"Sedge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lavishly provided with unsoldierly comforts, a double allowance of blankets and mattresses stuffed with dried reeds or sedge. Motioning me to help, Agathemer doubled a mattress and pressed on it till it lay so. Then he doubled another and set it so that the two were about a yard apart, with their folds towards each other. Another pair he set similarly so that ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Jehan forsook his woodcraft for the work of byre and furrow and sheepfold, and the yield of his lands grew under his wardenship. He brought heavy French cattle to improve the little native breed, and made a garden of fruit trees where once had been only bent and sedge. The thralls wrought cheerfully for him, for he was a kindly master, and the freemen of the manor had no complaint against one who did impartial justice and respected their slow and ancient ways. As for skill in hunting, there was no fellow to ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... butchered, the others felt that their only hope was in making their way to the mouth of the river, where lay two or three light craft which Ribaut had left. {94} Wading through mire and water, their naked limbs cut by the sedge and their feet by roots, they met two or three small boats sent to look out for fugitives, and ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... was very plain and clean, with lots of white paint, and very difficult to play in. So we were out a good deal. It was seaside, so, of course, there was the beach, and besides that the marsh—big green fields with sheep all about, and wet dykes with sedge growing, and mud, and eels in the mud, and winding white roads that all look the same, and all very interesting, as though they might lead to almost anything that you didn't expect. Really, of course, they lead ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... and laughed and listened beside the water's edge. The glancing river glistened and glinted through the sedge. Green parrots flew above her and, as the daylight died, Her young arms drew her lover ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... "lean-to" against the cliff, you may observe a rude hut built with blocks of stone, and plastered with mud from the bed of the rivulet. Enter it. You will find it empty, cold, untenanted by living thing. No furniture. Stone couches covered with sedge and grass, upon which men may have slept or lain; and two or three blocks of granite upon which they may have sat. That is all. Some pieces of skin hanging around the walls, and the bones of animals strewed over the ground outside, give a clue to the kind of food ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Belgian soldier with the woman described as Laudonniere's maid-servant, the latter wounded in the breast, and, urging their flight towards the vessels, they fell in with other fugitives, among them Laudonniere himself. As they struggled through the salt-marsh, the rank sedge cut their naked limbs, and the tide rose to their waists. Presently they descried others, toiling like themselves through the matted vegetation, and recognized Challeux and his companions, also in quest of the vessels. The old man still, as he tells us, held fast to his chisel, which had done ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... are twin mountain lakes, and the lashes of them Like the swishing sedge That hideth the ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... except for trailing willows. The brooks were not yet frozen, and snow had barely powdered the mountains; but where the coves ran in back between the mountains from the sea were gullies or ditches of sand and sedge. When Steller presently found a broken window casing of Kamchatka half buried in the sand, it gave Waxel some confidence about being on the mainland of Asia; but before Steller had finished his two days' reconnoitre, there was no mistaking the fact—this was an island, and a barren ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... broad surface of gold, beautiful to look down upon, with islands of tenderest birch green interspersed, and willows in which the sedge-reedling chattered. They used to say in the country that cuckoos were getting scarce, but here the notes of the cuckoo echoed all day long, and the birds often flew over the house. Doves cooed, blackbirds whistled, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... whose rumored coming to Denboro to live had filled the columns of the country weekly for three months. The quahaug boats were anchored just inside the Point; a clam digger was wading along the outer edge of the sedge; a lobsterman was hauling his pots in the channel; even the bluebird on the wild cherry stump had a straw in his beak and was plainly in the midst of nest building. Everyone had something to do and was doing it—everyone except Lute Rogers and ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... cherry-cheeked as milkmaids. The shepherds are all embroidered, and acquit themselves in a ball better than our English dancing-masters. I have seen a couple of rivers appear in red stockings; and Alpheus, instead of having his head covered with sedge and bulrushes, making love in a fair, full-bottomed periwig, and a plume of feathers; but with a voice so full of shakes and quavers, that I should have thought the murmur of a country brook the much more agreeable music. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... guns opened fire upon them and swept them off in files as they rushed on, and in the intervals of reloading the cavalry charged into their midst. By this time the Tlascalans had come up, having by order of Cortes bound wreaths of sedge about their heads that they might be the more easily distinguished from the Cholulans, and they fell upon the rear of the wretched townsmen, who, thus harassed on all sides, could no longer maintain their ground. They ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... turned to meet Hilarius and the Friar who were now coming slowly across the windswept common. March mists gathered and draped the sluggish river; the dry reeds rattled dismally in the ooze and sedge. Hilarius shivered, and the Friar ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... wooded enclosures where the brook curved almost round upon itself. If there was a hollow in the oak a pair of starlings chose it, for there was no advantageous nook that was not seized on. Low beside the willow stoles the sedge-reedlings built; on the ledges of the ditches, full of flags, moor-hens made their nests. After the swallows had coursed long miles over the meads to and fro, they rested on the tops of the ashes and twittered sweetly. Like ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... mower's cry, the dog's alarms, All housed within the sleeping farms! The business of the day is done, The last-left haymaker is gone. And from the thyme upon the height, And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows The perfume which the day forgoes. And on the pure horizon far, See, pulsing with the first-born star, The liquid sky above the hill! The evening comes, the fields ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... fell an hour too soon. I wandered down to the pebbly shore of the Rance, where bare-footed children, sent out to look after pigs and geese, were building castles with the many-coloured stones, while others on the rocky banks above were singing in chorus, like a somewhat louder twittering of sedge warblers from the fringe of willows. I wandered on until all was quiet save the water, and returned to the inn when the fire on the hearth was sending forth a cheerful red glow through the dusk. The soup was bubbling in the chain ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... lengths of convolvulus torn from the hedge, And trailing the highway over, The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge, And called for a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... first gazed with seeing eyes across its dreamy, silent solitudes. The secrets of the marshland wastes have been whispered in his ears by the wind in the willows, and have been sung to him by the sighing sedge. He knows the bird voices of reed rond and hover, and has read the lesson of the day's venture in the brightening sunrise and sunset glow. Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... the meads are hurl'd, And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world; Where woods and forests go in goodly green;— I'll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love's Queen;— The meads, the orchards, and the primrose-lanes, Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes: Thou in those groves, by Dis above, Shalt live with me, and be ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... dead leaves; it breathes of wild plants that hide and oak fragrances that vanish; it expresses to me the natural magic of music. Have you ever walked on long afternoons in warm, sunny spots of the woods, and felt a sudden thrill strike you with the half fear that a ghost would rise out of the sedge, or dart from behind the next ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... places its nest upon the north side of the tree; in the Middle and Eastern States, it fixes it upon the south or east side, and makes it much thicker and warmer. I have seen one from the South that had some kind of coarse reed or sedge woven into it, giving it an open-work appearance, like ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... floated slowly across the high, wide dome of the azure sky. The hilltops were bathed in a warm, soft glow; the placid waters of the canal sparkled, dimpled, and smiled beneath the caress of the passing breeze, until they broke into tiny ripples and wavelets against their sedge-grown banks. ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... island's edge, midst tangled sedge, Lay a wreath of wild flow'rs blue— The broad flag-leaf was their sweet relief, When the heat too fervid grew; And the willow's shade a shelter made, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... as the bold intruders press around, At once she starts and rises with a bound; With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear, And ludicrously wild and winged with fear, The herd decamp with more than swinish speed, And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed; Through tangled thickets headlong on they go, Then stop and listen for their fancied foe; The hindmost still the growing panic spreads, Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds, Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap; Yet glorying in their fortunate escape, Their groundless ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... smiling upon her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Her heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On either side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... the sun rise over the great city, to gild vane and weathercock of countless spires and steeples and make a broad-bosomed glory of the noble river. Suddenly my uncle halted to point before him with tasselled cane where two rough-looking men, unconscious of our approach, were crouched among the sedge beside ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea, undrained, only partly cultivated, half covered with sedge and sallow bushes, and consequently liable to heavy mists. There was a mist over it that night, and hence it was not easy even for Father Dan (accustomed to midnight visits to curragh cottages) to find the house which had once been the home of ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... The joists were thrown on top of them and gable ends of the same kind of boards that made the room. Bunks three or four feet wide made in two tiers were at rear end and sides bottomed with small poles, and broom-sedge and oak and pine leaves, with a blanket spread over. Four-legged slabs made good benches, but many split bottom chairs were obtained from country chair makers. With a good log fire three or four feet long ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... of a corpse. He plucked her by the sleeve, and both went on together, glancing back continually. At length they descended the slope of a small ravine, almost a hole, along the bottom of which a brook flowed lazily, overgrown with sedge, and strewed with mossy boulders. Descending into this ravine, they were completely concealed from the view of all the plain occupied by the Zaporovian camp. At least Andrii, glancing back, saw that the steep ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... ideal nesting place for a colony of these little marsh wrens. The home is made of sedge grasses, softly lined with the softer meadow grass or plant-down, and placed in a tussock of tall grass, or even upon the ground. The entrance is on the side. But while fond of moist places, both for a ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy lazzi and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... {and} to see unknown rivers, his curiosity lessening the fatigue. He went, too, to the Lycian[46] cities, and the Carians, that border upon Lycia. Here he sees a pool of water, clear to the {very} ground at the bottom; here there are no fenny reeds, no barren sedge, no rushes with their sharp points. The water is translucent; but the edges of the pool are enclosed with green turf, and with grass ever verdant. A Nymph dwells {there}; but one neither skilled in hunting, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... without a whimper from the pack. There was not a sound save the eager rustling of the dogs through the sedge and undergrowth. The ground was familiar to Flora, and I watched her with pride as with powerful strides she circled around. Suddenly she paused and flung her head in the air, making a beautiful picture where she stood poised, as if listening. My heart gave a great thump. It ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... hour's drifting with the current carried me to the end of the lake, and I found myself at the debouchure of the bayou. Here, to my great delight, I saw my boat in the swamp, where it had been caught and held fast by the sedge. A few minutes more, and I had swung myself over the gunwale, and was sculling with eager strokes down the smooth waters of ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... of Davy Jones's Locker lie open to view, as the boat glides through the ever-changing scenery mirrored in the transparent sea. Opalescent berries resemble heaps of pearls, and the lemon stalks of marine sedge gleam like wedges of gold in the crystalline depths. The long oars detach pinnacles of coral like tongues of flame, and a cargo of seaweed, shells, and anemones, fills the boat as each enchanted grotto contributes a quota of treasure trove, but ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... day the Gold Spring, is the deadliest spot on earth to those who bear your name. Far as the wood extends on either side, extended formerly the turf-pit. The deep moor is covered now by an unsteady earth-crust, overgrown with pale red sedge, and from its centre, as from a grotto, the beautiful rivulet ripples forth that irrigates and renders fruitful all your land. I doubt not that this grotto, with its golden vault of granite, is the very spring into which the furious Wittehold cast his daughter. The place ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... on grass and bush and hedge, Reddening the road and deepening the green On wide, blurred lawn, and in close-tangled sedge; Veiling in gray the landscape stretched between These low broad meadows and the pale hills seen But dimly on ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... On the seaward hedge The wild hops, hanging bright, Gleam as a foam-spray flung on sedge From a ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... swelling outlines, where the dry ploughlands were dappled with faint fawn-coloured tints, a little wood, in the centre of which was a reed-fringed pool. The new rushes were beginning to fringe the edges of the tiny lake, but the winter sedge stood pale and sere, and filled the air with a dry rustling. The water was as clear as a translucent gem, and Hugh saw that life was at work on the floor of the pool, sending up rich tresses of green-haired ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... perfect peace, and soliloquising): They don't rise yet. But a time will come. Hang it! but this is sweet. Yea, it is good to be here. Now, if that little Waterside Sketches chap was here, let me see, how would he tick it off? Forget-me-nots—and deuced pretty they are; sedge warblers, three; kingfishers, one; rooks melodious; picturesque cottages on the downs nestling—they always put it that way—nestling under the beech wood; balmy air—'tis a trifle nice; cuckoo mentioning his name to all ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... great gray bowlders, so that impressions of Scotch moorlands alternated with those of an Arizona desert. The tang of September was in the breeze; from the moorlands which overlooked the jagged Brenton reefs came the faint aroma of burning sedge; from the wet distant cliff a saline exhalation was wafted. It was such a morning as one can see and feel only on ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... pleasure 'tis to hedge My temples here with heavy sedge, Abandoning my lazy side, Stretched as a bank unto the tide, Or to suspend my sliding foot On the osier's undermined root, And in its branches tough to hang, While at my lines the fishes twang? But now away, my hooks, my quills, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... brooks, where love and sorrow run Crowned with sedge and singing wild, Like a sky-lark—or a child!— Old blind Moone, he knew their springs, and played 'em every one; Stood there, in the darkness, blind, And sang them into Shakespeare's mind.... Old blind Moone of London, O now his songs are done, The light upon ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... upon the evening shore, At once a lovely isle before me lay, Smooth and with tender verdure covered o'er, As if just risen from its calm inland bay; Sloped each way gently to the grassy edge, And the small waves that dallied with the sedge. ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth, the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Alva flashed and swirled, between green boughs below, clear coffee-brown from last night's rain. Some miles up the turnpike road he went, and then away to the right, through the ash-woods of Trebooze, up by the rill which drips from pool to pool over the ledges of grey slate, deep-bedded in dark sedge, and broad bright burdock leaves, and tall angelica, and ell-broad rings and tufts of king, and crown, and lady-fern, and all the semi-tropic luxuriance of the fat western soil, and steaming western woods; out into the boggy moor at the glen head, all fragrant with the gold-tipped ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... on, Hardy and the two boys left, and tried the proprietor's little stream with a fly. The trout rose freely, and Hardy caught about a dozen. The fish rose best to a gray-winged sedge fly, when thrown high over the water and falling slowly and softly near the reeds. Karl and Axel had little success, the perfect stillness of the water to them was ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge, And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still, The pensive Pleasures sweet Prepare ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... breast of my River, and startle the birds on the edge, To land on a newly found island, a boat that is caught in the sedge, The rays of the sun are still level, not yet has the heat of the day Deflowered the mists of the morning, that linger ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... motionless on their stems; the delicate reed-stalks off in the pearly haze stood up arrowy-straight; occasionally a home-returning bee shot humming athwart the shade, and a partridge creeping from the sedge drank, whistled to his mate, and ran away. The restfulness of the vale, the freshness of the air, the garden beauty, the Sabbath stillness, seemed to have affected the spirits of the elder Egyptian; his voice, gestures, and whole manner were unusually gentle; and often as ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... upraised his glowing and dripping countenance from the brook, resembled Silenus emerging from one of the rivers which Bacchus metamorphosed into wine during his campaign in India. He resorted to attrition and contrition, to maceration and laceration; he tried friction with leaves, with grass, with sedge, with his garments; he regarded himself in one crystal pool after another, a grotesque anti-Narcissus. At last he flung himself on the earth, and gave free course ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... gulf was well-grassed, particularly before we crossed the Nicholson; and on the plains and approaches to the rivers and creeks. The large water-holes were frequently surrounded with a dense turf of Fimbristylis (a small sedge), which our horses liked to feed upon. Some stiff grasses made their appearance when we approached the sea-coast, as well on the plains as in the forest. The well-known kangaroo grass (Anthisteria) forms still ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... I can watch it flow past from here. Get back then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... thither. They are not to be captured by the wiles of men, or so rarely that the most enthusiastic anglers have given them up. They are as safe in their tarn as those enchanted fish of the "Arabian Nights." Perhaps a silver sedge in a warm twilight may somewhat avail, but the adventure ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... the hedge, The dog-rose and the vetch, The sworded iris 'mid the sedge, The mallow ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... There was a thicket in the field she had crossed, and it was covered with wild roses, white and red. Through the heart of it there rippled a tiny streak of water that was amber-tinted from the round shingle in its bed. The trunk of an old beech lay across it for ford or bridge. Underfoot were the sedge and moss; overhead the thick boughs and the roses; in the air, the odor of hay and the songs of birds. And Paul, the cunning rascal, would have tempted Greta into this solitude; but she was too shrewd, the wise little woman, to-be so easily trapped. Pretending to follow him in ignorance ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... kingly kiss— no more regret nor old deep memories to mar the bliss; where the low sedge is thick, the gold day-lily outspreads and rests beneath soft fluttering of red swan wings and the warm quivering ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... though, instead of making thirty-two miles an hour, he were posing for his photograph. For full two hundred yards he sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge. How much longer the match had lasted I could not say. He must have got up near the engine—of course losing some time in the act of rising—and fallen back gradually to my place, which was in a rear car. But when a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness of the sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction of its points, its needles, and ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... Christ. The sense for harmony of hue displayed in their composition is marvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants of classical treatment which may be discerned—Jordan, for instance, pours his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge—or to show what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established these ancient monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names of the three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelists as we now recognise them, and many of the rites ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... round, upon the river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; 115 Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... mottled sand-bird runneth up and down, Amongst the creaking sedge, Along the crusted beach; The time-stained houses of the sea-walled town ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... cried.—"Help!—Clear the sedge! Strip bare a circle to the land!" That done, he hastened to its edge, And grasped a rifle in his hand: Dried weeds he held beside the pan, Which kindled at a flash the mass! "Now fire fight fire!" he said, as ran The forked ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... went into raptures over it, for it was a rarity, even among the many beautiful ones he had visited. As its name implied, it was shaped like a spoon, about five hundreds rods long and formed of white sand, with a growth of green sedge grass all over it. On the broadest part was a cluster of spruce forming a little thicket and beside this, and entered by a narrow inlet the tiniest bit of a harbor, just large enough to shelter a small sloop. The seagulls had also discovered its ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... was already in fruit, and the crowberry likewise. The willow, like the birch, has learned that the only way to live in such a place is to lie flat upon the ground and let the wind blow over you. The other flowers noted at the summit were one of the blueberries (Vaccinium uliginosum), Bigelow's sedge, and the fragrant alpine holy-grass (Hierochloa alpina). Why should this sacred grass, which Christians sprinkle in front of their church doors on feast-days, be scattered thus upon our higher mountain-tops, unless these places are indeed, ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... with Mr. Connelly on Western life and Red River experiences—I passed the long July day until evening came to a close. Then came the time of the mosquito; he swarmed around the shanty, he came out from blade of grass and up from river sedge, from the wooded bay and the dusky prairie, in clouds and clouds, until the air hummed with his presence. My host "made a smoke," and the cattle came close around and stood into the very fire itself, scorching their hides ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... thrusting further and further its outworks in, Here in Shakespeare's vision, a flower of her kin forsaken, Lay in her golden raiment alone on the wild wave's edge, Surely by no shore else, but here on the bank storm-shaken, Perdita, bright as a dew-drop engilt of the sun on the sedge. Here on a shore unbeheld of his eyes in a dream he beheld her Outcast, fair as a fairy, the child of a far-off king: And over the babe-flower gently the head of a pastoral elder Bowed, compassionate, hoar as the hawthorn-blossom in spring, And kind as harvest ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... dressed all in pure white, walking hand in hand. The setting sun shone on the golden roof of a colonnade, where white fires burnt in sacred sacrificial vessels; and the green island was spanned by a rainbow, the colour of which was rose-red and sedge-green. ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... more melodious note of a trumpeter swan; or from the top of a tall cottonwood, or cypress, the sharp saw-filing shriek of the white-headed eagle, angered by some stray creature coming too close, and startling it from its slumbers. Below, out of the swamp sedge, rises the mournful cry of the quabird—the American bittern—and from the same, the deep sonorous bellow of that ugliest animal on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... with green grass, looking like a meadow, beyond. Not intrinsically much of an affair. The beach, on close inspection, proved soft and dirty, the grass sedge, the meadow a bog. In the distance, however, and as a variety in this unswarded cliff-coast, it was sweet, I laugh now to think how sweet, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... exploration of a ruined cottage set in an ancient cherry-orchard, or the sailing of paper boats, or even the mere delight of lying on the grass and listening above the murmur of insects to the water nagging at the sedge. So much indeed was there to beguile them that, if after sunset the Pool had not been a haunted place, they would have lingered there till nightfall. Sometimes indeed they did miscalculate the distance they had come and finding themselves likely to be caught by twilight ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... canoe, flying swiftly forward at its own sweet will, brought me into a bight, a bare, desolate-looking country with no vegetation save grass and sedge on the near marshes and stony hills rising up beyond, with others beyond them mounting step by step to a long line of ridges and peaks still covered in ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... nor a quiet lake, in which, in the months of flowers and fruits, you would not see Indian maidens laving their dusky limbs. The wild duck found no rest in his sunny slumber on the banks of Menemshe, the pokeshawit could no longer hide in the sedge, on the banks of his favourite Quampeche, and the deer, that went to quench his thirst in the Monnemoy, found the unerring arrow of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... strange charm the smell of withering swamp grass is blended with these smells. To-day is Trinity. In accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about—in the corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They, also, had lit the lamps before all the images. The girls, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... straightening through serene and shining pastures. There is nothing quieter in all Surrey than this little path by the tiny river, with the bank on one side rich with roses and elderflower, and on the other the sunlight gleaming on the chestnut coats of the cattle moving slowly through the sedge. Here is an old oak bridge, solid and lichened; here, facing the stream, a high bank of white sand, bored and tunnelled by sand-martins; a little further, and the brushwood flames with the pink and crimson spires of a thousand ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... not graze in the field! The jackal laughs to see you. Paddy bird, do not fish in the pond! You pecked a piece of sedge thinking it was a frog's leg! Do not drink rice beer, O fowl! The ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... habitations of the musquash, or ondatra, called also the musk-rat. As evening approaches, the creatures may be seen in fine balmy weather gambolling on the surface, swimming rapidly here and there, or now and then diving below, apparently fearless of the passing canoe. The little sedge-built hut of the water-rat is constructed much in the same way as the beaver's larger mansion. The creature itself looks somewhat like the beaver, and some of its habits are also similar. It is rather more than two feet in total length, of which measurement ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... rolls along, And his robes of rank glitter like the young sedge. Do I not think of you? But I am afraid of this officer, and dare ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... the sake of contrast, there could not be. Every thing here is peace and softness. Banks lofty, but round and smooth, intervene to hide the summits of the mountains. The stream is not stagnant, but it flows on with a gentle current, sometimes through sedge or between grassy banks; elsewhere edged by a beach of the finest yellow sand. The water is beautifully transparent, and even where it is deepest you may count the shining pebbles below. A few weeping birches here and there hang their graceful disconsolate ringlets almost into the stream; the grass ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... nor passing gale Sigh'd thro' the long lank sedge, The air was hushed, no little wave Dimpled ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... livelong day, The livelong day, We beat afoot the northward way We had travelled times before. The sun-blaze burning on our backs, Our shoulders sticking to our packs, By fosseway, fields, and turnpike tracks We skirted sad Sedge-Moor. ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... their ponderous horns Scatter its tranquil waters, while the deer, Couched here and there in groups beneath the shade Of spreading branches, ruminate in peace. And all securely shall the herd of boars Feed on the marshy sedge; and thou, my bow, With slackened ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... of thanksgiving was appointed. In all the cities of the Seven Provinces the public joy manifested itself by festivities of which the expense was chiefly defrayed by voluntary gifts. Every class assisted. The poorest labourer could help to set up an arch of triumph, or to bring sedge to a bonfire. Even the ruined Huguenots of France could contribute the aid of their ingenuity. One art which they had carried with them into banishment was the art of making fireworks; and they now, in honour of the victorious champion of their faith, lighted up the canals of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... whence it came, and the broad barrier burst! A vain illusion! (such as mocks the eyes Of fearful men, when mountains round them rise From less than nothing [Footnote 4]) nothing now beheld, But scatter'd sedge—repelling, and repell'd! And once again that valiant company Right onward came, ploughing the Unknown Sea. Already borne beyond the range of thought, With Light divine, with Truth immortal fraught, From world to world their steady course they keep, [Footnote 5] Swift as the winds ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... where the little Bungay nunnery had been a refuge for the widow, the forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in the valley of the Nar—the Norfolk Holy Land—where seven monasteries of one sort or another clustered, each distant from the other but a few short miles—among the ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the Broads, where the tall reeds wave and whisper, and all else is silent—the glorious buildings with their sumptuous churches were little better than centres of contagion. From ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... trod, with footsteps wild and free, The crackling leaves beneath yon linden-tree, Panting from play or dripping from the stream, How bright the visions of my boyish dream Or, modest Charles, along thy broken edge, Black with soft ooze and fringed with arrowy sedge, As once I wandered in the morning sun, With reeking sandal and superfluous gun, How oft, as Fancy whispered in the gale, Thou wast the Avon of her flattering tale! Ye hills, whose foliage, fretted on the skies, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... creepers. You thought at your first glance among the tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire-rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left at every five steps. You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you if they are only three, and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to it either way, but gradually ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... partly of stone blocks, for it was difficult to procure logs of the proper length, and to cut them with such tools as they had would have been a tedious affair. The walls were made thick, rough, and strong; the interstices were matted and daubed with clay from the bed of the rivulet; the thatch was a sedge obtained from the lake; and the floor of earth was strewed with the leaves of the sweet-smelling rhododendron. The hole was left for the smoke to escape. Several granite slabs served for seats—tables were not needed—and for beds each of the party had provided himself ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... light which creeps slowly up from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the pine-thicket gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the barred owl in the cypress, as we leap our horses into a field of sedge and cheer on the dogs to their work. For half an hour we ride in silence save the words of encouragement to the hounds, which are snuffing about unsuccessfully and whipping the hoar-frost with their tails ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... on the edge And purple buds and red, Leant down,—and 'mid the pale green sedge The lotus ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... the danger of falling over rocks or becoming buried in snowdrifts. The sun by day and the stars by night were for him both clock and compass, and if these failed him he directed his homeward course by observing how the cotton-grass or withered sedge swayed in the wind. ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... came to a bank of beautiful shrubs; white-beam with its great silver-backed leaves, and mountain-ash, and oak; and below them cliff and crag, cliff and crag, with great beds of crown-ferns and wood-sedge; while through the shrubs he could see the stream sparkling, and hear it murmur on the white pebbles. He did not know that it was three ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... a fire takes place in a low bottom of long grass, sedge and tangled dry plants, more than six feet high; and when a rushing wind urges on the fiery ruin, flashing like the lightning and roaring like the thunder; the appearance is not beautiful, but terrible. I have heard the shrill war-whoop, ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... grasses and sedges of the meadow comprising the floor of the canyon. The ground and vegetation were dry at the time of capture, September 2, 3, and 4, 1956. Microtus montanus was the only other species taken in the mouse traps in the sedge and grass. Five of the six specimens from Prater Canyon are young, having slightly worn teeth; the sixth is an old adult male the teeth of which are so much worn that only a few traces of the reddish-brown pigment remain. His testes were 5 mm. long. These specimens ...
— Mammals of Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... low, and in others high, everywhere covered with wood. This town of Don John[249] is but small, having only about twenty huts of the negroes, and is mostly surrounded by a fence about the height of a man, made of reeds or sedge, or some such material. After being at anchor two or three hours, without any person coming off to us, we manned our boats and put some merchandize into them, and then went with our boats very near the shore, where we anchored. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... placed in the marsh grass barely above the surface of the water. Eggs same color as the last but the markings more inclined to zigzag lines. Size 2.10 x 1.40. Data.—Heron Lake, Minn., May 26, 1885. Nest of wet sedge stalks and rubbish placed in a bunch of standing sedge in shallow water; at least five thousand birds in rookery. Collector, ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... I have been three days at a place called Grez, a pretty and very melancholy village on the plain. A low bridge of many arches choked with sedge; great fields of white and yellow water-lilies; poplars and willows innumerable; and about it all such an atmosphere of sadness and slackness, one could do nothing but get into the boat and out of it again, and yawn ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dwelling-house on the part of the farm looking over Clew Bay towards Clare Island, and all was apparently smooth and pleasant. No sooner, however, was Mr. Hunter established there than a difficulty arose. The inhabitants of the surrounding country had been in the habit of cutting turf and pulling sedge on parts of the mountain and bog included within the limits of Mr. Hunter's farm. It is only fair to the memory of the deceased gentleman to state that such rights are frequently paid for, and that he had not taken the farm subject to any "turbary" ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... October, he had ever on his wrist some young falcon to essay, or some old favourite to exercise. And now, just as William was beginning to grow weary of his good cousin's prolix recitals, the hounds suddenly gave tongue, and from a sedge-grown pool by the way-side, with solemn wing and harsh boom, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... over 600 square miles. Even when more than 6,000,000 acres have been reclaimed by drainage, the armies found some of these marshes extending continuously for over 200 miles. In the upper Pripet basin the woods were everywhere full of countless little channels which creep through a wilderness of sedge. Along the right bank of the Pripet River the land rises above the level of the water and is fairly thickly populated. Elsewhere extends a great intricate network of streams with endless fields of bulrushes and stunted woods. Over these bogs hang unhealthy vapors, and among the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand, when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is clambering, unknowing of the serpent's dens. With clenched teeth, and hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake coiled round the mice's cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long gray moss. Estelle became a student of flowers, Cecile of birds, Camille of trees. All my explanations were alike enchantingly strange. To their minds it had never occurred that ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering; The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... that the infernal persistence of the Old Man of the Sea of Arabian origin could find its match in youth. A week slipped by. Philip wove an unsatisfactory mat of sedge upon a loom of cord and stakes, whittled himself a knife and fork and spoon which he initialed gorgeously with the dye of a boiled alder, invented a camp rake of forked branches, made a broom of twigs, and sunk a candle in the floor of his tent which he covered with a bottomless ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... pirates, he saw the three figures again in the distance, and, skirting around back of a hill of sand covered with coarse sedge grass, he came to where he overlooked a little open level space gleaming white in ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... was very uncomfortable for the frog. The day was hot; Dexter's hand was hotter still; and though there was the deliciously cool gurgling river close at hand, with plenty of sedge, and the roots of water grasses, where it might hide and enjoy its brief span of life, it was a prisoner; and if frogs can think and know anything about the chronicles of their race, it was thinking of its approaching fate, and wondering how many of its young tadpoles would survive to ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... turf-banks crowned with whispering sedge, And black bog-pools below; While dry stone wall or ragged hedge Leads on, to meet ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... Full-manned, flat-bottomed for the shallowest shore, Dropped down to west, and crossed our frontage here. Seen from above they specked the water-shine As will a flight of swallows toward dim eve, Descending on a smooth and loitering stream To seek some eyot's sedge. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... modern banquet for men only. Music flowed; wine sparkled; the night was far spent—it was in the wee sma' hours. The banquet was given by Col. Punk who was the promoter of a town boom, and who had persuaded the banqueters that "there were millions in it." He had purchased some old sedge fields on the outskirts of creation, from an old squatter on the domain of Dixie, at three dollars an acre; and had stocked them at three hundred dollars an acre. The old squatter was a partner with the Colonel, and with his part of the boodle nicely done up in his wallet, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... strong hand rent apart The veils of sense from soul and heart, Showing in light ineffable The joys of heaven and woes of hell All about in the misty air The hills seemed kneeling in silent prayer; The rustle of leaves, the moaning sedge, The water's lap on its gravelled edge, The wailing pines, and, far and faint, The wood-dove's note of sad complaint,— To the solemn voice of the preacher lent An undertone as of low lament; And the note ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... wastes, immix'd with reedy fens; Ye mossy streams, with sedge and rushes stor'd: Ye rugged cliffs, o'erhanging dreary glens, To you I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Their vernal garb of bud and bloom. How fair they look, how bright and gay With tasselled flowers on every spray! While each to each proud challenge flings Borne in the song the wild bee sings. That mallard by the river edge Has bathed amid the reeds and sedge: Now with his mate he fondly plays And fires ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... and meadow-lands, with here and there a plantation of trees in full blossom and here and there a farm croft. A winding river flowed down through the midst of this valley, very quiet and smooth, and brimming its grassy banks, where were alder and sedge and long rows of pollard willows overreaching ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... observed Sutchok, who spoke in a strange, far- away voice, as though he were in a dream, 'and there's sedge and mud at the bottom, and it's all overgrown with sedge. But there are deep ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... only cry the louder. On fine sunny days, it pleases us to hop through galingale and sedge and to sing while we swim; and when Zeus is pouring down his rain, we join our lively voices to the rustle of the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... beside the reedy Nile Thou hast ever held thy way, Where the embryo crocodile In the damp sedge lay; When the river monster's eye Kindled at thy passing by, And the pliant reeds were bending Where his blackened form was wending, And the basking serpent started Wildly when thy light ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... many birds on hice, in quetan, among sedge out on the bay, but I never see such sight. I never think so many birds in the world before," said Peter, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... Mountains), you must camp on the banks for days together, until it shall please Allah to abate the waters. Our lucky star was in the ascendant; we reached Wad N'fiss at eleven o'clock to find its waters low and clear. On the far side of the banks we stayed to lunch by the border of a thick belt of sedge and bulrushes, a marshy place stretching over two or three acres, and glowing with the rich colour that comes to southern lands in April and in May. It recalled to me the passage in one of the stately choruses ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... been raised in the county, in 1849. The yield increases from year to year. A general and rapid improvement of the State is in progress, and in nothing is this seen more clearly than in the corn crop. Mossy "old sedge" fields, which have been laid out for years, are broken up, and will yield, if it be a good season, from five to ten bushels per acre; fence them, lime them with twenty to thirty bushels, and seed the oat crop with clover, and in two years the clover sod will ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud, 320 The Moon ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... keeping behind banks lest they be seen by young uns, they shamefacedly paddled barefoot—two old men with bare feet and silvery shanks, chuckling and catching crabs, in a salt inlet among rolling hillocks covered with sedge-grass that lisped in the breeze. The grass hollows were filled with quiet and the sound of hovering flies. Beyond was a hill shiny ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... life to slip by until his seventieth year was reached, before he would print them, and when they appeared, he could not find the courage to put his name on the title-page. Not one of his own titlarks or sedge-warblers could be more shy of public observation. Even the fact that his own brother was a publisher gave him no real confidence ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... irresolute, peering right and left, then began to trudge eastwards, heavy boots crunching the thin sedge-ice. A little later they came to the water's edge and proceeded steadily along it, Quain leading confidently. Eventually he tripped over some obstacle, stumbled and lurched forward and recovered his balance ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... under the willows, and unhesitatingly plunged into the basin. The water was four or five feet deep, and its extreme length afforded an excellent swimming bath, despite the water-lilies and a few aquatic plants that mottled its clear surface, or the sedge that clung to the bases of the statues. He disported for some moments in the delicious element, and then seated himself upon one of the half-submerged plinths, almost hidden by reeds, that had once ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... of West Creek village, New Jersey, a boat- builder and an expert shooter of wild-fowl, about the year 1836, conceived the idea of constructing for his own use a low-decked boat, or gunning-punt, in which, when its deck was covered with sedge, he could secrete himself from the wild-fowl while gunning in Barnegat and Little Egg ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... river's trembling edge There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prankt with white, And starry river buds among the sedge. And floating Water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway |
