"Moss-grown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Isle Straits. Till the 9th of June brown fog held Cartier. When it lifted the tide had borne his ships across the straits to Labrador at Castle Island, Chateau Bay. Labrador was a ruder region than Newfoundland. Far as eye could scan were only domed rocks like petrified billows, dank valleys moss-grown and scrubby, hillsides bare as slate; "This land should not be called earth," remarked Cartier. "It is flint! Faith, I think this is the region God gave Cain!" If this were Cain's realm, his descendants ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... there, upon the roadside, shrines and holy niches were often observed, approached generally by a flight of stone steps, on a hill-side, looking very old and moss-grown. Upon these were placed consecrated idols, or religious emblems of peculiar character, calculated in our uninitiated eyes to provoke mirth rather than reverence. The principal object was usually a sitting figure in stone, wood, or metal, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... March wind is sweeping harsh and dry across a dreary sheet of bog, still red and yellow with the stains of winter frost. One brown knoll alone breaks the waste, and on it a few leafless wind-clipt oaks stretch their moss-grown arms, like giant hairy spiders, above a desolate pool which crisps and shivers in the biting breeze, while from beside its brink rises a mournful cry, and sweeps down, faint and fitful, amid ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... church, some lying flat on the ground, others elevated on low pillars, or on cross slabs of stone, and almost all looking dark, moss-grown, and very antique. But on reading some of the inscriptions, I was surprised to find them very recent; for, in fact, twenty years of this climate suffices to give as much or more antiquity of aspect, whether to gravestone or edifice, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gladly followed the Ancient Mariner down the path that sloped from the garden, through a green pasture, round to the river-bank. Here she found the boat-house, whose roof she had seen from her window, and a gray wharf with moss-grown piers. The tide was high, and it took Jeremiah only a few minutes to pull the little green boat out, and set her rocking ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... mention, the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... why anticipate its evil day? Ah, rather let us now in lovely June O'erlook these happy children at their play: Lo, where they gambol through the garden gay, Or round the hoary hawthorn dance and sing, Or, 'neath yon moss-grown cliff, grotesque and grey Sit plaiting flowery wreaths in social ring, And telling wondrous tales ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose And lily in the neglected garden close; But they whose feet had borne them from the door Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore. We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs, With lighter melancholy than the glooms Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense Suggestion of a mystical dismay, As in the brilliance of the summer day We faced the vast gray ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... him, rubbing his whiskers again, looking back over his trail as if he heard footsteps behind him. Then another nervous dash, a squeak which proclaims at once his escape, and his arrival, and he vanishes under the old moss-grown log where his fellows live, a whole colony ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... wisdom of lazy noons in spacious corn-fields; of dewy mornings in misty lanes and moss-grown paths; of dreamy shadows in deep grass when the apple boughs hang heavily earthward, and long nights of autumn rain have left amber-coloured pools in the hollow places of the trees and in the mud trodden by ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the sun was low, and a purple bluish smoke hung like a thin veil over the tops of the forest, Brita had taken out her knitting and seated herself on a large moss-grown stone, on the croft. Her eyes wandered over the broad valley which was stretched out below, and she could see the red roofs of the Blakstad mansion peeping forth between the fir-trees. And she wondered what they were doing down there, whether Grimhild had done milking, and ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to see later, might easily enough have been worked yesterday, in any one of the old mediaeval houses; Mathilde and her hand-maidens would find no more—not so much—to distract and disturb them now in this still and tranquil town, with its sad gray streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces, Bayeux was already old. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... flight of steep steps rudely fashioned of large unshapen blocks of stone, conducted to the entrance of the hermitage, and the dim light within its hoary, moss-grown, sloping walls is admitted through irregularly formed apertures, pierced through the dense body of the rock, and command magnificent views of the subjacent scenery." [Footnote: Bigsby (R.), "Historical and Topographical Description of Repton in the ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... same old board had stood beside the big iron gates with "This House to be Let Furnished" written upon it in large white letters, no one had come to live in it, and the children had grown to look upon the Grange garden, with its moss-grown walks and weedy flower ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... during that time we only lived to have dreams and write them down. The Story Girl had originated the idea one evening in the rustling, rain-wet ways of the spruce wood, where we were picking gum after a day of showers. When we had picked enough, we sat down on the moss-grown stones at the end of a long arcade, where it opened out on the harvest-golden valley below us, our jaws exercising themselves vigorously on the spoil of our climbings. We were never allowed to chew gum in school or in company, but in wood ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... good, And the mind of strength shall prove Weaker than the heart of love; Pride of graybeard wisdom less Than the infant's guilelessness, And his song of sorrow more Than the crown the Psalmist wore Who shall then, with pious zeal, At our moss-grown thresholds kneel, From a stained and stony page Reading to a careless age, With a patient eye like thine, Prosing tale and limping line, Names and words the hoary rime Of the Past has made sublime? Who shall work for us as well The antiquarian's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of them. But there's one thing that would happen: he would grow away from his mother. He'd come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... at last and nothing remained but the narrow channel of the brook itself, the smooth stones making a precarious and uncertain footing for the adventurous explorer. How soothing was the ceaseless plash of that little stream, fretting its moss-grown banks and dashing in miniature surge against the stones in its path! What infinite peace reigned in this place, around which the brotherhood of mountains had gathered, to hold it inviolate against all comers! The great rocks were moss-covered, the steep slopes on either ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... opens in the wilderness; gay flowers Of unknown name purple the yielding sward; The ring-dove murmurs o'er their head, like one Attesting tenderest joy; but mark the trees, Where, slanting through the gloom, the sunshine rests! Beneath, a moss-grown monument appears, O'er which the green banana gently waves Its long leaf; and an aged cypress near 160 Leans, as if listening to the streamlet's sound, That gushes from the adverse bank; but pause— Approach with reverence! Maker of the world, There is a Christian's cross! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... grey and moss-grown; moss carpeted the ground between its protruding roots, but the bracken and heather held back, and left a half-circle beneath it, untenanted by their kind. It would seem that all vegetation fears to venture beneath the shade of the beech; and for the ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... in thickness; and yielding to the pressure of the foot or the body as comfortably as a feather bed, if not more so, being elastic in nature. A large square of this had been cut up from some other part of the island and placed on the already moss-grown and cushioned ground, serving as a mattress, while two smaller pieces served as pillows. A sumac tree at the head of the improvised couch gave the necessary shade to the face of the sleeper, while a wild grapevine, after having run over and encircled ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... docks was a tangle of railroad yards and tracks, and miles upon miles of sheds, piled to the top with stores of every sort you could imagine. A whole encampment-city covered the surrounding hills, crowned by an old, creaking, moss-grown windmill—the Middle Ages looking in dismay ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse with a faint smile lingering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to her. Her hands were tied by her mother's policy, and she sat moping and chafing like a chained captive, waiting till Mr. Van Dam should come and deliver her from as vile durance as was ever suffered in the moss-grown castles of the old world. The hope of his coming was all that sustained her. Her sad situation was the result of acting on a false view of life from beginning to end. Any true parent would have shuddered at the thought of a daughter marrying such a man as Van ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... Davenport always shut up his log castle early, and retired to rest as soon as daylight departed; for it did so very early in the evening there, as the solemn pines, with their gray trunks and far-spreading moss-grown arms and dismal evergreen foliage, if it can be called foliage, stood close to his dwelling—nay, brushed with the breath of ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... gloomy wood by night has terrors for the bravest, and it was only the certainty that she was leaving girl-life—chaperons, waltz-tunes, and bitter sneering, for ever—that gave courage to proceed. A bit of moss-grown wall, a singularly shaped holly-bush, a white stone, took fantastic and supernatural appearances, and once she stopped, paralyzed with fear, before the grotesque shadow that a dead tree threw over an unexpected glade. A strange bird rose from the bare branches, and at that moment her ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... eyes and thought of a bit of landscape at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as the threads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smooth trunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled over the moss-grown stones to the brook below. It was like a bit from a Japanese garden in its ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... with more briskness, not only lured by the chance of coming up with the herd of rein-deer, but pursued by the moss-grown phantom of a mountain couch. An endless forest of firs lay on our right hand, and the nearer we approached it, the more clearly we could hear the howl of wolves; and whenever we reached an elevated mound of ground we thought ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... rambles I came across some curious stone erections on the summit of the Cape. They were moss-grown, much dilapidated, and apparently of great age. The tomb-like contrivances are said to have been constructed by the Eskimo as a protection against invaders—the pillars of stone, laid loosely one on the other, about ten feet high, to represent men, and ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... foliage rose in dark masses above the high wall, and some inquisitive, encroaching boughs stretched over and occasionally dropped their golden fruit into Ahmed's garden. On the inside of the old, moss-grown wall were numerous buttresses, and in these angles and corners, sheltered from any breeze, the roses and the small fruit-trees fairly rioted together, blending their masses of ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent, but the large green lizards slipped in and out, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... away. A slight breeze rustled amongst the cypresses and the olive trees, and the air grew clearer. The sun was low in the heavens, and long shadows lay across the brilliant patches of flowers, half wild, half cultivated, and on the moss-grown walks. ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ravine that one hears the sound of the waters close at hand without seeing anything but the profusion of foliage overhanging and growing among the rocks. After climbing down among the moist ferns and moss-grown stones, the gushing cascades appear suddenly set in a frame of such lavish beauty that they hold a high place among ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... fill from the ice-cold well at the back of the cottage. Morning and night I serve with the Gibeonites, their curse my blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when their hearts were purged by service. Morning and night I send down the moss-grown bucket with its urgent message from a dry and dusty world; the chain tightens through my hand as the liquid treasure responds to the messenger, and then with creak and jangle—the welcome of labouring earth—the bucket slowly nears the top and disperses ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... in a sort of dip in the ground, and was surrounded on all four sides—for it was exactly square—by very steep high banks, which had been cut into by steep stone steps, now gray, and broken, and moss-grown, which led down straight into the water. This pool was called Shadonake Bath. How long the steps had existed no one knew; probably for several hundred years, for there was a ghost story connected with them. Somebody was supposed, before the memory of any one living, ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... for what now happened to Gerald, who was leading the melancholy little procession. He stumbled, clutched at a tree-trunk, missed his clutch, and disappeared, with a yell and a clatter; and Mabel, who came next, only pulled herself up just in time not to fall down a steep flight of moss-grown steps that seemed to open suddenly in ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... Man.—See the moss-grown daisied bank Peering in the stream below; Here we'll sit in dewy dank, Turn thee, Alice: do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... satisfied, and there hasn't been a successor since with originality enough to start a fresh one. For they ARE a pretty limited lot, you will admit that? Originality is not in their line; they can't think up anything new, anything to freshen up the old moss-grown dullness of the language lesson and put life and "go" into it, and charm and grace ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... loved the clear old tree! Summer after summer did they return to build nests among its moss-grown branches; and the branches, glad that the songsters had come back again, would put forth green leaves to hide them from prying eyes, so that they could rest there securely. Can you wonder, then, that they sang sweet songs of gratitude to it, and that the little brook should ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... till morning. The poplars yonder rustle that their quivering leaves may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak; trembling does not become HIM; and he watches himself in his stout old burly steadfastness, without the motion of a twig. The moss-grown gate, ill-poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed swings to and fro before its glass, like some fantastic dowager; while our own ghostly likeness travels on, Yoho! Yoho! through ditch and brake, upon the ploughed land and the smooth, along the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... to sustain himself? where shall he look for his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... the sky above showed the crimson of the distant afterglow, warning us that it was time we began to think of how to make our exit. We were passing around a sharp bend in the glen where the boulders were so thickly moss-grown that our feet fell noiselessly, when I thought I heard a voice, and raising my hand ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... a great wind here; the spring has not begun properly yet, but we go about without our goloshes and fur caps. The tulips will soon be out. I have a nice garden but it is untidy, moss-grown—a ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... puddle of dirty water. You see more successful works—the Professor's little private garden, which he is supposed to cultivate with his own hands; various little wells and watercourses among the rocks, moss-grown and fern-embowered; and so you come out ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... windows of the Hall, occupied for the time by a farmer who held the post of steward, while the Squire, now four or five and twenty, was making the grand tour. However, at last, I reached Bridget's cottage—a low, moss-grown place; the palings that had once surrounded it were broken and gone; and the underwood of the forest came up to the walls, and must have darkened the windows. It was about seven o'clock—not late to my London notions—but, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. 'This—is as far as I can go,' she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. 'Even now it's wet with dew.' She rose again and looked strangely into his face. 'Yes, yes, here it is,' she said, 'oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We're both at ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... from the smouldering wood, in order to mount freely into the blue sky. Little clouds floated over the damp, grassy earth, rotting tree-trunks, piles of wood and heaps of twigs that surrounded the kiln. A moss-grown but stood at the edge of the forest, and before it sat Ulrich, talking with the coal-burner. People called this man "Hangemarx," and in truth he looked in his black rags, like one of those for whom it is a pity that Nature ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Earth's self. Invoke The storm-felled forest-trees moss-grown to-day Whose roots are hillocks where the children play; Or ask the silver sapling 'neath what yoke Those stars, his spray-crown's clustering gems, shall wage Their journey still when ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... she replied, but without looking up. Eliphalet led the way. He came to the summer house, glanced around it with apparent satisfaction, and put his foot on the moss-grown step. Virginia did a surprising thing. She leaped quickly into the doorway before him, and stood facing him, framed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... within an arm's length, distinct, dark with moisture, and insignificant in size. It had the usual country- schoolhouse form—belonged to the packing-box order of architecture; had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin—a typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad as "monuments of the past." With scarcely a glance at this ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Quong said, and he climbed up to where a tiny spring trickled down over a moss-grown rock so slowly that it took ten ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... abundant and to grow largest on the islands of the San Juan and Whidbey Archipelago. One of the three species of maples that I have seen is only a bush that makes tangles on the banks of the rivers. Of the other two one is a small tree, crooked and moss-grown, holding out its leaves to catch the light that filters down through the close-set spires of the great spruces. It grows almost everywhere throughout the entire extent of the forest until the higher slopes of the mountains are reached, and produces ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Menendez and I accompanied my friend there I was charmed by the picturesque scene below. Here was a real old herbal garden, gay with flowers and intersected by tiled moss-grown paths. There were bushes exhibiting fantastic examples of the topiary art, and here, too, was a sun-dial. My first impression of this beautiful spot was one of delight. Later I was to regard that enchanted demesne with something ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... rush-thatch'd cottage on the purple moor, Where ruddy children frolic round the door, The moss-grown antlers of the aged oak, The shaggy locks that fringe the colt unbroke, The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare Through the long tissue of his hoary hair, As with quick foot he climbs some ruin'd wall, And crops the ivy which prevents its fall, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... storms the moss-grown walls of eld And beats some falsehood down Shall pass the pallid gates of death Sans laurel, love ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... avoid this peril. What thy part is, is but this: Deliver this packet into the hand of Master Robert Catesby himself. Thou knowest him. Thou wilt make no error. Seek him not at any tavern or public place. Go to a lone house at Lambeth, with moss-grown steps down to the water's edge. Go by thine own wherry thither, and go alone. Thou canst not mistake the house. There is none like it besides. It stands upon the water, and none other building is nigh at hand; but a giant elm overshadows it, and there is a door scarce ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the dwelling of Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... saw the turrets of Front-de-Boeuf's castle raise their grey and moss-grown battlements, glimmering in the morning sun above the wood by which they were surrounded, than he instantly augured more truly concerning the cause ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... flower-beds and the fountain; some visited the stables and the home-farm, with its cow-houses and dairy and piggeries; some the neglected greenhouses, and some the equally neglected old- fashioned alleys, with their clipped yews and their moss-grown statues. No one belonging to the house was anywhere visible to receive them, until the great bell at length summoned them to the plentiful meal spread in the ruined hall. "The hospitality of some people has no roof to it," Godfrey said, when he heard ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... her breast. Thus reminded, she smiled down into the eyes of the dog and caressed it, pressing its head closer against her bosom. The man stood a few paces away, watching these two beautiful creatures as they sat in the hazy autumn sunlight, with their background of weeds and moss-grown paling. He felt baffled and perplexed, for he knew that he stood apart, excluded from their companionship by something he could not define. So intolerable did this feeling become that he resolved ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... dark background of cryptomeria, among which a great white waterfall gleams like a snow-drift before it leaps into the black pool below, it must be well worth a long journey. I have not seen anything which has pleased me more. There is a fine flight of moss-grown stone steps down to the water, a pretty bridge, two superb stone torii, some handsome stone lanterns, and then a grand flight of steep stone steps up a hill-side dark with cryptomeria leads to a small Shinto shrine. Not far off there is a sacred tree, with the token of love and revenge upon ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Washington's own monument which stands in Richmond, and many of his other works. My own early childhood was spent there, among the old-time gardens, and avenues of lordly cypresses and of bitter orange trees, and the moss-grown fountains, and long walks fragrant with half-wild roses and sweet flowers that no one thinks of planting now. Beyond, a wild waste of field and broken land led up to Santa Maria Maggiore; and the grand old bells ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... droning of bees. It seemed to Ming-Y that the path he followed had not been trodden by any other for many long years; the grass was tall upon it; vast trees on either side interlocked their mighty and moss-grown arms above him, beshadowing the way; but the leafy obscurities quivered with bird-song, and the deep vistas of the wood were glorified by vapors of gold, and odorous with flower-breathings as a temple with incense. The dreamy joy of the day entered into the heart of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... hammering away for very life: with women fainting, children screeching, Capuchins preaching. It was like a little rehearsal of doomsday. Don Marzio, a prudent housekeeper, had the latch-key of a private door at the back of the garden. He threw it open—not without a misgiving at the moss-grown wall overhead. That night the very stars did not seem to him sufficiently firm-nailed to the firmament! His family and dependents trooped after him, eager to follow. Rosalbina looked back—at one who was left behind. Don Marzio felt he owed me at least one word of leave-taking. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... most celebrated buildings in Old London. Each has been carefully reproduced from engravings and drawings in Mr. Gardner's priceless collection. The street begins with an excellent imitation of Bishopsgate, one of the City gates, with moss-grown walls, and statues of Bishop William the Norman, and of Alfred the Great and Aldred. On one side of the street will be found such quaint and picturesque buildings as the "Rose" Inn and "Cock" Tavern, the "Three Squirrels," Izaak Walton's House, and All ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... of idea that English girls were just a mite moss-grown. Old-fashioned and sweet, you know, but scared to move round without a footman or a maiden aunt. I guess I'm ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... I should be far from rejecting them," said Planchet; "but possessing only this little cemetery, full of flowers, so moss-grown, shady, and quiet, I am contented with it, and I think of those who live in town, in the Rue des Lombards, for instance, and who have to listen to the rumbling of a couple of thousand vehicles every day, and to the soulless tramp, tramp, tramp of a hundred and ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... him again with envy, with admiration, qualifying her perplexity. They had come to a point where some moss-grown, weather-beaten statues stood at the corners of the road that traversed the bosky stretch between the avenues of the Cascine. "Ah, how beautiful they are!" he said, halting, and giving himself to the rapture that a blackened garden statue imparts to ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... silent harp its master's hand requires, Shakes off the dust, and makes these rocks resound; For fortune placed me in unfertile ground, Far from the joys that with my soul agree, From wit, from learning—far, oh far from thee! 80 Here moss-grown trees expand the smallest leaf, Here half an acre's corn is half a sheaf; Here hills with naked heads the tempest meet, Rocks at their side, and torrents at their feet, Or lazy lakes, unconscious of a flood, Whose dull brown Naiads ever ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the haunts of pomp and power, To find the calm retreat; Loathing he leaves the velvet couch, To seek the moss-grown seat. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... or, as it is called in Hungary, "the castle" of Herr von Abonyi. It was really a very ordinary structure, only it had a second story, stood on an artificial mound, to which on both sides there was a very gentle ascent, and above the ever open door was a moss-grown escutcheon, grey with age, on which a horseman, with brandished sword, could be discerned in vague outlines, worn by time ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... low green hill, he threw himself over the dividing rail fence, and came, at the end of a minute's hurried walk, to the old Blake graveyard, midway of one of Fletcher's fallow fields. The gate was bricked up, after the superstitious custom of many country burial places, but he climbed the old moss-grown wall, where poisonous ivy grew rank and venomous, and landing deep in the periwinkle that carpeted the ground, made his way rapidly to the flat oblong slab beneath which his father lay. The marble was discoloured by long rains and stained with bruised periwinkle, and the shallow lettering was hidden ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Though the night was wild, the day had been warm and bright, and the water was not cold. I struck out, and began to swim round the great walls which frowned above me. I could see only three yards ahead; I had then good hopes of not being seen, as I crept along close under the damp, moss-grown masonry. There were lights from the new part of the Castle on the other side, and now and again I heard laughter and merry shouts. I fancied I recognized young Rupert Hentzau's ringing tones, and pictured ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... set off at the run towards the sobbing, in the black, wet, night air ahead, and, tripping as I ran, looked down and saw in the filtering starlight that the forest grass had given place to an ancient roadway, paved with moss-grown flag-stones, such as they ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... suffering from sea-sickness, pent up in the state-room of a storm-tossed ship, with all its vile odours around him, has been suddenly transferred to terra firma, and laid upon some solid bank, grassy or moss-grown, with tall trees waving above, and the perfume of flowers floating upon ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... said that scattered towers marked the villages which dotted this part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of hundred inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar of the parish, Mr. Roundhay, was something of an archaeologist, and as such Holmes had made his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a considerable fund of local ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... reaching to his shoulders—Mervyn, the pale, large-eyed genius of that haunted place, came to meet him. He led him into the cedar parlour, the stained and dusty windows of which opened upon that moss-grown orchard, among whose great trunks and arches those strange shapes were said sometimes to have walked at night, like penitents and mourners ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... He had been a tranquil spectator of the sports hitherto; but this was the last game, and he felt that he ought to do something more than look on. Vixen blindfolded him, asked him the usual question about his father's stable, and then sent him spinning amongst the moss-grown beeches, groping his way fearfully, with outstretched arms, amidst shrillest laughter ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... ride along a splendid road, shaded for miles with rows of spreading elms, brings me to the charming old village of Dunchurch, where everything seems moss-grown and venerable with age. A squatty, castle-like church-tower, that has stood the brunt of many centuries, frowns down upon a cluster of picturesque, thatched cottages of primitive architecture, and ivy-clad from top to bottom; while, to make the picture complete, there ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... piano that the Leatherstonepaughs pitched their lodge in a vast wilderness of colorful tiled roofs, moss-grown and lichen-laden, amid a forest of quaintly-shaped and smokeless chimneys. Their floors, guiltless of rugs or carpets, were of earthen tiles and worn into hollows where the feet of the palace-dwellers passed oftenest to and fro. A multitude ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... a level track of land at the crossing of three roads, its spacious front, rude and unpainted as it was, presented every appearance of an inn, but from its moss-grown chimneys no smoke arose, nor could I detect any sign of life in its shutterless windows and closed doors, across which shivered the dark shadow of the one gaunt and aged pine, that stood like a guard beside ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... out. In its expiring gleams she saw no more inky water, but only the damp, moss-grown stones, on which a pool was widening from her wet garments, and the half-defined figure of the general stooping over to squeeze the streams ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of the road where two grassy tracks forked, he passed a graven stone now chipped and moss-grown, set on noble eminence among reddening thorns. It was an altar to the old gods of the land, there had been another such in the forest of his childhood. The priest had told him it was the shrine of ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... were firs, whose great, straight stems were covered with lichen and mosses of beautiful variety, and some looking strangely like green ice-crystals. Presently we came to a little broken-down rude kind of chapel in the midst of the wood. It was built of stone; and masses of stone, shapeless and moss-grown, were lying scattered about on the ground around it. At a little rough-hewn altar within it stood a Christian priest, blessing the elements. Overhead, the great dark sprays of the larches and cone-laden firs swept ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... immensely full—to be in style!—and jacquette with sleeves of the pagoda form. The party seemed in high spirits, as from his dormer window Mauville, adjusting his attire, peered through the lattice over the edge of the moss-grown roof and leaf-clogged gutters and surveyed their preparations for departure. How well the rich color of her gown became the young girl! He had told himself white was her best adornment, but his opinion veered ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... on one side, and quaint old Spanish gardens on the other. Who cares that the bridges are modern, and that here and there pert boat-houses rear their prim heads? It is the bayou, even though it be invaded with the ruthless vandalism of the improving idea, and can a boat-house kill the beauty of a moss-grown centurion of an oak with a history as old as the city? Can an iron bridge with tarantula piers detract from the song of a mocking-bird in a fragrant orange grove? We know that farther out, past the Confederate Soldiers' Home,—that rose-embowered, rambling ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... rose I gazed over the wild and flowering things, and saw the corner of the old moss-grown wall that enclosed the garden. That wall was destined to be at a later time a very familiar haunt of mine, for on the Thursday holidays during my college life I spent many a happy hour sitting upon it contemplating the peaceful and quiet country, and there I mused, to the chirping accompaniment ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... for me to say? There wa'n't any more suspicion in them gentle blue eyes of his than in a baby's. Forty years in Pemaquid! Must be some moss-grown, peaceful spot, where a man can grow up so innocent and simple, and yet have the stuff in him Uncle Jimmy must have had. So I tows him back to 42d-st., points him towards the new lib'ry again, and turns him loose; him in his old blue suit and faded cap, with Cap'n Bill's antique ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... less than ten acres might still be observed the fragments of the great abbey: these were, towards their limit, in general moss-grown and mouldering memorials that told where once rose the offices and spread the terraced gardens of the old proprietors; here might still be traced the dwelling of the lord abbot; and there, still more distinctly, because built on a greater scale and of materials still more intended for perpetuity, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... beautiful in among the timber. Great spruces and pines towered above them like masts to the journeying earth. The sunlight fell in shimmering, golden patches upon the moss-grown and leaf-covered ground. In the more open places grew buck-brush and the service-berry, Oregon grape with its holly-shaped leaves, blue lupines, Indian paint-brush and great mountain ferns. It was very still when they stopped their horses to rest. Only the wind in ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... Leary striding over the hills. "Going to heave her herrin' overboard, are they? And she'll never clear for home, hah? She won't, eh?" And over the hills he ran. In and out, up and down, over the crests, and at last down the tangled slope across moss-grown rocks where lay the tide-tossed kelp, and onto the beach, where in the dawn he came ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... Moss-grown, and venerable it stands, From the way-side dust and noise aloof, And the great elms stretch their sheltering hands To ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... so that the scattered cottages, separated from each other by long strips of garden ground, the little country inn, and two or three old-fashioned tenements of somewhat higher pretensions, surrounded by their own moss-grown orchards, seemed to be completely shut out from this bustling world, buried in the sloping meadows so deeply green, and the hanging woods so rich in their various tinting, along which the slender wreaths of smoke from the old clustered chimneys went smiling ...
— The Widow's Dog • Mary Russell Mitford
... all that company whom the announcement did not cause to start; led by old Sylvester, they hastily rose, and conducted by Mopsey, followed to the scene. Blind Sorrel was lying by the moss-grown ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... arose,—shapes familiar to his mind, yet forgotten and remembered again, as the fragments of a dream; till at length, far, far below him he beheld the great City of the Past, with silent marble streets, and moss-grown walls, and spires uprising with a wave-like, flickering motion. And, amid the crowd that thronged those streets he beheld faces once familiar and dear to him; and heard sorrowful, sweet voices singing, O' forget us not! forget ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... and, best boon of all, an unexpected solitude—a solitude that invested the white building with a glamour of unreality and converted the slight-stemmed, moss-grown ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... whispered overhead. He was moving through an avenue that led towards big iron gates beside a little porter's lodge. He saw the hollies, and smelt the laurustinus. There lay the triangle of uncut grass at the cross-roads, the long, grey, wooden palings built upon moss-grown bricks; and against the sky he just caught a glimpse of the feathery, velvet cedar crests, crests that once held nails of golden meteors for his ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... distance, and with the hot sunlight shining full upon it, the fort might have been a strip of white sand; later it was decided to be a tribunal of unusual proportions, and at last when it loomed full upon us in all the picturesqueness of its gray, moss-grown walls, with weeds trailing in luxurious profusion from every crevice, we decided that there lived the American inhabitants of Misamis. Soldiers gathered under the roof of the nearest watch-tower to observe ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... no doubt of this. On each bank was a large, moss-grown block of stone, which the doctor knew could be nothing else than the old abutments. Seemingly there had been only a ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... stretched for many a mile across the estate. On the park-like lawn in front of the house—if this ancient quaint old pile could be said to have a front—the flower-beds were as big as suburban gardens, the statuary, the fountains, and even the gray and moss-grown dial-stone were gigantic; and nowhere else in all this vast and wealthy county were such stately herons seen as those that sailed around Grantley and built in its trees. The entrance-hall was spacious and noble, though the porch was comparatively small; but if divested of ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... go back to the seat again," he said; "though the ruin is scarcely visible from here," he added, as they reached the spot; "but it is safer. It is the most beautiful ruined castle that you can imagine. It is all covered with ivy, and the stones are moss-grown, and the gray walls show through in places, and in the setting sun they flame with crimson; you've no idea how beautiful it is! I saw it once from the steamboat. It was splendid! Now listen! The last lesson I took, the teacher asked me whether I was in earnest when I said ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... stone in the little Surrey churchyard, now gray and moss-grown with the rains of forty years, on which you remember reading: "Charles Knollys—lost in Carinthia"——This was all she would have inscribed; he was but lost; no one knew that he was dead. Was he not yet to be found? There was no grassy mound beside it; the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... by the angry waters as though I had been a mere chip, sucked deep down, hurled to the surface, and bruised against rocks. I fought hard for life and held my breath, and when a spar of moss-grown bowlder loomed suddenly in front of me, I caught it with both arms ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... jumped ashore. She looked round at her father, but he was absorbed in his fishing and his thoughts, and so the little girl slipped away into the bush. She made her way among the trees quickly, keeping to the line of the creek. Presently she sat down on a moss-grown stump and ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... of which I shall now, no doubt, appreciate more fully than ever. All I can say is, that the prospect was such when I went into that long sleep that I should not have been surprised had I looked down from your house-top to-day on a heap of charred and moss-grown ruins instead of ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... path through the wood and went straight on, not listening to the lad's chatter nor making any myself. The shade was welcome enough; there were pretty places for those that had eyes to see them—waterfalls splashing down from the moss-grown rocks above; little pools, dark and wonderfully blue; here and there a bit of green, which might have been the lawn of a country house. But of dwelling or of people I saw nothing, and to what the boy fancied that he saw I paid ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... It was the same rotten little place I had arrived at. It is only because I am trying to sell the "station-master" a copy of this book that I call the place a station at all. It really is a decomposing collection of half-hearted buildings and moss-grown rails, with an apology for ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... before from this place. The pile of stones had changed to a warrior. The night was quite dark, but still she could plainly see that old King Atle sat there and watched her. She saw him so well that she could distinguish the moss-grown bracelets on his wrists and could see how his legs were bound with crossed bands, between which ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... chambers, who might have suffered in his suffering. Nor do I wish to root up your ancient family. If I prize not your boast of family honours and pedigree, I would not willingly destroy them; more than I would pull down a moss-grown tower, or hew to the ground an ancient oak, save for the straightening of the common path, and advantage of the public. I have, therefore, no resentment against the humbled House of Peveril—nay, I have regard to it in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... funeral oration of the Duc d'Enghien, a virulent pamphlet that the royalists passed from hand to hand, and of which he had taken a copy. How many times must d'Ache have paced the magnificent avenue of limes, which still exists as the only vestige of the old park. There is a moss-grown stone table on which one loves to fancy this strange man leaning his elbow while he thought of his "rival," and planned the future according to his royalist illusions as the other in his Olympia, the Tuileries, planned it according to ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... a natural than a violent death. In truth, Sir, the attempt was no less an affront upon the understanding of that respectable people than it was an attack on their property. They chose rather that their ancient, moss-grown castles should moulder into decay, under the silent touches of time, and the slow formality of an oblivious and drowsy exchequer, than that they should be battered down all at once by the lively efforts of a pensioned engineer. As it is the fortune of the noble ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... swim since the flood," I thought to myself, as I went on, leaped over the rough, moss-grown fence, and was soon after making my way along past the edge of the sugar-cane plantation, where the weeds were growing like mad, and then through the great, tall-leaved rows of tobacco in the new clearing, where the stumps of the trees so ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... blocks. To place a pile of these on the margin of the creek, and apply his torch to them, took but a moment; and in an instant a bright, white flame flashed and lit up the little sheltered alcove. Another, and the almost overcome girl was placed on a seat of soft, dry shavings, against the moss-grown rock, under the rude roof, out of the reach of the snow or wind; and another fire was lit of the dry shingle blocks, at her feet, from which her saturated shoes were removed, and to which warmth was ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... of all the quaint and pretty towns I have seen. A painter might spend months here, and wander from church to church, and admire old towers and pinnacles, tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little patches of green garden and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear quiet water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the early morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wallflowers; next comes a road with trees of admirable green; numbers of little children are playing in this road (the place is so ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray |
