolatry, and painted the blessings which would befall them when converted to the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... spacious schoolroom to the prim splendours of Georgy's state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the mysteries and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... has attempted to shelter himself under the authority of Sophocles; but though there are some exquisite touches of landscape painting in that drama, the poet has introduced them with a much more sparing hand. It is said that Hurd pruned away a great deal more luxuriance of this kind, with which the first draught of the Elfrida was overrun; and we learn from Gray, in his admirable letter of criticism on the Caractacus, that the opening of that tragedy was, as it at first stood, even much more objectionable than at present. Such ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... that this is not the first crop of the kind. The grasses are numerous and many of them unknown to me, but they only constitute a moderate portion of the herbage. Several kinds of spurious vetches and portulac, as well as salsolaceae, add to the luxuriance of the vegetation. At seven miles we found ourselves in an open forest country, where the feed was good, but not equal to what we had passed, neither had it been visited by yesterday's rain. We soon emerged again on open plains, but the soil being of a more clayish nature, they were not nearly ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... time they were clear of the sombre wood, and had to commence another fight in the hollow of the slope they had to climb, for here the brambles and furze grew in their greatest luxuriance, and had woven so sturdy a hedge that it was next to impossible ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... art that would not do discredit to a very advanced school." The figure is clad in mail armour, which covers the mouth in a peculiar fashion, and wears a surcoat falling in simple folds, almost Greek in feeling, that are somewhat curious in connection with the rich mediaeval luxuriance of the surface ornament. On his shield are borne six heraldic leopards or lions. The slab and effigy are stone, but the base is of wood encircled by an arcade of trefoiled arches. One of its compartments protected ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... measure of things about it. Deep in the wide American soul there shall be Lake Superiors, inland oceans of thought; and the streams of her eloquence shall be like the sweep of the Mississippi in his strength. The rugged strength of the New England hills, the luxuriance of the sunny South, the measureless expanse of the prairie, the broad flow of our rivers, the dashing of our cataracts, the huge battlements of the everlasting mountains,—these are American. On the face of the globe there is nothing like to them. When therefore these various ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... whether they who oppose the bill will grant their opposition hypocritical, or their patriotism languid, I shall lay my opinion of this new regulation before your lordships with equal freedom, though with less luxuriance of imagination, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... of the unconscious sleeper, who lay in happy forgetfulness of all her sorrows, her fair curls spread in unbound luxuriance over the dark shaggy neck of the faithful Wolfe, who seemed as if proud of the beloved burden that rested so trustingly upon him. Sometimes the careful dog just unclosed his large eyes, raised his nose from his shaggy paws, snuffed the night air, growled in a sort of under ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... morning of the decisive battle. Jasmine and rose, unstained by the sulphur of gunpowder, twined around its ruined columns and half hid the recessed windows; the careless flower garden was still in its unkempt and unplucked luxuriance; the courtyard before the stables alone showed marks of the late military occupancy, and was pulverized by the uneasy horse-hoofs of the waiting staff. But the mingled impress of barbaric prodigality with patriarchal simplicity was still there ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... might read plainly there, but no trace of fear or despair. She might have been a lioness defending her young. Her splendour of dark auburn hair, escaped and fallen free to her waist, fascinated me with the luxuriance of its disorder. Volney's lazy admiration quickened to a deeper interest. For an instant his breath came faster. His face lighted with the joy of the huntsman after worthy game. But almost immediately he ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... wondered that the Puritans did not set sail en masse for the Bahamas. Gorgeous were the descriptions of Virginia sent home by some of the first settlers, in which lions and tigers, and a whole menagerie of tropical animals, came in for no small share of wonder; and, as an offset to this summer luxuriance of life, most disparaging pictures were drawn of the bleak sterility of New England,—and even that which was the only compensation for this barrenness of the earth, namely, the abundance of fish in the sea, was, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the great butter-making district that lies north of St Lo. The grass in every meadow seems to grow with particular luxuriance, and the sleepy cows that are privileged to dwell in this choice country, show by their complaisant expressions the satisfaction they feel with their surroundings. It is wonderful to lie in one of these sunny pastures, ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... itself was now closed deep with green creepers, and its veranda with jessamine; and the low white walls of the garden were beautiful with vine-leaves and huge fig-leaves, that ran up them and about them, and waved over them in tropical luxuriance. In short, the house was a very bower, and looked the abode of bliss; and this time last year a young couple had spent their honeymoon there, and left it with a sigh. But one place sees many minds; and now this sweet place ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the long street over the rock and cobble stones between walls half green with pellitory, houses with high gables and rough wooden balconies where geraniums shone in the shadow, and from which the trailing plants hung low in that supreme luxuriance which is the beginning of their death. A few old women sat at their doors spinning, and geese, in small companies of three or four, waddled out of the way; but there was no sound of any kind—Limeuil was as silent as a cemetery. And yet there were cafes, which ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... encounter it as a physical enemy, to bid it "do its worst," and feel that its worst will perhaps be ultimately its best for us. He stood and saw another flash dart its bright, brief, and malignant glance over the ruins of ancient power, and the luxuriance of recent fertility. Singular contrast! The relics of art forever decaying,—the productions of nature forever renewed.—(Alas! for what purpose are they renewed, better than to mock at the perishable monuments ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Sun smiled—and for one broken month there was a perpetual alternation of rain and radiance! How beautiful is penitence! How beautiful forgiveness! For one week the Summer was restored to his pristine peace and old luxuriance, and the desert blossomed ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... half-civilised inhabitants would no longer have need to search the whole surface of the land for it, and thus lead to its extirpation; and even if this did occur during a famine, dormant seeds would be left in the ground. In tropical countries the wild luxuriance of nature, as was long ago remarked by Humboldt, overpowers the feeble efforts of man. In anciently civilised temperate countries, where the whole face of the land has been greatly changed, it can hardly be doubted that some plants ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... hand of man had been employed to adorn it; for the tall majestic trees that constitute the growth of the Island, were tied together at the tops, by creepers running out from their branches, forming the most graceful festoons, and often peeping over the tops of the trees, as if to exult in their own luxuriance. ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... men who never have left England take such beauty for granted, but to me, after the flaunting luxuriance of the East, it is enchanting. I notice everything. I want someone, who cares for it as I do, to admire it with me. If it weren't for Dick Burden this England would ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... piece had a dedication, written with such elegance and luxuriance of praise, as neither haughtiness nor avarice could be imagined able to resist. But he seems to have made flattery too cheap. That praise is worth nothing of which the price ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... yet brooded inwardly, April-eyes, that were turned towards the summer that was coming. And all the past was poured into that, even as the squalls and tempests of winter are transmuted into and feed the luxuriance of June-time. The sorrow and the pain that were past had become herself; they were over, but their passage had left her more patient, more tolerant, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... loam, and a slightly shaded situation will conduce to its lengthened flowering, and also tend to luxuriance. Soon after the flowers fade the foliage begins to dry up; care should, therefore, be taken to have some other suitable flower growing near it, so as to avoid dead or blank spaces. Pentstemons, rooted cuttings of which are very handy at this season for ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... of Jesus, to spend a comfortable hour and perchance contribute to carrying the Gospel to some nature-favored heathen land, never as yet cursed by rum and other evils which flourish with tropical luxuriance in all civilized countries, and which ever follow with blighting, corroding, and life-destroying influence in the wake of our boasted modern civilization. Two great evils confront every thoughtful American citizen to-day. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... sombre library where, only a few days before, Diane had seen Derek Pruyn turn his back on her, without even a gesture of farewell. On the long mahogany table the red azalea was in almost passionate luxuriance of blossom; while through the open window faint odors of lilac came from Miss Lucilla's bit ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... apprehensive that, after all the labour which we should employ in painting this scene, the said reader would be very apt to skip it entirely over, we have saved ourselves that trouble. To say the truth, we have, from this reason alone, often done great violence to the luxuriance of our genius, and have left many excellent descriptions out of our work, which would otherwise have been in it. And this suspicion, to be honest, arises, as is generally the case, from our own wicked heart; for we have, ourselves, been very often most horridly given to jumping, as we have ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... gay-looking can be imagined than the Cayenne River, and the pretty town standing on its banks—the wooden houses all separated from each other by gardens in which the tropical vegetation displays an unexampled luxuriance and variety. Flowers of every hue, set among huge calabash trees, gigantic palms of every kind, such as the traveller's palm with its immense fan-shaped leaves, bread-fruit trees, and many more, charm the eye with a wealth of colour which must be seen before it can be realized. Though ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... a slaughter of invaders as Italy had never seen, and a picture of the long triumph winding up the Sacred Way, of Hannibal disappearing forever within the yawning jaws of the Tullianum. At times, when his imagination ran riot most, he went so far as to depict with what luxuriance the corn would grow on the farm of that happy man whose land should be selected by the great consul, the plebeian consul, the consul Varro, for his slaughter of the enemies ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... with a nervous headache, that I have been obliged for a time to give up my excise-books, being scare able to lift my head, much less to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man? To-day, in the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; in a few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter. Day ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... dress and frippery—but here it was—a glowing and palpable fact. The simple white drapery with its border of scarlet floated with the grace of its own perfect simplicity around that perfect form, and never was royal mantle more splendid than the rippling hair that crowned her head and fell in its luxuriance of curls and waves to her feet. As they again seated themselves side by side, Mrs Jefferson remembered that she was not yet acquainted with the nationality of the stranger. She hastened to repair the error ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance. Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the smoke and clangour of a blacksmith's shop, it was a favourite resting-place of seals. The crab and lobster haunt in the crevices; and limpets, mussels, and the white ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... production. Athens and Sikyou became mere provincial cities, and were shorn thenceforth of all artistic significance; and Greek art, thus deprived of the roots of its life, continued to grow for a while with a rank luxuriance of production, but soon became normal and conventional. The artists who followed Lysippos contented themselves chiefly with seeking a merely technical perfection in reproducing the creations of the earlier ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... luxuriance in a piece of soap and a clean towel that only experienced campers can understand ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... Benjamin Franklin which illustrates the very striking nature of its action on this crop. It is related that he once printed with gypsum the words "This has been plastered" on a field of clover, and that for a long time afterwards the legend was plainly discernible on account of the luxuriance of the clover on the parts of the field which ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... a little paradise. If the view is not very extended, it is rich in its parts; and the eye and the mind are filled. The grass is shaven smooth on the bank where the two are sitting; so it is all around, under trees which stand with wilful wildness of luxuriance, grouped and scattered apparently as they would. They are very old, in several varieties of kind, and in the perfect development and thrift of each kind. Among them are the ruins of an old priory. They peep forth here ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... up the hills, constantly growing more steep and precipitous, and occasionally winding between large rocks, which were often overgrown with honeysuckle in full luxuriance. The Arabs scrambled like wild animals over the rocks, and brought down very long streamers of honeysuckle, Luwayeh, as they call it, which they wound round and round the necks of our horses, and generally got piastres for doing so. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... with sure instinct the easiest way. Three hours of steady work brought us suddenly beyond the timber-line, and the real joy of the day began. Nowhere else have I see anything approaching the luxuriance and variety of delicate blossoms shown by these high, mountain pastures of the North. "You scarce could see the grass for flowers." Everything that was marvelous in form, fair in color, or sweet in fragrance seemed to be represented there, ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... labour of love, day after day, he returns with unabated zest, altering, improving, painting out, adding, taking away, drinking in the while his model's beauty, as parched and thirsty gardens of Egypt drink in the overflowing Nile, to return a tenfold harvest of verdure, luxuriance, and wealth. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... those which preceded it. Again, each of these groups may not have become totally extinct, but may have left a few species, the modified prototypes of which have existed in each succeeding period, a faint memorial of their former grandeur and luxuriance. Thus every case of apparent retrogression may be in reality a progress, though an interrupted one: when some monarch of the forest loses a limb, it may be replaced by a feeble and sickly substitute. The foregoing remarks appear to apply to the case of the Mollusca, which, at a very early ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of the age with "a whole piece of rich and glowing scarlet." His two pieces "The Vision," 1715, and "The Fair Circassian," 1720, though written in the couplet, exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of imagery manifestly learned from Spenser. In 1713 he had published under the pseudonym of Nestor Ironside, "An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 "Another Original Canto," both, of course, in the stanza of the "Faerie Queene." The example thus set was followed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... western inclines of the sierra there is nothing suggestive of tropical luxuriance or romance in the landscape, which impresses one chiefly with its towering mountains and vast slopes. Grass is plentiful enough among the stones and rocks, and groups of fresh green trees indicate where ground is moist and ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... fungus—a mere infinitesimal ovoid particle, which finds space and duration enough to multiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... whitewashed houses, well-trained gardens, and the like, vary these evergreen hills and trees, and diversify the unceasing monotony of hill and dale, and dale and hill—of green trees, green grass—green grass, green trees, so wearisome in their luxuriance,—what a paradise of beauty would this place present! The deep blue waters of the lake, in contrast with the vegetation and large brown rocks, form everywhere an object of intense attraction; but ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... twice they had broken the monotony by a stretch along the towing-path of a canal, which, choked with water-lily plants and shining weeds, brooded sluggishly beside the fields. Nature, in one of her ironic moods, had cast a grey and iron-hard cloak over all the country's bland luxuriance. From dawn till darkness fell there had been no movement in the steely distant sky; a cold wind ruffed in the hedge-tops, and sent shivers through the branches of the elms. The cattle, dappled, pied, or bay, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and neither my glass nor the others showed any good landing there. As the launch drew in towards the cliffs I began to get the lie of the place more clearly; and especially of what I call the mainland, which was wonderfully fresh and green in the sunlight and seemed to have some of the tropic luxuriance of more southern islands. About four miles long, I judged it to be, from the high black rock to which it rose at the southward point, to the low dog's-nosed reef which defended it to the north. Trees I could see, palms and that kind, and ripe green ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton |
