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Sylvan   Listen
adjective
Sylvan  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to a sylva; forestlike; hence, rural; rustic. "The traditional memory of a rural and a sylvan region... is usually exact as well as tenacious."
2.
Abounding in forests or in trees; woody.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sylvan" Quotes from Famous Books



... indignant pride, and coy disdain, Stern Tragedy rejects too light a vein: Like a grave Matron, destin'd to advance On solemn festivals to join the dance, Mixt with the shaggy tribe of Satyrs rude, She'll hold a sober mien, and act the prude. Let me not, Pisos, in the Sylvan scene, Use abject terms alone, and phrases mean; Nor of high Tragick colouring afraid, Neglect too much the difference of shade! Ut nihil intersit Davusne loquatur et audax Pythias emuncto lucrata Simone talentum, An ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace

... holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d— d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his fist ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... my beloved!" Then he beheld, in a dream, once more the home of his childhood; Green Acadian meadows, with sylvan rivers among them, Village, and mountain, and woodlands; and, walking under their shadow, As in the days of her youth, Evangeline rose in his vision. Tears came into his eyes; and as slowly he lifted his eyelids, Vanished ...
— Greetings from Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... piped. Below her, hidden by a screen of hazel, chattered the fall. Why should she wend farther? She must be greedy of solitude indeed if this sylvan ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... passed her quiet days; she was extremely beautiful, and charmed all that beheld her; her looks, her mien, and her behaviour had something of more than human; and indeed she was the daughter of a Dryad, and of a sylvan god. Her chastity and devotion equalled her beauty, she was perfectly resigned to the will of heaven, and never undertook any thing without having first implored our assistance; her heart was pure, and her hands undefiled. This nymph is dead, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... awkward, white-headed, forlorn-looking boy; a pack suspended on a staff over his right shoulder; his dress unrivaled in sylvan simplicity since the primitive fig leaves of Eden; the expression of his face presenting a strange union of wonder and apathy: his whole appearance gave you the impression of a runaway apprentice in desperate search of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... last long tramp in "Dickens-Land," for the Friday before our departure. Mrs. Perugini, the novelist's second daughter, had recently told us that this was the most beautiful of all the beautiful parts of Kent, and so indeed it proves to be. Its sylvan scenery is ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... warm day for the season: once in a while it will be hotter in these sylvan solitudes than it is in New York. While we were in the brook we did not mind that, for we could drop every five minutes and drink. I suppose I consumed some nine gallons of aqua pura during the morning: you can do this with ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made Steering stand too determinedly to suit Crittenton Madeira made him forge ahead determinedly now. "Piney would be apt to suffer less if he were wholly the sylvan, irresponsible creature, the faun, he sometimes seems to be. But, alas, Piney has a man's heart, Miss Madeira. He will have to suffer for that, for he will have to love. That's why 'poor' Piney; because ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... themselves up the steep northern bank of the pond, bringing from the city well-to-do, country-loving souls who desired space and sunshine. It was a satisfaction to Thor's father, Archie Masterman, that only the best type of suburban residence was going up among these sylvan glades, and that the property was justifying his foresight as ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... Bred by Ulysses, nourished at his board, But, ah! not fated long to please his lord! To him, his swiftness and his strength were vain; The voice of glory called him o'er the main. Till then, in every sylvan chase renowned, With Argus, Argus, rung the woods around: With him the youth pursued the goat or fawn, Or traced the mazy leveret o'er the lawn; Now left to man's ingratitude he lay, Unhoused, neglected ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth

... that, from the time they had been tramping through the forest, they ought to have very nearly reached its southern skirts; but as far as the eye could penetrate, in the uncertain moonlight, through the sylvan vistas, there was no sign of break or opening of any kind; nothing but an apparently endless succession of trees and dense undergrowth. Seeing this, Leicester began to feel uneasy. He knew that they had been travelling through the timber in ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood

... the seat of sylvan powers, Of nymphs and fauns, and savage men who took Their birth from trunks of trees and ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... were they, that I felt as if I were the intruder, and bound by all the laws of aerial chivalry to keep the peace. But this was no easy matter where Rose and Nettle were concerned, for when an imprudent weka appeared on the sylvan scene, looking around-as if to say, "Who's afraid?" it was more than I could do to keep the little terriers from giving chase. Brisk, too, blundered after them, but I had no fear of his destroying the charm of the day by taking ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... handsome olive figures glistening in the sun; the sight of strange faces, the sound of strange speech, the smell of a strange land; the glitter of gold; the sudden death-shriek breaking the stillness of some sylvan glade; the sight of blood on the grass . . . The Admiral's face undergoes a change; there is a stir in the room; some one signs to the priest Gaspar, who brings forth his sacred wafer and holy oils and administers the last sacraments. The wrinkled eyelids flutter open, the sea-worn ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. "A few strong instincts and a few plain rules" ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... were giving him time. He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for "appreciation"—a colour indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... Sunday school wants a dozen, other schools may want some after they see them. What if we go up and get seventy-five or a hundred, and take them along with the rest of our load? They may sell pretty well. Listen: 'Witches' brooms for your Christmas tree! Very sylvan! Very odd! Something new and unique! Only fifty cents apiece! Buy a ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... high-road. But there was nothing to suggest the presence of his mysterious contributor. A hare limped slowly away, a green-and-gold lizard paused upon a pine stump, the woodpeckers ceased their work. So complete had been his sylvan seclusion, that he found it difficult to connect any human agency with the act; rather the hare seemed to have an inexpressibly guilty look, the woodpeckers to maintain a significant silence, and the lizard to ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... the last, this tribe worship the sun, but with the moon as his wife, and the stars as their children. Besides these they revere Manes, and countless local and sylvan deities. Like Druids, they sacrifice only in a grove, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... ungrateful cares Absolv'd, and sacred from the selfish crowd. Happiest of men I if the same soil invites A chosen few, companions of his youth, Once fellow-rakes perhaps now rural friends; With whom in easy commerce to pursue Nature's free charms, and vie for Sylvan fame A fair ambition; void of strife, or guile, Or jealousy, or pain to be outdone. Who plans th'enchanted garden, who directs The visto best, and best conducts the stream; Whose groves the fastest thicken, ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis

... praised thee with my praise, E'en as a bird, conceal'd in sylvan ways, May laud the rose, and wish, from hour to hour, That he had petals like the empress-flower, And there could grow, unwing'd, and be a bud, With all his warblings ta'en at singing-flood And turned to vagaries of the wildest scent To undermine ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay

... entire country was intersected with rivers, inlets and creeks that were deep enough to float the sea going vessels of the age, and salt water penetrated the woods for miles, forming of the whole country, as John Fiske has expressed it, a sylvan Venice. Thus it was possible for each planter to have his own wharf and to ship his tobacco directly from his own estate. Moreover, it allowed him to receive from the foreign vessels what merchandise he desired to purchase. Hugh Jones wrote, ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... "Our sylvan retreat has been somewhat disturbed by the advent of Mrs. Johns, her children and her dog. Annie is also here, but they will not remain long, it is too quiet, too lonely, and the nights are too mysterious and uncanny, strange noises to disturb the slumbers of the timid. And besides there ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... simple Chaucer's child, Dear heritor of Spenser's tuneful reed, With soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled The weary soul of man in troublous need, And from the far and flowerless fields of ice Has brought fair flowers ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... the mighty Sire addressed They all obeyed his high behest, And thus begot in countless swarms Brave sons disguised in sylvan forms. Each God, each sage became a sire, Each minstrel of the heavenly quire,(112) Each faun,(113) of children strong and good Whose feet should roam the hill and wood. Snakes, bards,(114) and spirits,(115) serpents bold Had sons too numerous to be told. Bali, the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... for the sylvan fitting room?" she murmured. "Yes? Bring it, please." Her gesture seemed to waft the damsel over the floor. During this interlude the Byrds were silent, Stefan hugely entertained, Mary beginning to feel a slight antagonism ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... a Druid lies. Where slowly winds the stealing wave; The year's best sweets shall duteous rise To deck its poet's sylvan grave. Ode on the Death of ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... Cries of invisible Beings, echoing from haunted Spring and Dale, as ne'er smote human Ears before nor since: Nymphs and Wood-Gods, or they that had passed for such, breaking up House and retreating to their own Place. I warrant you, there was Trouble among the Sylvan People that Day—Satyrs hirsute and ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... straight girl not yet nineteen. Even before his sickness Dick, with the instinct for deference to all women of self-respect that obtains among frontiersmen, had won the gratitude of the shy creature. There was something wild and sylvan about her sweet grace. The deep, soft eyes in the brown oval face were as appealing as those of a doe wounded ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... were as coarse as canvas, but these trifles did not trouble me. I listened to the song of the crickets on the hearth downstairs until drowsiness beckoned sleep and consciousness of the present lost its way in sylvan labyrinths ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... hundred and sixty-nine hectares and was due originally to Louis XV, who sought to have a sylvan gateway to the city from the east. Under the Second Empire the park was considerably transformed, new roads and alleys traced, and an effort made to have it equal more nearly the beauty of the more popular Bois de Boulogne. It occupies the plateau ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... reached Hawaiki. Of the creation of man suffice it to say that he was made by Tiki, who formed him out of red clay, or, as some say, out of clay reddened by his own blood. Woman's origin was more ethereal and poetic; her sire was a noonday sunbeam, her mother a sylvan echo. Many are the legends of the hero, Maui. He lassooed the sun with ropes and beat him till he had to go slower, and so the day grew longer. The first ropes thus used were of flax, which burned ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... was steeped in the noontide sunlight, the mountain air tasted of the fresh sylvan fragrance that pervaded the forest, the foliage blazed with the red and gold of autumn, the distant Chilhowee heights ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... a host of mythic beings, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic. The difference between man and brute recognized in civilization, is unrecognized in savagery. All animal life is wonderful and magical co sylvan man. Wisdom, cunning, skill, and prowess are attributed to the real animals to a degree often greater than to man; and there are mythic animals as well as mythic men—monsters dwelling in the mountains and caves or hiding ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... Forthwith Despair— More keen that one of these was rotten— Moved me to seek some forest lair Where I might hide and dwell forgotten, Attired in skins, by berries stained, Absolved from brushes and ablution;— But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained, Fate ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... her is much the most forcible; and there is something infinitely tragic in the reader's sense of the contrast between the sternly prosaic life of the good people about her, their wholesome decency and their noonday probity, and the dusky sylvan path along which poor Hetty is tripping, light-footed, to her ruin. Hetty's conduct throughout seems to me to be thoroughly consistent. The author has escaped the easy error of representing her as in any degree made serious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... observe the Christmas festival in good old English style, even during the sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, when provisions were to be had only at famine prices. The ingenious Tommy Atkins, in distant lands, has often found sylvan substitutes for mistletoe and holly, and native viands to take the place of plum-puddings and mince-pies, but it is not so easy to find substitutes for the social circles in old England, and when the time comes round for ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... the dark-brown moors, The dusky mountain's shade, Down which the wasting torrent pours, Conceal'd so sweet a maid; When sudden started from the plain A sylvan scene and gay, Where, pride of all the virgin train, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... in the world. Here have ever congregated the talent and beauty of every clime. With the painter, the poet, the sculptor, here sleep, in the city of the silent, Michael Angelo, Alfieri, and like spirits, rendering it hallowed ground to the lovers of art. Proud and lovely city, with thy sylvan Casino spreading its riches of green sward and noble trees along the banks of the silvery Arno, well may a Florentine ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray

... of the Wood-Thrush consists of about eight or ten different strains, each of considerable length. After each strain the bird makes a pause of about three or four seconds. I think the effect of this sylvan music is somewhat diminished by the length of the pauses or rests. It may be said, however, that during each pause our susceptibility is increased, and we are thus prepared to be more deeply affected by the next notes. Whether the one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... the Baltic Sea. The tales and traditions of the Rhine would give us a large knowledge of German history, and, in fact, of the great empire of Europe, over which Charlemagne ruled, and which now is divided into the kingdoms of Northern Europe. The stories of haunted castles, spectres, water nymphs, sylvan deities, and fairies, if shapes of fancy, are full of instruction, and I know of no subject so likely to prove intensely interesting as the Rhine and the Baltic; and I would like to propose it to the Club for consideration, although, ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth

... the hidden margin roves Of Como, bosomed deep in chestnut groves. No meadows thrown between, the giddy steeps Tower, bare or sylvan, from the narrow deeps. 80 —To towns, whose shades of no rude noise [19] complain, From ringing team apart [20] and grating wain— To flat-roofed towns, that touch the water's bound, Or lurk in woody sunless glens profound, Or, from the bending ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight

... see thee stand, As down the future years I gaze, The fairest maiden of the land— The spirit of those sylvan ways. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various

... great festival, Ernest, with all the other people of the valley, left their work, and proceeded to the spot where the sylvan banquet was prepared. As he approached, the loud voice of the Rev. Dr. Battleblast was heard, beseeching a blessing on the good things set before them, and on the distinguished friend of peace in whose honor they were assembled. The tables were arranged in a cleared space ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... then, "on Monday, at six in the morning," both the Majesties left Prag, for a place called Chlumetz, southwestward thirty miles off, in the Elbe region, where they have a pretty Hunting Castle; Kaiser intending "sylvan sport for a few days," says the old rag of a Newspaper, "and then to return to Prag." It is here that Grumkow, after a pleasant morning's drive of thirty miles with the sun on his back, finds Kaiser Karl VI.; and makes his announcements, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... daughter Krishna also, while ill and, therefore, clad in a single raiment, was brought into the assembly and great trouble was given by thee in diverse ways, O thou most wicked, unto her. While dwelling also in her sylvan retreat, thy well-wisher, that wicked wight, viz., the ruler of the Sindhus, persecuted her further, disregarding my sires. For these and other wrongs, O wretch of thy race, I shall today take vengeance if thou dost not quit the field.' ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... disappeared from the eyes of the astonished beholders. The fox-hunters, perceiving his disaster, exclaimed, in the phrase and accent of the chase, "Stole away! stole away!" and with hideous vociferation, joined in the sylvan chorus which the hunters halloo when the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... imaginative understanding are in fact but charts and surveyors' outlines meagre and arid for the timid or uninspired student. To a grander intellect these historical delineations are not maps but pictures: they compose a forest wilderness, veined and threaded by sylvan lawns, 'dark with horrid shades,' like Milton's haunted desert in the 'Paradise Regained,' at many a point looking back to the towers of vanishing Jerusalem, and like Milton's desert, crossed dimly at uncertain intervals by forms ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... spirit merely. She shook her head, regarding him gravely, her hand yet upon her heart. "I attend the Queen upon her progress," she said. "This day at the Earl's there is a great masque of Dian and her huntresses, satyrs, fauns, all manner of sylvan folk. At last I might steal aside unmissed.... By the favor of a friend I rode here through the quiet lanes, for I wished to see you face to face, to speak to you—to you who gave me no answer when I wrote, and wrote again!... I am weary with ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... making occasionally progresses about his little domains, visiting the different towns, receiving the homage of the inhabitants, and bestowing largesses with a princely hand. His great delight, however, was in sylvan sports and exercises, with horses, hawks, and hounds, being passionately fond of hunting and falconry, so as to pass weeks together in sporting campaigns among the mountains. The jealous suspicions of Ferdinand followed him into ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... could give information about his rider; and it seemed probable that he would not be discovered until the autumn and the winter should again carry the sportsman into every thicket and dingle of this sylvan tract. One person only seemed to have more knowledge on this subject than others, and that was poor Ferdinand von Harrelstein. He was now a mere ruin of what he had once been, both as to intellect ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... statues of satyrs or fauns at each end of the grove. The statues, like everything else about the old Lord, fell under the suspicion and obloquy that overshadowed him in the latter part of his life. The country people, who knew nothing of heathen mythology and its sylvan deities, looked with horror at idols invested with the diabolical attributes of horns and cloven feet. They probably supposed them some object of secret worship of the gloomy and secluded misanthrope and reputed murderer, and gave them the name of ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving

... last year it was not quite what it is now, and next year it may be altogether different. In fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when the rudeness of the first summer conditions has been left far behind, and vulgar luxury has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of sylvan distinction. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Barr-Smith in a barouche; followed by Antonia, who brought Mr. Cecil in her trap—and a concomitant thrill to the company. Mr. Cornish, in his dress, had struck a happy medium between the habiliments of business and those of sylvan recreation. Mr. Barr-Smith on the other hand, was garbed cap-a-pie for an outing, presenting an appearance with which the racket, the bat, or even the alpenstock might have been conjoined in perfect harmony. As for the men of Lattimore, any one of them would as soon have been seen ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... and steady as any in any hotel in Glasgow. Next day the weather was clear. We rounded the terrible headland, and were floating at ease that evening on the glassy surface of Loch Erribol. In this half-sylvan seclusion we rested for several days. Thence some eight hours of steaming brought us to the roadstead of Thurso. For several days we lay there while the yacht rocked uneasily, and most of our time was spent in expeditions on dry land. In some ways Thurso was ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... sitting under a tree, talking together with animation. It was his sister-in-law, Sylvia, with her little dog, and Woodville. Before they saw him, Sylvia got up and walked quickly towards the Row with the dog. Woodville looked after her, and then strolled slowly towards the bridge. How well the sylvan surroundings suited them! Sylvia was a wood nymph in a fashionable dress; Woodville, a faun in Bond Street clothes. Chetwode smiled to himself. Then for a moment he was surprised.... It seemed odd to see the secretary so far from his usual ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... perform? Spring claims the verse that with his influence glows, And shall be paid with what himself bestows. Thou, veil'd with op'ning foliage, lead'st the throng Of feather'd minstrels, Philomel! in song; Let us, in concert, to the season sing, Civic, and sylvan heralds of the spring! With notes triumphant spring's approach declare! To spring, ye Muses, annual tribute bear! 30 The Orient left and Aethiopia's plains The Sun now northward turns his golden reins, ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton

... "feathers." It is the sapin of the French-Canadians, the cho-kho-tung of the New York Indians, the balsam of the tenderfoot, the Christmas-tree of the little folk, and that particular Coniferae known by the dry-as-dust botanist as Abies. There is nothing in nature which has a wilder, more sylvan and charming perfume than the balsam, and the scout who has not slept in the woods on a balsam bed has a ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard

... and gaunt and somewhat wistful, rode slowly through the leafy lane, attended some little distance behind by Griggs the groom, who slumped in the saddle and thought only of the sylvan dell to curse it with poetic license. (Ever since Mr. Wrandall had been thrown by his horse in the Park a few years before his wife had insisted on having a groom handy in case he lost his seat again: hence Griggs.) It sometimes ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... for a moment at the old hound that was sniffing and whimpering in his master's ears, as if he could answer him. Poor Jonquil! he has shared his master's fortune fairly—the better and the worse; for years his humble comrade in the sylvan solitudes of Charrebourg, and here the solitary witness of his parting moment. Who can say with what more than human grief that dumb heart is swelling! He will not outlive his old friend many days—Jonquil is past the age ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... calmly die As waves on quiet shores when winds are low. Fields, lonely paths, the one small glimmering rill That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye, Under moist bay-leaves, clouds fantastical That float and change at the light breeze's will,— To me, thus lapped in sylvan luxury, Are more than death of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... centre of the open space within the hanging wall of the vines,—perfect sylvan temple,—there lay a mounded grave, covered from head to foot with articles he knew at once to be the gifts of Indians to some great chief gone to the shadowy hunting-grounds. Rich they were, these gifts, in ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... conservatory of nature big, black-faced monkeys, with tails four feet long, romp and revel through the trees, nimbly climb the creepers, and thoroughly enjoy the life amid the sylvan scenes about them. It is a curious sight to see these big anthropoids, almost as large as human beings, swing themselves deftly up among the festooned creepers at my approach—to see their queer, impish black faces peering cautiously out of their hiding-place, and to ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... running off the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells

... H.) 'Amid the Corn', a charming account of the denizens of the corn-fields, in his 'Sylvan Lyrics' (New York, ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... ruled were as free in their opinions and actions as the air they breathed. Legal or moral restraints were few; yet the gentle-minded people were enemies to violence or crime. They were widely scattered, with not a city or town and scarce a hamlet within their sylvan domain. The only roads were bridle paths from house to house, and these were indicated by notches cut in trees—"blazed roads." There was not a settled minister in the colony ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... storeys of darkness, behold, in the tower Of the heaven, the thunder! on stairways of cloudy commotion, Colossal of tread, like a giant, from echoing hour to hour Goes striding in rattling armor ... The Nymph, at her billow-roofed dormer Of foam; and the Sylvan—green-housed—at her window of leaves appears; —As a listening woman, who hears The approach of her lover, who comes to her arms in the night; And, loosening the loops of her locks, With eyes full of love and delight, From the couch of her ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein

... long after Ackronnion sang again in the sylvan palace of the Queen of the Woods, having first drunk all the tears in his agate bowl. And it was a gala night, and all the court were there and ambassadors from the lands of legend and myth, and even some from ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

... civilized society. In their own tribunals, under the pipal-tree or cotton-tree, imagination commonly did what the deities, who were supposed to preside, had the credit of doing; if the deponent told a lie, he believed that the deity who sat on the sylvan throne above him, and searched the heart of man, must know it; and from that moment he knew no rest—he was always in dread of his vengeance; if any accident happened to him, or to those dear to him, it was attributed to this offended ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... as to the brow. "They are probably the heathen fauns and satyrs and such,—one feels somehow that they are all men. Don't you, Jack? Well, when the elder gods were sent packing from Olympus there was naturally no employment left for these sylvan folk. So April took them into her service. Each year she sends them about every forest on her errands: she sends them to make up daffodil-cups, for instance, which I suppose is difficult, for evidently they make them out of sunshine; or to pencil the eyelids ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... played with it continually. She kept it always in trim by washing it in a fountain, and combing and smoothing its hair, and she amused herself by adorning it with wreaths, and garlands, and such other decorations as her sylvan resources ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... their sylvan cadence And sweet their simple art. The balladry of the greenwood tree Stirs memories ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams

... every one. Hans loved its quiet and sylvan beauty. It was just such a place as he would choose to ramble in, book in hand, and dream away many a pleasant hour. Hendrik liked it much, because he had already observed what he termed "extensive spoor" about the spot: in other ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... long in the midst of this fair scene—long have enjoyed its sylvan beauty; but the intellectual must over yield to the physical. I felt sensations of hunger, and soon the appetite began to distress me. Where was I to obtain relief from this pain—where obtain food? I could not ask my companion to guide me to the plantations, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... of these Bacchanalian festivals were those fabulous race of grotesque sylvan beings, previously referred to, known as the Satyrs. They were of a sturdy frame, in features they had broad snub noses, and appeared in rough skins of animals with large pointed ears, heavy knots on their foreheads, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... you next imitate the style of 'Tacitus,' pray add, 'de moribus Germanorum;'—this last was a piece of barbarous silence, and could only be taken from the Woods, and, as such, I attribute it entirely to your sylvan sequestration at Mayfield Cottage. You will find, on casting up accounts, that you are my debtor by several sheets and one epistle. I shall bring my action;—if you don't discharge, expect to hear from my attorney. I have forwarded your letter to Ruggiero; but don't make a postman of me again, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... terrestrial paradise. What shall I tell you of the birds and the brilliant colors of their plumage? What of their variety, their sweet songs, and their beauty? I dare not enlarge upon this theme, for I fear I should not be believed. How shall I enumerate the infinite variety of sylvan animals: lions, catamounts, panthers—though not like those of our regions—wolves, stags, and baboons of all kinds? We saw more wild animals—such as wild hogs, kids, deer, hares, and rabbits—than could ever have entered the ark of Noah; but we ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... thou art placed above me; thou art Lord; From thee I can, and must, submiss, endure Cheek or reproof, and glad to scape so quit. Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song; 480 What wonder, then, if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore. Permit me To hear thee when I come (since no man comes), And talk at least, though I despair to attain. Thy Father, who is holy, ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton

... sylvan occasions I awoke, not with a graceful start, like the story-book ladies, but with a grunt. Sis was digging me in the ribs with her toe. I looked up to see her standing over me, a foaming tumbler of something in her hand. I felt that it was eggy ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... parent stream, Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed, With sylvan Jed! thy ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... done something so interesting, Crow," she told him, as they went along towards Regent's Park, to which sylvan spot she had directed her chauffeur, to be more free to talk in peace to her companion. Some of her friends were capable of making scandals, even about the dear old Crow, ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn

... at our wry faces, declaring the potation was excellent; and he set us all an example by drinking six cups of this truly sylvan beverage. His eloquence failed in gaining a single convert; we could not believe it was only second to young hyson. To his assurance that to its other good qualities it united medicinal virtues, we replied that, like all other ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... challenging wink. He was proud of his bright brown eyes, and his dark hair and mustache, and smiling, handsome face, and his popularity among the class that he was pleased to denominate "gal critters." He piqued himself upon his several endowments as a hardy woodsman, his endurance, his sylvan craft, his pluck, and his luck and his accurate aim. The buck—all gray and antlered, for it was August—that hung across the horse, behind the saddle, gave token of this keen exactitude in the tiny wound at the base of the ear, where the rifle-ball had entered to ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... aspects and influences hitherto unobserved by the ripe civilization of Europe. The taste which had become cloyed with endless imitations of the feudal and mediaeval pictures of Scott turned with fresh delight to such original figures—so full of sylvan power and wildwood grace—as Natty Bumppo and Uncas. European readers, too, received these sketches with an unqualified, because an ignorant admiration. We, who had better knowledge, were more critical, and could see that the drawing was sometimes faulty, and the colors more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... she never carried out the suggestion of her affectionate admiration; and to those who knew and loved Mendelssohn (alas! the expressions are synonymous), the glorious wood itself, where he walked and mused and held converse with the spirit of Shakespeare, forms a solemn sylvan temple, forever consecrated to tender memories of his bright genius and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... round the circle of sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your way back by any distinguishing individuality of your own habitation. In the centre of the Circus is a space fenced in with iron railing, a small play-place and sylvan retreat for the children of the precinct, permeated by brief paths through the fresh English grass, and shadowed by various shrubbery; amid which, if you like, you may fancy yourself in a deep seclusion, though probably the mark of eye-shot from the windows of all the surrounding houses. But, in ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... thou glittering child of pride, That a poor villager inspires my strain; With thee let Pageantry and Power abide: The gentle Muses, haunt the sylvan reign; Where through wild groves at eve the lonely swain Enraptured roams, to gaze on Nature's charms: They hate the sensual and scorn the vain, The parasite their influence never warms, Nor him whose sordid soul the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... am glad that you have come, Arthur, from the dusty town; You must throw aside your cares, And relax your legal frown. Coke and Littleton, avaunt! You have ruled him through the day; In this quiet, sylvan haunt, Be ...
— Ballads • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... long summer afternoons when the nuns carried their sewing out to the orchard behind the house, or to the pine grove on the hill, where one could obtain such a lovely view of the river, Nita would flit about amongst them like a veritable woodland fairy. Her snatches of song and merry laughter made sylvan echoes ring and brought smiles to the faces of the simple women who watched her ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams

... and aged sire. Behold the coward and the brave, The haughty prince, the humble slave, Physician, lawyer, and divine, All make oblations at this shrine. Some enter boldly, some by stealth, And leave behind their fruitless wealth. For, while the bashful sylvan maid, As half-ashamed and half-afraid, Approaching finds it hard to part With that which dwelt so near her heart; The courtly dame, unmoved by fear, Profusely pours her offering here. A treasure here of learning lurks, Huge heaps of never-dying works; Labours of ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbours in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes; those recesses in which the gods partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... thought I would not care to wander here quite alone, and that a whisper might steal on my ear, sweeter than the note of the thrush and the nightingale; and that there might be a somebody without whom all that sylvan beauty would be a blank, but with whom any place would become a fairyland. And then I fell to wondering who that somebody would be; and I looked at Cousin John, and felt a little cross—which was very ungrateful; and a little disappointed—which was ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... wore a wrinkled face, That not a leaf e'er shed its sylvan grace, But, harden'd by their northern wind, Rude, deceitful, and unkind, Thy half-cloth'd sons their oaten cake denied, Victims at ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr

... of the throng into the quiet little lane, Mr. Rickman came forward, raising his hat. He had been waiting under the plane-tree for twenty minutes, and was now beguiling his sylvan solitude with a cigarette. Two years had worked a considerable change in his appearance. His face had grown graver and clearer cut. He had lost his hectic look and had more the air of a man of the world than of a young poet about town. To Flossie's admiration and delight he wore ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... eminent degree the charm of freshness and novelty, a charm becoming rarer every year in these globe-trotting days, when the ubiquitous tourist boasts that he has been everywhere and seen everything. Yet it may well be doubted whether even he has penetrated to the heart of the wild, romantic, sylvan regions of the Wallachian and Transylvanian Alps, which is the theatre of the exploits of that prince of robber chieftains, the mighty and mysterious Fatia Negra, and the home of those picturesque Roumanian peasants whom Jokai loves to ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... If strength be wanted for security, Mountains the guard, forbidding all approach With iron-pointed and uplifted gates, Thou wilt be welcome too in Aguilar, Impenetrable, marble-turreted, Surveying from aloft the limpid ford, The massive fane, the sylvan avenue; Whose hospitality I proved myself, A willing leader in no impious war When fame and freedom urged me; or mayst dwell In Reynosa's dry and thriftless dale, Unharvested beneath October moons, Among those frank and cordial villagers. They never saw us, and, poor simple souls! So little know ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor

... a woodman's,—the logger and pioneer have preceded him, and banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized nature for him. For a permanent residence, there can be no comparison between this and the wilderness. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen and rustics; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants salvages." What Thoreau loved, like all men of healthy minds, was the occasional experience of untamed wildness. "I love to see occasionally," ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carved dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100 Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. And ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot

... village had grown up on private grounds, conceded to the public year by year as the children and dependents of the founders increased. The Spragues were the founders, and they had never been anxious to alienate their patrimony. Acredale is not now the sylvan sanctuary of rural simplicity it was thirty years ago—before the war. The febrile tentacles of Warchester had not yet reached out to make its vernal recesses the court quarter for the "new rich." In Jack Sprague's young warrior days the village was three miles ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... it was converted into a cemetery, was one of the most attractive sylvan resorts in the environs of Concord. It was a sort of natural amphitheatre, a small oval plane, more than half surrounded by a low wooded ridge; a sheltered and sequestered spot, cool in summer, but also warm and sunny in spring, where the wild flowers bloomed ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... tigella[obs3]; spray &c. 51; leaf. flower, blossom, bine[obs3]; flowering plant; timber tree, fruit tree; pulse, legume. Adj. vegetable, vegetal, vegetive[obs3], vegitous|; herbaceous, herbal; botanic[obs3]; sylvan, silvan[obs3]; arborary[obs3], arboreous[obs3], arborescent[obs3], arborical|; woody, grassy; verdant, verdurous; floral, mossy; lignous[obs3], ligneous; wooden, leguminous; vosky[obs3], cespitose[obs3], turf-like, turfy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... as an artist. Barbizon is fatal to true emotion. It induces a fine sense of the beauty of sunsets, of diffused light in sylvan solitudes, of blues that are greens and browns that are reds. In a word, the study of nature inclines one toward truth, whereas art is essentially a gracious lie. That is why the Greeks were the greatest artists: because they were ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... transferred pastoral poetry into their own language: Sannazaro wrote Arcadia in prose and verse: Tasso and Guarini wrote Favole Boschareccie, or sylvan dramas; and all nations of Europe filled volumes with Thyrsis and Damon, and Thestylis ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... of this book significant to you, I must transport you to a sylvan nook, far from the city's boundaries, where an old stone cottage peeps forth from the thick foliage. Down through the maple avenue you will take your pleasant route, past the willow and alder clumps, and the ancient mill, that hangs its ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... of the masters, superior to the rest in point of knowledge, taught Latin; but he has left the school, without being succeeded by another instructor of the same learning.' 'At seven years of age,' writes the son of a Loyalist family, 'I was one of those who patronized Mrs Cranahan, who opened a Sylvan Seminary for the young idea in Adolphustown; from thence, I went to Jonathan Clark's, and then tried Thomas Morden, lastly William Faulkiner, a relative of the Hagermans. You may suppose that these graduations to Parnassus was [sic] carried into effect, because a large amount of ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... they were in Arcady, they were also in the Park. Hayden looked up the little lane; north and south marched an unending line of people. They were in Arcady, but deprived of its ancient privilege of sylvan and umbrageous solitude. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... of the strong man that he must needs become as water at some woman's touch and go dancing and babbling like a sylvan brook. Women were the light of life—he was willing enough to admit it, but one must be able to switch the light on and off at will. All these were reasons for not falling in love—they were not reasons for not marrying. And so, Amber being determined to marry ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... bank, by a flowing stream, beneath the sylvan shade of unfading foliage. Mr. PUNCH—who is free of all places, from Fleet Street to Parnassus—discovered, in Arcadian attire, attempting "numerous verse" on a subject of National importance—to wit, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various

... they contain. Here are materials in abundance for our garland; advance forward, and fear not the issue;"—and, gathering leaves from the boughs of trees of a species unknown to his new acquaintance, he twined them into a wreath, and placed the sylvan diadem on Carl's head. The instant that he felt the light pressure on his temples, all his fears vanished; and he followed his guide, conversing pleasantly through wide avenues and over broad glades of fresh turf, which seemed to be laid out like a royal chase, till they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various

... Unquestionably it had been fashionable for a generation; but the people who had established summer homes there were inhabitants of the large neighboring city which they forsook during five months in the year to enjoy the ocean breezes and sylvan scenery, for The Beaches afforded both. Well-to-do New England families of refinement and taste, they enjoyed in comfort, without ostentation, their picturesque surroundings. Their cottages were simple; but each had its charming outlook to sea and a sufficient number of more or less ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... as fair As sylvan nymphs who haunt the vale; As sylphs who dwell in purest air, As fays who skim ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... sylvan company, in lieu Of Pampinea with her lively peers, Sate Queen Titania with her pretty crew, All in their liveries quaint, with elfin gears, For she was gracious to my childish years, And made me free of her enchanted round; Wherefore this dreamy scene ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... so long as it is the highest circle, in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the ideal which was in Gluck's mind when, in the preface to "Alceste," he said, "I imagined that the overture ought to prepare the audience for the action of the piece, and serve as a kind of argument to it." The atmosphere of the opera is that which pervades the sylvan life of Germany—its actualities and its mysteries, the two elements having equal potency. Into the peacefulness of the woods the French horns ("Forest horns," the Germans call them) usher us at once with the hymn which they sing after a few ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... Sylvan, terraced, lacustrine; cottages by the score, gay in color, unique of design; people everywhere, chatty, erudite, artistic, processional; "round tables," "leagues," "societies" and "circles;" lectures, sermons, concerts and conferences—a school, a church, a university—all ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various

... than the inhabitants of Coon Hollow!—and Stuart's tent was the most comfortable of all. He had stretched a large canvas beneath some sheltering trees; and filling up the opening at each end with a picturesque wicker-work of evergreens, ensconced himself there in his sylvan lodge, like some Robin Hood, or ranger of the greenwood in old times. The woodland haunt and open air life seemed, at first, to charm the bold cavalier; nothing seemed wanting to his happiness, lost here in the forest: but soon the freezing airs "demoralized" even the stout cavalryman, and ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... were green, And winds were soft and low, To lie amid some sylvan scene. Where, the long drooping boughs between, Shadows dark and sunlight sheen Alternate come ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... pheasant suddenly bursting upon the wing—the artificial stream, the brook taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into the glassy lake, with the yellow leaf sleeping upon its bright waters, and occasionally a rustic temple or sylvan statue grown green and dark with age, give an air of sanctity and picturesque beauty to English scenery that is unknown in the United States. The very labourer with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground-plot before the door, the little ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown

... mass might topple down. There stood a grove Which from the earliest time no hand of man Had dared to violate; hidden from the sun (27) Its chill recesses; matted boughs entwined Prisoned the air within. No sylvan nymphs Here found a home, nor Pan, but savage rites And barbarous worship, altars horrible On massive stones upreared; sacred with blood Of men was every tree. If faith be given To ancient myth, no fowl has ever dared To rest upon those branches, and no beast Has made his lair beneath: ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... hares were drawn from woods to share his home caresses, Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses; The very world, by God's constraint, from falsehood's ways removing, Its women and its men became, beside him, true ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... hut, together with the botanical studies and the formation of the herbarium, suggested the plan of the "Sylvan Year," and thereby lent additional interest to these pursuits, though at that time his main work was the prosecution of "The Intellectual Life," now that he had finished the correction of the handbook ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... rods further, under the cool vault filled with woodland spicing, he came upon it. In its summer harlequin dress of scarlet and green, with hanging bells of poly-tinted berries, like some personified sylvan Folly, it seemed a fitting symbol of Susy's childish masquerade of passion. Its bizarre beauty, so opposed to the sober gravity of the sedate pines and hemlocks, made it an unmistakable landmark. Here he dismounted ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... Amid the sylvan solitude Of unshorn grass and waving wood And waters glancing bright and fast, A softened voice was in her ear, Sweet as those lulling sounds and fine The hunter lifts his head to hear, Now far and faint, now full and near— The murmur of the wood swept pine. A manly ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... when you looked up you found the boughs of the tree to be laden with strange fruit: palm-branches elaborately plaited, and beautiful models of canoes, finished and rigged to the least detail. The whole had the appearance of a midsummer and sylvan Christmas-tree al fresco. Yet we were already well enough acquainted in the Gilberts to recognise it, at the first sight, for a piece of wizardry, or, as they say in the group, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... an uninterrupted scene of sylvan pleasures, I spent the time until the 27th day of July following, when my brother, to my great felicity, met me according to appointment, at our old camp. Shortly after we left this place, not thinking it safe to stay there any longer, and proceeded to Cumberland River, ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley

... walls and dingy ways of trade, From high society's luxurious stately homes, From lounging places by the park or promenade, From rural dwellings canopied in sylvan shade, ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... when Fan had decided to remain in the house with her—rejoicing, no doubt, at her daughter's defeat. All this seemed hard to endure uncomplainingly; but she was strong and proud, and before quitting her sylvan retreat she resolved to submit quietly and with a good grace to the new position of affairs, though brought about by such unworthy means. She would make no petulant complaints nor be sullen, nor drop any spiteful ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... space so small that it never has an opportunity to stretch its wings in flight, nor can it ever bathe in the bright sunshine or view the blue skies above it. The whispering of the winds through the sylvan shades is lost to the captive forever. Is it strange that the nature of this wild free ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... every human being becomes such a helpless compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... creek turned behind a clump of dogwood, a patch of sunlight lay on it, shooting down through the misty twilight of broad oak trees, and the surface of the water dimpled and glinted and laughed and flirted at him, before it slipped away into leaf-dimmed sylvan solitudes, in a way that was not to be longer resisted. He gave one more glance of distaste at the white hot road ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... passing under the bridge which he had viewed with so much terror, the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher, rose eminences and peaks, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... every thing that came in the way of his convenience, whether long skirts, hanging sleeves, royal mantles, or boots with folding tops. He was (for his time) a great reader, a "huge lover of the woods" and of all sylvan sports, fond of travelling, a very small eater, a generous almsgiver, a faithful friend—and a good hater. The model example which he set before him as a statesman was that of his grandfather, Henry First. The Empress Maud, his mother, was above all things Norman, and ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... triumphs of the artists, the wit of the bel esprit—all that ingenuity could devise or money could buy was brought into service. It was the life that Watteau painted, with its quaint and grotesque fancies, its sylvan divinities, and its sighing lovers wandering in endless masquerade, or whispering tender nothings on banks of soft verdure, amid the rustle of leaves, the sparkle of fountains, the glitter of lights, and the perfume ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... 1839 the treaty was again brought forward, signed, and promulgated. Thereupon all the States of Europe recognized the Kingdom of Belgium. The plenipotentiaries who then signed the treaty were Palmerston for Great Britain, Sylvan van de Weyer for Belgium, Senfft for Austria, H. Sebastiani for France, Buelow for Prussia, and Pozzo di ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? what maidens loath? What ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron

... sylvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee, Mixed with the music of the hunting rolled, But her delight is all in archery, And nought of ruth and pity wotteth she More than the hounds that follow on the flight; ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... pursuers, as wary as they were brave and untiring, with the double object of concealing the inequality of their numbers, which were but four, and securing the advantages that a choice of positions in all sylvan contests especially affords, had instantly fallen back to a line of hastily-selected coverts, stretching across the gorge, and had now become wholly invisible to their advancing foes, who soon paused in turn, and, shielding themselves ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... inhaling the ozone-laden air, looking through the loop-holes of recent experiences in crossing the great wonderland to the west; its strange intermingling of forest-clad hills and grassy valleys; its barren, rocky mountains and dreary, desolate plains; its vast, snowy solitudes and its sunny, sylvan nooks; the no less strange intermingling of people; the wandering red-skin with his pathetic history; the feverishly hopeful prospector, toiling and searching for precious metals locked in the eternal hills; and the wild and free cow-boy who, mounted on his wiry bronco, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... winking tail-lights at night. On the dark green background of the distant heights an eruption of new red bungalows threatened to spread and destroy the beauty of Charleswood at no remote date. But at present the sylvan charm of the spot was unspoiled. Its meadows and fields seemed to lie happily unconscious of the contagion ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... war against them “to the knife.” Many is the buzzard I have seen nailed up with the pole-cats and other vermin in the woods at Woodhall. But they are now seen no more, and a handsome and comparatively harmless ornament of our sylvan scenery is ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... mounds of stone and gravel. It was so feeble and inconsistent a culmination to the beautiful scenery they had passed through, so hopeless and imbecile a conclusion to the preparation of that long picturesque journey, with its glimpses of sylvan and pastoral glades and canyons, that, as the coach swept down the last incline, and the remorseless monotony of the dead level spread out before them, furrowed by ditches and indented by pits, under cover of shielding their cheeks from the impalpable dust that rose ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte

... trees, the ruby tints lingering on the boulder brought down by the glaciers long ago; the little bats that weave their way beneath the darkening arches of the leafy roof, while the fire-flies are lighting their lamps in the nave of the sylvan sanctuary. When the afterglow has faded and the blur of night has come, give me the old, childlike faith and assurance that tomorrow's sun shall rise again, and that by-and-by, in the same sweet way, there shall break ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... blew their gales after, the bearded grasses that shook in the wind, all gave me their secret sigh; all the sweet land around, the distant hill, the distant shore, said, "Redeem me from my chains!" I came across a sylvan statue, some faun nestled in the forest: the rains had stained, frosts cracked, suns blistered it; but what of those? A vine covered with thorns and stemmed with cords had wreathed about it and bound it closely in serpent-coils. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... charm That can make the fleeting time Of thy sylvan, faint alarm Suit itself to human rhyme: And my yearning rhythmic word, Does ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... not all alone: around him grew A sylvan tribe of children of the chase, Whose young, unwaken'd world was ever new, Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view A frown on Nature's or on human face; The free-born forest ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... childhood among old forests of England. The verdure and the shade from the Syrian sun were delightful, with the glades and vistas, as well as the amusing alternations often occurring of stooping to the horse's neck in passing below the venerable branches that stretched across the roadway. Those sylvan scenes abound in game, and are known ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... after the ground in the woods was completely thawed.] It requires many days of mild weather to raise the temperature of soil in this condition, and of the air in contact with it, to that of the earth in the forests of the same climatic region. Flora is already plaiting her sylvan wreath before the corn-flowers which are to deck the garland of Ceres have waked from their winter's sleep; and it is probably not a popular error to believe that, where man has substituted his artificial crops for the spontaneous harvest of nature, spring delays her coming. [Footnote: ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... somewhere behind the arbor, but the vines grew so thick she could not get a glimpse of the speaker. Celia went on with her work, feeling at first a little annoyed that her quiet should be disturbed, yet the suggestion of sylvan joy in the words grew upon her. The Forest of Arden—where they fleeted the time carelessly—what a rest for tired spirits ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard

... shall I live a ministrant of gods and slave to Cybebe? I a Maenad, I a part of me, I a sterile trunk! Must I range o'er the snow-clad spots of verdurous Ida, and wear out my life 'neath lofty Phrygian peaks, where stay the sylvan-seeking stag and woodland-wandering boar? Now, now, I grieve the deed I've done; now, now, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... were avenues of trees then as now. Instead of the ornamental water ran a long canal, populous with ducks, which joined a pond called—no one knows why—Rosamund's Pond. This pond was a favorite trysting-place for happy lovers—"the sylvan deities and rural {66} powers of the place, sacred and inviolable to love, often heard lovers' vows repeated by its streams and echoes"—and a convenient water for unhappy lovers to drown themselves in, if we ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... together with the hemlocks and other trees undesirable in kind or in some way defective, so that the neighboring trees appear to have closed over the gaps make by the removal of the larger and better ones, maintaining the general continuity of the forest and leaving no sign on the sylvan sea, at least ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... on the sturdy woods,—roaring amongst the pliant branches, and entwining around the knarled trunks, uprooting some as though in sport to show its giant strength. And the cascade which formerly leaped forth from sylvan nooks where the wild flowers half hid its source, and bathed themselves in the ascending mist,—now roaring down in sullied swollen force, bearing along the wrecks of summer beauties,—tumbling and hissing ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley

... appearance to forbid. The motive and the movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he. Yet now he was, debarred from going to meet her. She might have an impulse to bathe her feet. Her name was Diana . . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith



Words linked to "Sylvan" :   wooded, spirit



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