"Heather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the spirit of the maid. "I could be wishing I had brought you a spray of that heather," says I. "And though I did ill to speak with you at the first, now it seems we have common acquaintance, I make it my petition you will not forget me. David Balfour is the name I am known by. This is my lucky day, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cross-road. Here the children must have separated, for there were footprints in two directions. The boy looked now as if all hope had fled. Then he saw a little white down on a heather-knoll, and he understood that the goosey-gander had dropped this by the wayside to let him know in which direction he had been carried; and therefore he continued his search. He followed the children through the entire wood. The goosey-gander he did not see; but wherever ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... way. The railway runs past there now, over the very place the cottage stood on, I believe; but no one so much as dreamt o' railways, time I talk on. Not a road was near, and all around there was nothin' but the moors stretching away for miles, all purple ling and heather, with not a living soul nearer than Wharton, and that was a good twelve miles away. It was pretty lonely for mother, o' course, during the day; but she was a brave woman, and when dad come home at night, never a word would she let on to ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... stood up and remained standing, her head turned a little away from him, a charming silhouette in her heather-blue shooting-suit. ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... into working premises. He got carpenters to fit up the big laundry as a dining-room, under his directions, and when fresh-looking mats covered the tiles, and when the huge chimney-piece, the walls, and the doors were ornamented with tall ferns, shiny hollies, and blooming heather, of which Stephen and his cousins had gathered a cartful, the ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Keswick; but I would not have missed the scene for any reasonable consideration. Scott, of course, stood on the top of the hill looking down on the Tarn, with Striding Edge on his right. Alas! no "eagles" are ever "yelling" on the mountain, nor "brown mountain heather" is in sight—only common ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... the waist with a leather strap; and when he turned and grinned, his red lips showed under his sackcloth-coloured beard. His cap was sackcloth too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his neck. He navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in their faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their legs, and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew whether it would give way in showers of rotten wood, or ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... was a Scotch shepherd boy who tended his flocks along the river Tweed near Melrose. Night and day he lived in the open air, drinking in the sunshine and sleeping on the heather. And he grew up big and strong and handsome,—the finest lad in all that part of the country. He could run faster than any one, and was always the champion in the wrestling matches to which he challenged the village boys for miles around. And ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... run to the stream, all suddenly she was startled by the sound of a heavy thud upon the heather at her feet. She looked round and saw that a large capercailzie had fallen there. The bird was dead, and there was an arrow in ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... eye of the eagle soaring in the clouds, or that of the screech-owl piercing the darkness, to distinguish these men among the gorse and heather and underbrush where ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... you have long since heard the news, that a sulky churlish boor has destroyed the ancient statue, or rather bas-relief, popularly called Robin of Redesdale. It seems Robin's fame attracted more visitants than was consistent with the growth of the heather, upon a moor worth a shilling an acre. Reverend as you write yourself, be revengeful for once, and pray with me that he may be visited with such a fit of the stone, as if he had all the fragments of poor Robin in that region of his viscera where the disease holds its seat. Tell ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... famous meeting-place for the fairies, this haunt at the foot of the mountain by the stream, for the Little Folk from the heather above used nightly to foregather in the meadow with the Little Folk from the woodland below, and there they danced the long night through among the shamrocks. But although Nora had heard about the fairies from her grandmother, who sat all ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... show you your berth; we have no bedrooms here," said the hermit, with a sort of deprecatory smile, as he led the way to the darker end of the cavern, where he pointed to a little recess in which there was a pile of something that smelt fresh and looked like heather, spread on which there was a ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... like Ulysses, still hold his barren Ithaca above the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands before there was ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... tiny table and cut notepaper into elegant shapes, sticking on it little bits of Turkish heather, and printing beneath: "A Slice of Turkey" (which we thought a very happy jest); "Heather from Invaded Enemy Territory. Are we downhearted? NO! Are we ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... a dolefu' dream; I ken'd there wad be sorrow; I dream'd I pu'd the heather green, On the dowie ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... secret so inviolably." Such was the commencement of that compact which, held together by the word of Scotchmen, was in few instances broken; but was maintained with as scrupulous a regard to honour and fidelity by the poorest Highlander that ever trod down the heather, as by the great nobleman within his ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... had no instruments of tillage, we did not even know the use of them, and the time of harvest never came for those who had sown nothing. Thus hunger was always in our midst. In winter, mosses and the bark of trees were our common food. A few green roots of dogs-bit or heather were a feast, and when men found beech-mast, nuts, or acorns, they danced for joy round the beech or oak, to the sound of some rude song, while they called the earth their mother and their nurse. This was their only ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... on a moor covered with heather in bloom, the young shepherd lay dreaming in the sun. The serene light, the hum and buzz of tiny creatures, the sweet whispering of the waving grass, the silvery tinkling of the grazing sheep, the mighty beat and rhythm ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... stones and heather springing, Brook and brooklet haste below; Hark the rustling! Hark the singing! Hearken to love's plaintive lays; Voices of those heavenly days— What we hope, and what we love! Like a tale of olden time, Echo's voice ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... that you are going to have to turn your adventures to a practical use, it does take away from the sense of relaxation that a writer like anyone else craves for on his day off. On the road to Vallauris we were more struck by the heather than any other form of vegetation. The mountains and hills were covered with it, and whatever else we saw, heather was always in the picture on the hills and mimosa along the roadside. From the roots ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... would not allow it; she insisted on Toby's going to sleep on the heather, and made him take her mother's warm shawl, that he might wrap ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... shoes, That were made of Spanish leather, And I have put on coarse Lowland brogues, To trip it o'er the heather.' ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... eagles will be gathered together. I am like a sheep which I have seen fall down a precipice, or drop down from sicknessif you had not seen a single raven or hooded crow for a fortnight before, he will not lie on the heather ten minutes before half-a-dozen will be picking out his eyes (and he drew his hand over his own), and tearing at his heartstrings before the poor devil has time to die. But that dd long-scented vulture that dogged me so longyou have ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Through the poor man's ignorance, through his wondrous folly, I could discern an immense love that had overpowered him and broken him forever. He was an exile from his beloved land of Brittany, and would never see its heather and gorse again, or the flaming foxgloves that redden some of ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... contentment brings, In every pure enjoyment wealthy, Blithe as a beautiful bird she sings, For body and mind are hale and healthy. Her eyes they thrill with right goodwill - Her heart is light as a floating feather - As pure and bright as the mountain rill That leaps and laughs in the Highland heather! Go search the world and search the sea, Then come you home and sing with me There's no such gold and no such pearl As a bright and beautiful ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... voice, that went straight to the listener's heart and nestled there. The sweet old tunes that one is never tired of were all Polly's store; and her favorites were Scotch airs, such as, "Yellow-Haired Laddie," "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Down among the Heather," and "Birks of Aberfeldie." The more she sung, the better she did it; and when she wound up with "A Health to King Charlie," the room quite rung with the stirring music made by the big piano and ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... them by the fold In these glad days, ere Paris was a king, And oft the Autumn, in his car of gold, Had pass'd them, merry at the vintaging: And scarce they felt the breath of the white wing Of Winter, in the cave where they would lie On beds of heather by the fire, till Spring Should crown them with ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery of Edinburgh, which is ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest gray hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year I think I ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... pellucid air everything seemed weirdly beautiful, even Arthur Jukes' heather-mixture knickerbockers, of which hitherto I had never approved. The sun gleamed on their seat, as he bent to make his shots, in a cheerful and almost a poetic way. The birds were singing gaily in the hedgerows, and such was my uplifted ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... said. "We will have a holiday, after we are married, and that will be in a fortnight's time. We will go to Devonshire, where the heather is. But, my child, you will be wanting to sing again ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... gathering small flowers among the heather). Oh, Hilde! Now do let Mr. Lyngstrand ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... soul's wing! What lies above? Sunshine and Love, Skyblue and Spring! Body hides—where? Ferns of all feather, Mosses and heather, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... in East is glowing, The cock on high is crowing; Upon the heath's brown heather 'Tis time our bands we gather. Ye Chieftains disencumber Your eyes of clogging slumber; Ye mighty friends of Attil, The ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... the empty bag she carried for the chaff. "There's a hidin' o' what I hae—no a pretendin' to hae what I haena!—Is' be hame in guid time for yer tay, father.—I can gang a heap better withoot them!" she added, as she threw the bag over her shoulder. "I'll put them on whan I come to the heather," she concluded. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... Rose. "Yes, I think I should like to be a shepherd." And straightway she fell into a reverie, this foolish Rose, and fancied herself wrapped in a plaid, lying in a broad meadow, spread with heather as with a mantle, and here and there gray rocks, and sheep moving slowly ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... though some of its tors, the enormous rocks of granite crowning its hills, rise considerably higher, the loftiest of these, the Yes Tor, near Okehampton, being two thousand and fifty feet high. The moor is composed of vast stretches of bog and stunted heather, with plenty of places where peat is cut, and having its streams filled with trout. Legend tells us that all manner of hill-and water-spirits frequent this desolate yet attractive region, and that in Cranmore Pool and its surrounding ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... fallacious Caledonian Morris would revile daily, as he sat in the private office opening his mail, with old Joseph at another table, sullenly awaiting orders, or savagely affixing signatures to he knew not what. And when the man of the heather pushed cynicism so far as to send him the announcement of his second marriage (to Davida, eldest daughter of the Revd. Alexander McCraw), it was really supposed that Morris would have had ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... stark desert, on which there were ruins of former Egyptian cities, but no trace of life. On the other hand, on the southern shore stretched a fertile country, magnificent, with shores overgrown by heather and reeds and teeming with pelicans, flamingoes, herons, wild geese, and ducks. Only here did Stas find an opportunity for displaying his marksmanship. The shooting from a common rifle as well as from the short rifle was so extraordinary that after every shot ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... loves the lift, my dear, There's nae ship loves the sea, There's nae bee loves the heather-bells, That loves as I love thee, my love, That loves as I ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... message over the sea, granting him a pardon for the part he had taken in '45, for you know he was out then. The Sea Raven was about to clear in a week for Glasgow, and a sudden longing seemed to seize him to see once more the dash of the waters through the Braes of Mar and the heather-crowned hills of old Aberdeen; and so, within a week, they had sailed away; and as he left he said to me: 'A revolt drove me from old Scotland; another sends me back again. I wonder where fortune will end my days.' It is a strange fortune that has ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... deathless solace left— To gaze at younger heroes smiting, Of neither grit nor hope bereft, Up to the end for victory fighting. Gentlemen all, we taste delight, Banished now from the stream and heather, Calm and cool on an old camp-stool, Watching the game in ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... foul weather, The foolish, fond Old Year, Crowned with wild flowers and with heather, Like weak, despised Lear, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... almost as thick as the heather in places on the steep, rocky hills that overlook the Exe. Feeding on these berries when half ripe is said to make the heath poults thin (they are acid), so that a good crop of whortleberries is not advantageous to the black game. Deep in the hollow the Exe ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... astonishing journeys about that fag end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Laura spoke in haste: "Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather." "You have much gold upon your head," They answered altogether: "Buy from us with a golden curl." She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... "I too—Desdemona slain by a blackamoor. To some it is the cold hills and the valleys 'green and sad,' and the sea-birds' wailing," she continued in a low, strange voice, "and to some the glens of heather, and the mountain-brooks, and the rowans. But, come to an end, what are we all? This man's eyes will tell ye! I would give white and red, nectar and snow and roses, and all the similes that ever ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... out on the right-hand side. For some time past I had been ascending a low, broad, flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through the undergrowth into the open I found myself on the level plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown with heather and scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch trees. Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent of country was disclosed. The surface was everywhere broken, but there was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the recent rain had intensified. There is too ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... lights and blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by the upper classes, and such extension as had been was towards the Meadows. The new town had not been projected even, and on the slopes, now occupied by its spacious streets and squares, copse-woods and grass and heather grew. In the hollow at the foot of these green braes, and by the side of the Water of Leith, a chain of little hamlets—Dean, Stockbridge, and Canon-mills—nestled, and in the mid-most of these Robert Raeburn established himself as a yarn-boiler. Although in the country, his home was less than ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature becomes more and more aware of an American background. Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were writing. Nature literature becomes a category. Men make ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and you can see nothing of the huge expanses of moorland stretching away from the precipices on either side. So that we, who would learn something of this region, must make the journey on foot; for a bicycle would be an encumbrance when crossing the heather, and there are many places where a horse would be a source of danger. The sides of the valley are closely wooded for the first seven or eight miles north of Pickering, but the surrounding country gradually loses its cultivation, ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... and that Mrs. Kendal would be glad of his company in a long walk. Mr. Goldsmith seemed rather surprised, but consented, whereupon the young clerk lighted up into animation, and bounded out of his prison house, with a springy step learnt upon mountain heather. Mr. Kendal only waited to hear whither they ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level. Thus the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone, is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in many places waist deep." Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting, were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air. Sport, in the proper sense of the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the wayside weed Becomes a flower; the lowliest reed Beside the stream Is clothed with beauty; gorse and grass And heather, where his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... disposed to obey them until I had translated them into a plausible rendering of the accepted code. If I could not so translate them I found it wise to control them. When I wanted urgently one summer to wander by night over the hills towards Kestering and lie upon heather and look up at the stars and wonder about them, I cast about and at last hit upon the well-known and approved sport of treacling for moths, as a cloak ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... moor, cloven by that one ribbonlike stretch of uneven road, broken here and there with great masses of lichen-covered grey rock, by huge clumps of purple heather, long, glittering streaks of yellow gorse. The morning was young, and little shrouds of white mist were still hanging around. His own clothes were damp. Little beads of moisture were upon his face. But below, where the Atlantic billows came thundering in upon ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... assumed to his throat the flavour that pepper does to ours—there had been a considerable depth of water over the fen, and that it was very soft. The result was, that while the lads stopped short, and then began to pick their way from tussock to tussock, and heather patch to patch, Solomon blundered on, made a splash here, a bit of a wallow there, and then a bound, which took him in half-way up his back; and as he plunged and struck out with fore-legs and heels, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... no obstacle in the way of men devoted to the duty of self-culture. Professor Alexander Murray, the linguist, learnt to write by scribbling his letters on an old wool-card with the end of a burnt heather stem. The only book which his father, who was a poor shepherd, possessed, was a penny Shorter Catechism; but that, being thought too valuable for common use, was carefully preserved in a cupboard for the Sunday catechisings. Professor Moor, when a young ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... unsurpassed fertility, and lovely with oak woods and brown open heaths which stretch away, hill after hill, down towards the southern coast. I could greedily fill a long chapter with the well-loved glories of Cleeve Hill; but it may be that we must press its heather with our feet more than once in the course of our present task, and if so, it will be well to leave something for those ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... not troubled by shyness. He extricated himself from his seat with the help of the young men, and slowly ascended the platform. He looked a size too large for it, and for the other speakers, and his loose tweed suit and heather stockings were as great a contrast to the tightly buttoned-up black of the other occupants as were his strong, keen face and muscular hands to ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... up to Canton, and saw the rich alluvial banks covered with the luxuriant evidences of unrivalled industry and natural fertility combined; beyond them, barren uplands, sprinkled with a soil of a reddish tint, which gave them the appearance of heather slopes in the Highlands; and beyond these again, the white cloud mountain range, standing out bold and blue in the clear sunshine,—I thought bitterly of those who, for the most selfish objects, are trampling under ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... after their arrival. Audrey had arranged her own and Michael's books on the empty shelves; the little mirror, and indeed the whole mantelpiece, was festooned and half hidden with branches laden with deep crimson rowan-berries, mixed with heather and silvery-leafed honesty; a basket of the same rowan-berries occupied the centre of the round table; an Oriental scarf draped the ugly horsehair sofa, and a comfortable-looking rug was thrown over the shabby easy-chair. The fishing-tackle, butterfly-nets, pipes, ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and made for the young. The opinions were charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet. But this delighted the boys. There were no reprints then, and to pass the paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the heather arm in arm with Christopher himself. It is a little singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley rarely if ever wrote for it. I remember a translation from Goethe, 'The Ghost-Seer,' which he may have written for it, and a poem upon the White ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... no doubt fortunately for the patient, to allow Nature to take her course, merely adopting such simple precautionary measures as would suggest themselves to anyone possessed of average common sense. We provided for our patient a comfortable, fragrant, springy bed of a species of heather; cleansed and dressed his wounds as often as seemed necessary; kept him as cool as possible, and fed him entirely upon fruits of a mild and agreeable acid flavour. During that fortnight Smellie was undoubtedly hovering on the borderland between ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... got worse and worse and the hills were steeper and more thickly covered in heather and bracken. The horses were over their hocks all the time, and the place was pitted with rabbit-holes; but the hounds were still streaming along, and the riders could not afford to pick their steps. As they raced down one slope, the hounds were always flowing up the opposite one, until it ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the two desolate women bade adieu to their dead, and made their way to England, and from there to Scotland, where among the heather hills they passed the summer in ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... family room, nor that in which I slept, that first of all rises before my inward vision, but that desolate hill, the top of which was only a wide expanse of moorland, rugged with height and hollow, and dangerous with deep, dark pools, but in many portions purple with large-belled heather, and crowded with cranberry and blaeberry plants. Most of all, I loved it in the still autumn morning, outstretched in stillness, high uplifted towards the heaven. On every stalk hung the dew in tiny drops, which, while the ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... Saftly this songe to thee: "Balow, my boy!" And a wee heather bell, Pluckt from a fayry dell, Chimed thee this rune ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... the little earl, and watched with wistful eyes the tall Highlander striding across brushwood and heather, leaping dikes and clearing fences—the very ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... mediaeval barbarism." A considerable space in the forest was cleared and enclosed with canvas. In the centre of this enclosure was a pavilion open at the sides, made of branches of fir-trees, and decorated with berries, heather, and forest flowers; in short, a sylvan bower provided for the principal company, outside a table furnished with powder and shot supplied a station for less privileged persons, including the chasseurs or huntsmen of the Duke, in green and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... other outlet for the smoke, except a hole which a branch of the ill-favoured pine-tree had made in the roof, in one of his most restless moods. More light came through this hole than through the window, the broken panes of which were stuffed with rags, dry grass, and heather, though not tight enough to prevent the wind from whistling, and the rain, snow, and sleet from driving in upon the wretched inmate. Except where the solitary gleam of cold evening light fell upon the crouching figure of poor Mountain Moggy, all else in the hovel was gloom and obscurity. Little, ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... her, and when she came to a spot that pleased her, she would turn Prue into the hedge to graze, while she herself would stay in the carriage and read, or dismount and climb some hedge, or tree, or gate, and gaze about her, or lie on the heather, thinking or reading; and by-and-by she would turn the old horse's head homewards, and arrive at last laden with honeysuckle or dog-roses, bog-myrtle, ferns, or rich-brown bracken ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... lightly on his way over the rough moorland road. The high ridge of tableland extended far to the north; the landes, purple and gold with the low heather and furze which covered them, unsheltered by any tree, except where crossed in even lines by pollard oaks of immense age, their great round heads so thick with leaves that a man might well hide in them. ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... which she advanced left her no time to take in all the varied scene, the vast moving sands, the quagmires boasting a few scattered trees, fallen granite boulders, overhanging rocks, shaded valleys, broad open spaces with moss and heather still in bloom (though some was dried), utter solitudes overgrown with juniper and caper-bushes; sometimes uplands with short grass, small spaces enriched by an oozing spring,—in short, much sadness, many splendors, things sweet, things strong, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... mollified him, but at all events he turned and walked with us to show us the way up the "Hareknap"—the war-path of ancient armies—to a famous point of view. There we saw the Quantock Hills, rolling all around us. They were like long smooth steep billows of earth, covered with bracken, and gorse, and heather just coming into bloom. Thick woodlands hung on their sides, but above their purple shoulders the ridges were bare. They looked more than a thousand feet high. Among their cloven combes, deep-thicketed and watered with cool springs, the wild red deer still find ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... be in what green field Or meadow we our nest may build, Midst flowering broom, or heather; From whence our new-fledg'd offspring may With least obstruction wing their way Up to ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... cried Petrea, internally; but before she herself knew how, she was out of the carriage, and found herself standing not at all the worse upon the soft heather. With the Assessor, however, it did not fare so well; a severe blow on the right leg made it impossible for him to support himself upon it without great suffering. His old servant, who had acted as coachman on the journey, lay in a fainting fit at a few paces from him, bleeding profusely ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... drank a whole tumbler of new milk before we lifted her to carry her back, we came upon a wide high moorland country the roads through which were lined with gorse in full golden bloom, while patches of heather all about were showing their bells, though not yet in their autumnal outburst of purple fire. Here I began to be reminded of Scotland, in which I had travelled a good deal between the ages of twenty and five-and-twenty. The further I went the stronger I felt the resemblance. The look ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia and in Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated honey of Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of rosemary. In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather. ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... ("of y' ilk" was the form that most delicately tickled his palate) still dwelt in the fortalice built by his ancestors at a time when to the average Scot the national tartan suggested but an alien barbarian who stole his cattle; and the national bagpipe, the national heather, and the national whisky were merely the noise the brute made, the cover that preserved him from the gallows, and the stuff that gave you your one ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... form to attract the eye, more than the grand outline renders necessary. But, where the rock joins the ground, where the shadow falls, and the eye is not attracted, she puts in bold forms of ornament, large leaves and grass, bunches of moss and heather, strong in their projection, and deep in their color. Therefore, the architect must act on precisely the same principle: his outward surfaces he may leave the wind and weather to finish in their own way; but he cannot allow Nature to put grass and weeds into the shadows; ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... rich, warm valleys, by orchards bursting into bloom, from farmhouse to farmhouse, each more beautiful than the other, and from hamlet to hamlet bowered amid dark evergreens; the next, I was on pine-clad heights, gazing over moorland brown with last year's heather, feeling upon my face a wind from the white-flecked Channel. So intense was my delight in the beautiful world about me that I forgot even myself; I enjoyed without retrospect or forecast; I, the egoist in grain, forgot to scrutinize my own emotions, or ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... wholly unfit for the plough, were mostly devoted to the posturing of sheep and cattle; the soil was thin and poor: bits of grey rock here and there peeped out from the grassy hillocks; bilberry-plants and heather—relics of more savage wildness—grew under the walls; and in many of the enclosures, ragweeds and rushes usurped supremacy over the scanty herbage; but these were not ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... purlieus of the town and the various plots of land occupied by its inhabitants, they crossed a small river, and entered upon a region of little hills, some covered to the top with trees, chiefly larch, others cultivated, and some bearing only heather, now nursing in secret its purple flame for the outburst of the autumn. The road wound between, now swampy and worn into deep ruts, now sandy and broken with large stones. Down to its edge would come ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... pigeons had taken their evening draught from the coffee-coloured water-hole beyond the butcher's paddock, and then flown back into the bush to roost on 'honeysuckle' and in heather." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... kinds of heather are found on the Mountain. The red heather is the largest and the most abundant. It grows at a lower altitude than the others, and is sometimes, erroneously, called Scotch heather. There are two kinds of white heather. One forms a prominent part of the {p.135} flora, often ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... and Wordsworth discovered the beauties of their native land. Where others had only lamented over bare and wearisome hills, they saw the battle-fields and burial-places of the primeval Titan struggles of nature. Where others saw nothing but barren moors full of heather and broom, the land in their eyes was covered as with a carpet softer and more variegated than the most precious loom of Turkey. Where others lost their temper at the gray cold fog, they marveled at the silver ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... provincial town. On the other hand, the country was within easy reach. Ten minutes' walk led on to comparatively rural roads, and within half an hour you could find yourself beginning to climb the fells, with a long stretch of heather for a prospect, and the pure moorland air ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... grass was getting hidden by the black throng, and still the crowds arrived, seating themselves row behind row on the wild thyme and heather. The topmost corner of the field merged into a rocky wilderness of stunted heath and patches of burnt grass, studded with harebells, and this unapportioned piece of ground stretched away into the adjoining corner ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... enclosures were crowded with young fir-trees growing too close together for all to live; and these were not sown or planted, nothing having been done to the ground beyond enclosing it so as to keep out cattle. On ascertaining this, Mr. Darwin was so much surprised that he searched among the heather in the unenclosed parts, and there he found multitudes of little trees and seedlings which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. In one square yard, at a point about a hundred yards from one of the old clumps of firs, he counted thirty-two ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... "only I had first to settle Lady Temple, little guessing who was her treasure of a governess! Last night I had nearly opened, on another false scent; I fell in with a description that I could have sworn was yours, of the heather behind the parsonage. I made a note of the publisher in case ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with them; and yet we must ask our readers to figure to themselves a sharp cleft sloping downwards to a brawling mountain stream, the sides scattered with gray rocks of every imaginable size, interspersed here and there with heather, gorse, or furze. Just in the widest part of the valley, a sort of platform of rock jutted out from the hill-side, and afforded a station for one of those tall, narrow, grim-looking fastnesses that were the strength of Scotland, as well ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to play In their fairy town secure; Ev'ry frisker Flirts his whisker At a pink-eyed girl demure. Ev'ry maid In silk arrayed At her partner shyly glances, Paws are grasped, Waists are clasped As they whirl in giddy dances. Then together Through the heather 'Neath the moonlight soft they stroll; Each is very Blithe and merry, Gamboling with laughter droll. Life is fun To ev'ry one Guarded by our magic charm For to dangers We are strangers, Safe from ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... none like those brave hearts, (for now I climb Gray hills alone, or thread the lonely heather,) That walked beside me in the ancient time, The good old time ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the beginning of September and anything more dreary and deserted than the parks could not be imagined. No one is in London. Who would be when the seaside is everything delightful and the moors are covered with heather and grouse? Philippa shudders as she looks out of her bedroom window into the mews, even that is deserted, a canary in a very small cage and a lean cat are the only living ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... great deal more," was Wilford's answer, as he kissed her upturned face, and then went for the last time to Genevra's grave; for on the morrow they were to leave the neighborhood of Alnwick for the heather ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... mornings of late summer shone upon her. The heather was at its purplest, the furze at its yellowest, the grasshoppers chirped loud enough for birds, the snakes hissed like little engines, and Elfride at first felt lively. Sitting at ease upon Pansy, in her orthodox riding-habit and nondescript hat, she looked what she felt. But the mercury ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... hanging over them, and vines and flowers fairly crowding themselves into the water; lanes and roads hedged in with hawthorn, wild roses, and tall purple foxgloves; little woods and copses; hills covered with heather; thatched cottages like the pictures in drawing-books, with roses against their walls, and thin blue smoke curling up from the chimneys; distant views of the sparkling sea; villages which are nearly covered up by greenness, ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... shoulders, when he had been working, and the white flesh showed through. He would feel the air and the spots of rain on his exposed flesh. And he would look again across the common, where the dark, tufted gorse was dying to seed, and the bits of cat-heather were coming pink in tufts, like a sprinkling of ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... gabble-gabble!' My window glimpses larch and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... her kindly precautions, the nervous sheep scuttled across the road on to the heather-clad common, bleating plaintively: then their scuttle became a run. At sight of this flying column, Tim stopped, put his head on one side, and prepared ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... heather in my native county. No," said Peter, "no. To tell you the truth, it is the usual thing. It ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... clump of scrub oaks; sparsely scattered about were small pines. We found great numbers of Opuntia Missouriensis, called by the Mexicans nopal; small mesquite shrubs, too, are seen everywhere, while the resurrection plant covers great areas, like the heather on the Scotch hills. Here are also found century plants, or agaves, and many species of small ferns, such as the graceful maidenhair. In the larger water-courses are poplars and maples, now presenting their most brilliant hues, and carrying the thoughts ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... changed and aged, but a strong man still, with a more settled air of strength of purpose than he had worn in his wild youth. He found his little girl a pretty child, brilliantly healthy, brilliantly strong. The wind of the mountain, of the heather, of the woods, had quickened her with an enduring vitality very different from that of the delicate fair mother for whom his heart still grieved. Of course the little Helena did not remember her father, and was at first rather ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... engaging simplicity and directness, and show a sympathetic knowledge of wild nature such as is the reward only of long familiarity. The glorious mountain wind blows through them all, so that as you read you feel the heather brushing your knees, and see the clouds massing on the peaks of Ben-something-or-other. Perhaps Mr. GORDON is at his most interesting on the subject of the Golden Eagle. There are many striking snapshots of the king of birds in his royal home; and some stories of court life in an eyrie ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... down from town, and in the afternoon he carried his patient off for a thirty-mile spin. They went through the depths of the country, through tiny villages hidden among the hills, through long stretches of pine woods, over heather-covered uplands. But though it did him good, Durant was conscious of keenest pleasure when, returning, they ran into view of the sea. He felt that the shore and the sand-dunes ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... but the heather and the mountain cave for Alexander Gordon for many a day. He had wealth of adventures, travelling by night, hiding and sleeping by day. Sometimes he would venture to the house of one who sympathized with ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... had been approaching a house built high among the heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. Presently, the saint stopped in ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... her head with an energy that set the pink heather-bells a-tremble in her hair, and her color deepened beautifully as she said, with ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... rock, nor a tuft of its heathery herbage, that has not adorable manifestations of God's working thereupon. The harmonies of color among the native lichens are better than Titian's; the interwoven bells of campanula and heather are better than all the arabesques of the Vatican; they need no improvement, arrangement, nor alteration, nothing but love, and every combination of them is different from every other, so that a painter need never repeat himself if he ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... upon the Maremma. And as the elements paled and were silent, a hush overspread wild nature, not a beast in the thicket, not a bird on the bough, stirred. Sighs siffled through the bracken and the heather, and the roar of the distant sea died away in moaning ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... expectant, tired mother, he had not done it. He should be at their house in Scotland later. He thought he would wait till then. He breathed a long sigh of relief, in the quiet darkness now, at the thought that he had not done it. He had a haunting presentiment that neither in the purple heather, any more than in a London ball-room, would he be able to pass beyond that "certain point" to which, in divers companionship, with or without assistance, he had so ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... lightly to welcome or strike up an intimate friendship with any chance comers, or love those who attach themselves to us, but attach ourselves to those who are worthy of our friendship. For what is easily got is not always desirable: and we pass over and trample upon heather and brambles that stick to us[331] on our road to the olive and vine: so also is it good not always to make a friend of the person who is expert in twining himself around us, but after testing them to attach ourselves ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... retired to rest. Their couches were composed of heather, scattered along the sides of the room; but it was covered with thick cloths and rugs, and formed no contemptible resting-place; their drenched clothes had been well dried, and they had enjoyed a plentiful meal. Even Fleetwood had done justice to it; and the Maltese lad, who was no other than ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... isolation, when Washington, with the telegraph inoperative, was kept in an appalling uncertainty, the North rose. There was literally a rush to volunteer. "The heather is on fire," wrote George Ticknor, "I never before knew what a popular excitement can be." As fast as possible militia were hurried South. The crack New York regiment, the famous, dandified Seventh, started for the front amid probably the most tempestuous ovation which ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... had, as it has been the fashion to say of late years, "set the heather on fire," and perhaps in no literary instance on record did the blaze spread and heighten itself with such extraordinary speed and intensity. His book must have been written a little before the middle of the twelfth ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere around were the traces of the glacier-drift—great gray boulders of gneiss fixed fast into the black peat-moss or set amid the browns and greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and turbid, that plunged down their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... still untouched. The air was full of voices—the primal sounds of earth, and man's food-gathering; calling reapers, clattering carts, playing children. And on the moors that closed the valley there were splashes and streaks of rose colour, where the heather spread under the ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled grey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early moths blurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... frequently in my neighbourhood; and I can obtain from her with the least trouble the greatest number of data. In September I see the bold filibuster flying from clump to clump of the pink heather pillaged by the Bee. The bandit suddenly arrives, hovers, makes her choice and swoops down. The trick is done: the poor worker, with her tongue lolling from her mouth in the death-struggle, is carried through the air to the underground ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... house was of distinctly composite structure. Tradition said that it had been a royal hunting lodge in the days when Barnes and Putney and Wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the Thames flowed silver-clear through a vast, wild region of forest and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of the deer in Richmond Park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges bellowing across the open spaces which separated their ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... turret and tower. The wreaths of rising smoke turned to clouds of red and gold. Dusky grandeur clothed the height where the huge castle stood in state. Far to the north, ridge on ridge, rose the mountains, the rosy morning light bathing their sides in floods of sunshine, and turning each heather bell at their feet into an amethyst. Yonder could be seen the shores of Fife, nearer Preston Bay and Berwick. Between them rolled the broad Firth, islands floating on its bosom like emeralds on ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... upon a grove of olives or cypresses as gnarled and twisted as the tortured souls that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... a leafless wood. Marsham talked of indifferent things, and she answered him with spirit, feeling it all, so far, a queer piece of acting. Then they emerged on the side of the hill beside a little basin in the chalk, where a gnarled thorn or two, an overhanging beech, and a bed of withered heather, made a kind of intimate, furnished place, which ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... belonging to Ben Burke, and with all a dog's resemblance to his master, who lies stretched before the hearth where the peaty embers never quite die out, but smoulder away to a heap of white ashes; over these is hanging a black boiler, the cook of the family; and beside them, on a substratum of dry heather, and wrapped about with an old blanket, nearly companioned by his friend, the dog, snores Thomas Acton, still fast asleep, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... but that he is now in Scotland, chin-deep in heather, killing grouse against time for a bet of some hundreds, which he has persuaded some simpleton to make with him. No man knows better than Beauchamp how to get paid for amusing himself. I had never heard, and don't believe, that Beauchamp is going to take a wife. Whatever you know of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... area. The ground becomes rocky and sterile. The gum-trees still grow sturdily, but there is no grass beneath; instead a wild confusion of wiry heather-like brush, bearing all sorts of curious flowers, white, pink, purple, blue, deep brown. One flower called the flannel-daisy is like a great star, and its petals seem to be cut of the softest white flannel. The boronia and the native rose compel attention by ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... The note of a thrush was heard away inland. A guillemot skimmed over the water in the same direction as their own, and a tern on curved wing screamed in their wake. There was a sense of expectation over all. The scent of the young fir-trees and the heather was wafted out to them; farther in lay the flowery meadows of Hellebergene. At a great distance an eagle could be seen, high in air, winging his way from the mountains, followed by a flock of screaming crows, who imagined that they ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... part of the world, and start with the great asset of being always expected to "make good" in every land of their adoption. Wherever they may roam, we find them occupying positions of influence, and still cherishing and promulgating the traditions and customs of the Land of the Heather, which impel to high thinking, resolute doing, and the upholding of old standards, such as build up the lives both of individuals and ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... against the nobility which smouldered in the French peasantry. Cobbett looked back as fondly to the surroundings of his youth as any nobleman could look back to Eton or to his country mansion. He remembered the 'sweet country air' round Crooksbury Hill, the song of birds, and the rambles through heather and woodland. He loved the rough jovial sports; bull-baiting and prize-fighting and single-stick play. He had followed the squire's hounds on foot, and admired without jealousy the splendid gardens of the bishop's palace at Farnham. Squire and parson were ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... were Connla and Nora. Right in front of the door of the little house lay a pleasant meadow, and beyond the meadow rose up to the skies a mountain whose top was sharp-pointed like a spear. For more than half-way up it was clad with heather, and when the heather was in bloom it looked like a purple robe falling from the shoulders of the mountain down to its feet. Above the heather it was bare and grey, but when the sun was sinking in the sea, its last rays rested on the bare mountain ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... Our noisy norland Resounds and rings; Waste waves thereunder Are blown in sunder, And winds make thunder With cloudwide wings; Sea-drift makes dimmer The beacon's glimmer; Nor sail nor swimmer Can try the tides; And snowdrifts thicken Where, when leaves quicken, Under the heather the ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... flowing side, With stroke on stroke we rack; As down the sinking slope we slide, She cleaves a talking track— Like heather-bells on lonely steep, Like soft rain on the glass, Like children murmuring in their sleep, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... what I saw as I returned home across the moor from the station? The day was nearly over, and the clouds were gathering overhead. The wind was rising and falling as it swept across the moorland. The rich purple of the heather had gone, and was succeeded by dull brown—sometimes almost grey—each little floret of the ling, as Ruskin said, folding itself into a cross as it was dying. Poor little purply-pink petals! They had had their day, they had had their ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various |
