"Petal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... white-crepe peignoir, and there was no color in her cheeks. Her skin had the soft whiteness of a rose petal. Her eyes were like stars. As I lay there and looked at her I wondered if it was Anthony's kisses or the memory of Olaf's singing which had made her eyes ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... My burning, breaking being; So when cold death Will put out the light In some wilderness Of far forsaken life Might each kiss blossom Into a lotus and a Shephali.[2] And in the desolate hours Of loneliness of traveling In the dusk of despair One petal of these Will cheer the vagrant souls That tread the pathway Of love's forsaking. Or, when Death will sow This Soul of mine On the lake-shore of sorrow, Like a weeping willow I will spring, And with my green tresses And bending body Shall shelter secrecy-seeking lovers ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... Even the private secretary of His Excellency hesitated to have this rubber prince and mahogany baron haled before him as a common citizen of Anchuria. So he sent Goodwin a flowery epistle, each word-petal dripping with honey, requesting the favour of an interview. Goodwin replied with an invitation to dinner at his ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... the director showed us some very curious and exquisite specimens of castings, such as baskets of flowers, in which the most delicate and fragile blossoms, the curl of a petal, the finest veins in a leaf, the lightest flower-spray that ever quivered in a breeze, were perfectly preserved; and the basket contained an abundant heap of such sprays. There were likewise a pair ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the petal species, unquestionably fine as to framing, but leaving little space for the effect of the glass, which they hold only ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... On the toilette-table was a vase full of camellias—those beautiful but scentless flowers which were emblematic of her brilliant but artificial life. Taking one of these in her hand, she plucked it to pieces leaf by leaf, and when the last petal fell to the ground went quietly back to her bed, there hopelessly to await the coming on of death. Her parting with Armand was very pathetic, and her death, although harrowing and true to Nature, was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... those innocent looking flowers really possess powerful weapons in the shape of tiny lassos, which are concealed in lasso-cells. These lasso-cells, which are very small, are carefully hidden in the walls of those petal-like tentacles, or feelers of the Anemone. Still other lasso-cells are hidden in the mouth of the Anemone, and inside its stomach. In the cells the long, slender, thread-like lassos lie coiled up ready for use. The lassos escape from the cells by turning themselves inside out with lightning-like ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... stateliest songs, and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams. All true,—he said,—all flowers of his soul; only one with the corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two showing its tip through the calyx. The water-lily is the type of the poet's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half germinating spices, mere decay Produces richer life, and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... that it can be used for is to sweep or lick up the nectar as it exudes from the pores of the flower, secreted, it would seem, for no other purpose but to attract her—while there she obtains nothing but what nature has provided for her and given her the means of obtaining, and the most delicate petal receives ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... with the shrill ecstasy of life in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And, do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from my heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerial essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the "very me," ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... orientale. 2-4 ft. June. Flowers 6-8 in. across; deep scarlet, with a purple spot at the base of each petal. There are other varieties of pink, ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... table, the seal-ring, with its quartered bearings,—all intensely there, and there in beauty of which no one could have dreamed that even flowers or gold were capable, far less parchment or steel. But every change of shade is felt, every rich and rubied line of petal followed; every subdued gleam in the soft blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched with a hand whose patience of regard creates rather than paints. The jewel itself was not so precious as the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... contours in stem stitch throughout. The centre and two side petals have stem stitch veins, edged buttonhole stitch and were filled in with big knots. The smaller petals were partially filled in with buttonhole stitch and darning. The dark petal on left was done in Cretan[3] ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... graver thoughts. Alice Maud Mutimer was nineteen. For two years she had been thus tall, but the grace of her proportions had only of late fully determined itself. Her work in the City warehouse was unexacting; she had even a faint impress of rose-petal on each cheek, and her eye was excellently clear. Her lips, unfortunately never quite closed, betrayed faultless teeth. Her likeness to Richard was noteworthy; beyond question she understood the charm of her presence, and one felt that the consciousness might, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... dainty head was all revealed to him. There were glints of gold struck by the morning sun from her light nut-brown hair that hung in a cluster of curls about her oval face. Her complexion was of a delicacy that he could compare only with a rose petal. He could not at that distance discern the colour of her eyes, but he guessed them blue, as he admired the sparkle of them under the fine, dark ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... soul was, her flesh was all girlhood in one flower of lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... that had fallen into her lap. The fingers that held the petal tingled, and a flush ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... most minute to the very largest flowers. The red martagon grows abundantly on our plains; the dog's tooth violet, Erythronium, with its spotted leaves and bending yellow blossom, delicately dashed with crimson spots within, and marked with fine purple lines on the outer part of the petal, proves a great attraction in our woods, where these plants increase: they form a beautiful bed; the leaves come up singly, one from each separate tuber. There are two varieties of this flower, the pale yellow, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... different species. Now in domesticated animals there is great variation in colouring, but not in the majority of wild species. What the causes are that operate in the painting of the skin of an animal no one can say, any more than one can say how particular spots are arranged on the petal of a flower or the wing of a butterfly. That specific liveries have been designed by an all-wise Creator for purposes of recognition I have no doubt, as well as for purposes of deception and protection—in the former case to keep certain breeds ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... across or at an angle, but the one slant must be maintained throughout. In small curved figures, the stitches may be placed more closely at the inner edge and spread slightly at the outer edge. In flat work where the leaf or petal is large, two or three stitches taken in the cloth, back of the face stitch, holds them even and prevents misplacement in laundering. (All embroidery should be ironed on ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... interested by him; yet I cannot but think, clever as the whole is, that parts are weak, as when he doubts whether each curvature of the beak of humming-birds is of service to each species. He admits, perhaps too fully, that I have shown the use of each little ridge and shape of each petal in orchids, and how strange he does not extend the view to humming-birds. Still odder, it seems to me, all that he says on beauty, which I should have thought a nonentity, except in the mind of some sentient being. He might have as well said that love existed during the secondary or Palaeozoic ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... this: Cut from red tissue paper a couple of dozen little leaf shaped pieces to be crimped and creased and coaxed into representing rose petals. On each petal write a familiar quotation ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... made of silk or satin; it may have as many petals as desired. Each petal is cut from a piece of folded material like the diagram (1). It is highly important that the folded edge be on a true bias. Begin the rose by cutting three petals like the illustration, with the bias edge one and one-half inches long. Run a gathering thread one-eighth ...
— Make Your Own Hats • Gene Allen Martin
... azure blue and most singular form, composed of two petals, the upper petal very short and broad, with a whitish mucro or point, the sides of which lap over the base of the other petal; inferior petal about two inches and a half in length, the lower half somewhat triangular, grooved on the two lowermost sides, and keeled at bottom, the keel running straight ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 4 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... elves were dressed in pink, some in blue, others in yellow, and many had glow worms in their hands. Their tread was so light that the flower stems never bent, nor was a petal crushed, when they walked over the turf. All, as they came near, bowed or dropped a curtsey. Then the little musician took off his cap to each, ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... women slaughter with a look! And, like cold steel, your glance cut through my heart, Struck every petal from the rose of love And left the ragged ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... . the miracle happened. Michael, with the hand that had just taken hers, stroked a petal of this prized vegetable, with no thought in his mind stronger than the thoughts that had been indigenous there since Christmas. As his finger first touched the rim of the town-bred petals, undersized yet not quite lacking in "rose-quality," he had intended nothing more than to salute the ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... without stopping for a moment! O amiable and cheerful girl, I have been bitten by Kama who is even like a venomous viper. O thou of swelling and large hips, have mercy on me! O thou of handsome and faultless features, O thou of face like unto the lotus-petal or the moon, O thou of voice sweet as that of singing Kinnaras, my life now depends on thee! Without thee, O timid one, I am unable to live! O thou of eyes like lotus-petals, Kama is piercing me incessantly! ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... returned to the moth quivering like a flower petal in the breeze. "Well, there it is!" he said cheerily. "Let's give it the benefit of ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... to the white garment lying wet and pale in the half-light she drew a sharp breath. There in the centre lay one minute blue petal. Its very smallness proved to her its magic. It was a faery flower. She took it up reverently and went home solemn as a child in church. When, with blue petal under her pillow, she lay down, she fell asleep in a moment. She dreamt of Reddin, for he had ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... hops from bough to bough, examining every part for food; it also runs up the stems of the crown-imperials, and, putting its head into the bells of those flowers, sips the liquor which stands in the nectarium of each petal. Sometimes it feeds on the ground like the hedge- sparrow, by hopping about on the grass-plots ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. And on the top-most spray of the Rose-tree there blossomed a marvellous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song. Pale was it, at first, as the mist that hangs over the river—pale as the feet of the morning, and silver as the wings of the dawn. As the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, as the shadow of a rose in a water-pool, so ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... leaves of the manuka, at the chinks of blue between, and now and again a tiny yellowish flower dropped on her. Pretty—yes, if you held one of those flowers on the palm of your hand and looked at it closely, it was an exquisite small thing. Each pale yellow petal shone as if each was the careful work of a loving hand. The tiny tongue in the centre gave it the shape of a bell. And when you turned it over the outside was a deep bronze colour. But as soon as they flowered, they fell and were scattered. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... brighter to her vision the form which the other had sought to blacken. What a new existence seemed opening before her, with new and higher capacities for enjoyment! The half-closed bud had suddenly unfolded itself in the summer air, and every blushing petal thrilled with a more ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... the truth of old, when, amid thoughts of thee, I asked, 'Loves she, loves she not?' and the poppy petal clung not, and gave no crackling sound, but withered on my ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... This, of course, is difficult at first, but with the proper training the pupil should be able to see the phrases at a glance, just as a botanist in examining a new flower would divide it in his mind's eye into its different parts. He would never mistake the calyx for a petal, and he would be able to determine at once the peculiarities of each part. In addition to the melodic phrases the pupil should be able to see the metrical divisions which underlie the form of the piece. He should be able to tell whether ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... They came from the trees and plants. The airs were always astir, helping the soft designs of Nature, loosening a leaf from its stem and bearing it to the sand, striking a berry from its place and causing it to drop at Domini's feet, giving a faded geranium petal the courage to leave its more vivid companions and resign itself to the loss of the place it could no longer fill with beauty. Very delicate was the touch of the dying upon the yellow sand. It increased the sense ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... them more closely, we shall find that they are thrown into a group of three magnitudes by the expansion of two of the inner petals above the stamens to a breadth greater than any of the four others; while the third inner petal, on which the stamens rest, contracts itself into the narrowest of the six, and the three under petals remain of one intermediate magnitude, as ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... bliss—grand nature's harmony. With love the finest particle is rife, And deftly woven in the woof of life, In throbbing dust or clasping grains of sand, In globes of glistening dew that shining stand On each pure petal, Love's own legacies Of flowering verdure, Earth's sweet panoplies; By love those atoms sip their sweets and pass To other atoms, join and keep the mass With mighty forces moving through all space, Tis thus on earth all life has found its place. Through Kisar,[6] Love came ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... out, one after another, and the distant shore became a floating blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a great white moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The nightingales had paused and the trickle of the fountain behind ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... in their mind the good done to them, whereas the evil they experience drops from their mind, like water from a lotus-petal.—Jatakamala. ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various
... wondered whether when we grew up we should ever be rich enough to own one anything like so grand. We imagined that each lily was worth an enormous sum of money and never dared to touch a single leaf or petal of them. We really stood in awe of them. Far, far was I then from the wild lily gardens of California that I was destined to see ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... epic of the Cosmos, evoked when the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"—an epic printed in stars on blue abysses of illimitable space; in illuminated type of rose leaf, primrose petal, scarlet berry on the great greenery of field and forest; in the rainbows that glow on tropical humming birds, on Himalayan pheasants, on dying dolphins in purple seas; and in all the riotous carnival of color ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... to stop to consider that the man would notice neither her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends thither its special reporter with ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... contemplating them from her movable throne, crowned with pearls and phosphorescent stars drawn from the depths of her dominion. White as the cloud, white as the sail, white as the foam, entirely, dazzlingly white was her fair majesty except where a rosy blush tinted the petal-like skin of ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... knees made his straight legs appear bent, as if for a jump at something, while his daughter Phyllis looked at him searchingly, but not in the least impatiently, her fine gray eyes wide open, and her face, with its delicately blooming cheeks, its peach-petal lips, and its saucy little nose, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... a tiny box by itself. Hester took it out and examined it carefully. The little bit of cut glass in the center attracted her strongly. In the sunlight it gleamed like fire. In the shadow it showed a pale yellow tinge like the petal of ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... love! What tender language from each petal springs! Affection's tribute! Heart's best offerings! Wanderers, surely, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... other ear would ever listen to the words of love, to remember which continually would assuredly drive her mad. But matters now were changed. Day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, a rose had been unfolding itself at Collingswood, and with every opening petal had grown more and more precious to the blind man, until more than one crone foretold the end; and Grace Atherton, grown fonder of gossip than she was wont to be, listened to the tale, and watched, and wondered, and wept, and still caressed and ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... and coffee estates. There is a blossoming shrub, the native name of which we do not remember, but which is remarkable for its multitudinous crimson flowers, so seductive to the humming-birds that they hover about it all day long, burying themselves in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first upright, a little later the gorgeous bells droop downward and fall to the ground unwithered, being poetically called Cupid's tears. Flowers abound here which are only known to us in our hothouses, whose brilliant colors, like those of the cactus, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... come I to the festival Thou holdest in the regions of romance, Where dragons lurk and elfin spirits dance, And pearls lie hid within each rose petal. What magic changes in life's crystal ball Shall thus transform earth's dullness at thy glance! Ride then the wind, a feather for thy lance, A pool thy sea, thy heaven a waterfall. So shall thy soul to fairy worlds belong, Where dust is gold and dew-drops turn to wine; Remember ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... quadrilateral contour. The four great luminous sheaves forming the corners of the square are made up of rays curving together from each side into "synclinal" or ogival groups, each of which may be compared to the petal of a flower. To Janssen, in 1871, the eclipsing moon seemed like the dark heart of a gigantic dahlia, painted in light on the sky; and the similitude to the ornament on a compass-card, used by Airy in 1851, well conveys the decorative effect of the beamy, radiated kind of aureola, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... at a distance before her features were discernible. Her eyes were of a gray-blue that changed in shade with her swiftly varying moods. Her lower lip was full and red, the upper one firm and repressed with the dull crimson of a fading rose-petal. Her shapely arms and legs were restless, seemingly impatient to break into some quickly moving dance. She was extraordinarily alive. Vitality flashed from her with every gesture, and her mind, a thing of caprice and whim, knew ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... glee as they eluded his grasp and sailed away on the summer air. Here I thought his childish fancy had built a paradise and peopled it with dainty seraphim and made himself its Adam. He saw the sunshine of Eden glint on every leaf and beam in every petal. The flitting honey-bee, the wheeling June-bug, the fluttering breeze, the silvery pulse-beat of the dashing brook sounded in his ear notes of its swelling music. The iris-winged humming-bird, darting like ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... their arms bare and their hair gathered gracefully about their shapely heads, looking like cherubim drunk with light, floating in spheres of harmony and beauty, I would think: "Ah, what a garden, what flowers to gather, to breathe! Ah! Marguerites, Marguerites! What will your last petal say to him who plucks it? A little, a little, but not all. That is the moral of the world, that is the end of your smiles. It is over this terrible abyss that you are walking in your spangled gauze; it is on this hideous reality ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... time this afternoon, I will go over this list with you. Bring me those five boxes on the first row of shelves." I brought the boxes to her room and placed them on the table. She opened the first one and it contained a most beautiful peony made of coral and jade and each petal trembled like a real flower. This flower was made by stringing the petals which were made of coral on very fine brass wire, also the leaves which were made of pure jade. She took this flower and placed it on the right ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... have failed to discover and recognise it at first sight from the description he already had, for the leaves of the plant grew thick about the root and put forth an upright stem, some two to three feet high, from which proceeded shoots, like broccoli sprouts on an enlarged scale, the outer petal-like leaves of which were six to eight inches long, and of a dark olive-green hue and fleshy nature, rounded and ciliated at the margin; while the inner leaves were of a paler green that approximated to ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... flowers like chrysanthemums, it is necessary to build up the most prominent flower solidly in clay, putting on the outer petals separately. The back flower can have the near petals modelled, while the distant ones can be just indicated on plaque with incised lines. Don't attempt to copy every petal in clay, which is an impossibility, but try and get the general effect of the flower in your modelling. Take the prominent petals first, and put them on in their proper positions, and the less important petals can then be filled in in the intervening ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... slightest detail. Let's see, where was I?—'tenderness,' oh, yes. 'Her hair is of midnight darkness, inclined to ripple, with little whiffs of curls imperiously defying restraint about her temples. Her complexion is as pure as the dawn, touched now and then with a blush as delicate as the petal ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... "This is the last petal, auntie," said the girl, still bending her head with its wealth of golden hair over her work. At last with a satisfied "There!" she laid it on the table and turned towards the bay window, through which ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... Perkins. She felt better already in her conscience, she declared, and even sang as she set about rearranging her roses. Each one of these she named with a girl's name, Johnnie assisting; and the two were able, by the curl of a petal, or the number of leaves on a stem, or some other tiny sign, to tell Cora from Alice, and Elaine from Blanchefleur, and the Princess Mary from Buddir al Buddoor, as well as to recognize Rebecca, and Julia, and Anastasia, and Gertie, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... tissues. But he who thinks of "things true and just and lovely" will, by his thinking, be transformed into the image of the ideal he contemplates, even as the rose becomes red by exposing its bosom to the sunbeams and soaking each petal in ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... been strangely mingled. What eyes she had!—of that blackly lustrous sort nearly always associated with unusually dark complexions; but Karamaneh's complexion was peachlike, or rather of an exquisite and delicate fairness which reminded me of the petal of a rose. By some I had been accused of raving about this girl's beauty, but only by those who had not met her; for indeed she ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... For this petal-like tube, so commonly to be seen upon the little rush of our paths, is, in truth, a tiny silken case enclosing the body of a small larva—a diminutive psychid, or sack-bearer, which I have not chanced to see described. Only the head and six ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... newest. It is this: that nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... close to the lines of her figure and split at the side for walking; a tight-fitting bodice, light in color (a man knows little of the technicalities of such things); throat bare, with a flaring rolled collar behind—a throat like a rose-petal with the moonlight on it; arms bare, save for the upper, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Commelyn, Dutch botanists, because two of them—commemorated in the two showy blue petals of the blossom—published their works; the third, lacking application and ambition, amounted to nothing, like the inconspicuous whitish third petal! Happily Kaspar Commelyn died in 1731, before the joke was perpetrated in "Species Plantarum." Soon after noon, the day-flower's petals roll up, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... fine as the petal of a flower," cried Rameri. "Her voice is like the ring of pure gold, and—Oh! look, she is moving. Uarda, open your eyes, Uarda! When the sun rises we praise the Gods. Open your eyes! how thankful, how joyful I shall be if those two suns ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the Old Water-colour Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower completely, but laying the ground colour of one petal, and painting the spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of lilies, geraniums, tulips, &c., numbered with proper reference to their position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds besides ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... peace. Lightfooted maids came and went noiselessly, to brush up a fallen daisy petal, or straighten a rug. Not the faintest streak of dust ever lay across the shining surface of the piano, not the tiniest cloud ever filmed the clear depths of the mirrors. A slim Chinese houseboy, in plum- color and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... and there from some castle of a greater importance a chieftain would ride out with his bodyguard, gay in velvets, and silks from Bokhara and chogas of gold kinkob, and offer to him gold dust twisted up in the petal of a flower, which he touched and remitted. He was escorted to polo-grounds and sat for hours witnessing sports and trials of skill, and at night to the music of kettledrums and pipes men and boys danced interminably before him. There ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... the "petals" of a daisy one by one, naming a boy (or a girl as the case may be) at each one, thus, "Jenny, Fanny, Jenny, Fanny," etc. The one named with the last petal is your sweetheart. The seeds which remain on the back of your hand after taking them up show ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... crimson lozenges bearing admirable designs—flying birds, wading storks, fish, even miniature landscapes. Akira picks out the chrysanthemum, and insists that I shall eat it; and I begin to demolish the sugary blossom, petal by petal, feeling all the while an acute remorse for ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... nose, and the full, dewy scarlet, very firm lips gave the lower part of her face a frankly animal look. Her eye-teeth, which were too prominent, raised her upper lip a little and she continually ran the point of her tongue along the edge to moisten it, like the thick petal of a rose running over a row of little ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... by the hyacinth petal colours, drew near. Robin made an unconscious little catch at ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thick, and perched upon it was a round scarlet cap; her mouth was scarlet; her eyes were like Scotch braes, brown and laughing; the curves of her long, delicate lips ran upward; her curving thin, black eyebrows were like question-marks; her chin was tilted upward like the petal of a flower. She was very slim, and wore a very short brown skirt which revealed the slenderest of feet and ankles; a sweater clung to her unformed, lithe little figure. She had an air of pointed sharpness and firmness like a lifted sword. She might have been sixteen, though she was, as a matter ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... sea appears to wash no pebbles of its own bringing, but only fragments of stone brought by man, broken off man's buildings, shot by him into the Tiber, in the days, no doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into petal-shaped wedges for the Opus Alexandrinum. I don't think we saw one natural looking stone upon that beach; everything seemed vaguely, precious and outlandish, basalt, porphyry, agate, Rossoantique, and serpentine still bearing its original polish; also fine white ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... McChesney was sleeping, by a curious coincidence, as she had been when Emma arrived, so that she could not have the satisfaction of a last pressure of the lips against the rose-petal cheek. She had to content herself with listening close to the door in the vain hope of catching a last sound ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... from any similar, stipitate species. It varies a little according to locality. Ohio specimens are a little larger and have thicker and more calcareous stipes than is usual in those from Philadelphia. The walls of the sporangia when fully matured generally break into several petal-like segments which finally become reflexed. The description given by ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... again, loves geometrical forms in nature, such as the crystal and the basalt column, or the magnified snowflake, better than it loves forms of lavish wildness. We gather about our dwellings flowers which please by their sharply defined tint, and their correspondence of petal with petal; and yet there is just as precisely ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more strictly geometrical. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... boisterous waters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of mighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in the hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some glassy plane stilled, as it were, into a concentrated wrath of movement. The men sprang from side to side, from bow to stern, staving the craft with a miraculous deftness from a projecting boulder, forcing her into ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Iden had planted, flung sackfuls of bloom at his feet. They poured themselves out in abandoned, open-armed, spendthrift, wasteful—perfectly prodigal—quantities of rose-tinted petal; prodigal as a river which flows full to the brim, never questioning but what there will be ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... pentagyna, L'Her. (STUARTIA.) Leaves thick, ovate, acuminate, acute at base, obscurely mucronate, serrate, finely pubescent, 3 to 4 in. long, one half as wide. Flowers whitish cream-colored, one petal much the smallest; stamens of the ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... Melancholy without bad. Knowledge this man prizes best Seems fantastic to the rest: Pondering shadows, colors, clouds, Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds, Boughs on which the wild bees settle, Tints that spot the violet's petal, Why Nature loves the number five, And why the star-form she repeats: Lover of all things alive, Wonderer at all he meets, Wonderer chiefly at himself, Who can tell him what he is? Or how meet in human elf ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hyperaesthetic every breeze has a sting, and life is full of pin pricks. "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" are multiplied in number, and furthermore the reaction to them is intensified. In the "Arabian Nights" the princess boasts that a rose petal bruises her skin, while her competitor in delicacy is made ill by a fiber of cotton in her silken garments. So with the hyperaesthetic; an unintentional overlooking is reacted to as a deadly insult; the thwarting of any desire robs life of its savor; sounds become noises; ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... together, and it is not until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and duly sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with confidence, that they are able to do justice to the inherent beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the stem contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom expand into things which may well be a joy to the botanist's eye. A thousand times during that shady saunter did I envy my companions their scientific acquaintance with the beautiful green things of earth, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... the step-children, with only one chair; the two small gay petals are the daughters, with a chair each; and the large gay petal is the wife, with two chairs. To find the father, one must strip away the petals until the stamens and pistils are bare. These then bear a fanciful resemblance to an old man with a flannel wrapper about his neck, having his shoulders upraised, and his feet in a bath tub. The French ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Little Blue Overalls came again. This time he was a peddler, with horse-chestnut "apples" to sell, and rose-petal pies. ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... from Batavia's shore; The thrifty Fleming for my beauty rare Pays a king's ransom, when that I am fair, And tall, and straight, and pure my petal's core. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... that of America in most particulars. It is there often placed in alternate rows with rice, and after the rice-harvest is over puts forth a beautiful yellow flower with a crimson eye in each petal; this is succeeded by a green pod filled with a white pulp, which as it ripens turns brown, and then separates into several divisions containing the cotton. A luxuriant field, says Forbes in his "Oriental Memoirs," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... variety, but with the actually velvet look of a bee's body. The girls at school had told her her eyes looked good to stroke. Her nose was an indeterminate snub, her chin delightfully round but retreating, falling away from a mouth like a baby's—so fine in texture, so petal soft, so utterly helpless-looking, with its glint of two small square teeth. Only when she looked obstinate and closed her mouth the charm went out of her face as though wiped off like a tangible thing. She looked almost sullen now, but Vassie, heedless of her, jumped up and, pirouetting round ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... The dark cloak about her had fallen a little aside, and showed a gleam of white neck emerging from snowy drapery underneath—it was, to his fancy, as though a white rose- petal had been suddenly and delicately unfurled. He longed to kiss that virginal whiteness, and trembled at the audacity of ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... the call, and the two figures passed lightly along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness. They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray drapery; her long ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... themselves, in passing, with other odors more delicate and more subtle; from each leaf, each petal, each blade of grass, exhaled secret aromas, mute words which the plants exchange with each other, and which revealed to Gilbert's heart the great mystery of happiness which ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... species, found in the district of King George's Sound, was brought to my notice by my brother. It is usually found in a tuft of grass, where it lies completely hidden except its tongue, which is thrust upwards, and bears an exact resemblance to the petal of a flower, crimson and pink. Flies seem to delight in resting upon this deceptive flower, which being covered with an adhesive mucous substance, takes them prisoner, and proves ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... tenderness and apprehension drew me forward to bend above her, hovering there, awed by the beauty of her—the pure lids, the lashes resting on the cheeks, the red mouth so exquisitely tranquil, curled like a scarlet petal of ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... bitterness there to sweetness? Perhaps the shy spirit of life and loveliness, mother of men and of wild-flowers and grasses, had come to it, bringing a whiter sunshine and the mystic silence of her forests, and touching every flowery petal with her invisible finger to make it burn like fire, and giving a ringing woodland music to the ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... and that spring has truly come. Oh but the song of all the birds in spring is more beautiful than Man, and the first coming of the hyacinth more delectable than his face! When spring is fallen upon the days of summer, I carry away with mournful joy at night petal by petal the rhododendron's bloom. No lit procession of purple kings is nigh so fair as that. No beautiful death of well-beloved men hath such a glory of forlornness. And I bear far away the pink and white petals of the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... think about them. They electrify the atmosphere. I see this girl so distinctly somehow: little, white thing; big, gloomy eyes like storms in deep woods, and thin eyelids—you know, that transparent, flower-petal kind, where you fancy you see the iris looking through, like spirit eyes, always awake while the body's eyes sleep; and—and lots of dark hair without much colour—hair like smoke. I see her a ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Pervert malkonverti, malverigi. Perversion malkonverto, malverigo, malverigxo. Pervious penetrebla. Pest pesto. Pester enui, turmenteti. Pestiferous pesta. Pestilence pesto. Pestilential pesta, pestiga. Pestle pistilo. Pet dorloti. Petal florfolieto. Petard petardo. Petition petegi. Petition petskribo. Petrify sxtonigi. Petroleum petrolo. Petticoat subjupo. Pettish malgxentila. Petty malgranda. Petulance petoleco. Petulant petola. Pew pregxbenko. Pewter stano. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... been blowing strongly, all the morning, and the waves were rolling in heavily. Their green tops were crested with white foam which rose high and higher, curved over as softly as a rose petal, balanced for a brief second, then fell with a crash and went flowing up the bank of the beach, circling and twisting in countless eddies that now and then crept to the very awnings and caused a stampede among their inhabitants. A ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray |
