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More "Fen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wenches and merry men From over the hill and field and fen, Great store is here, the drifts between Of myrtle red-berried, and mistletoe green! Ho, Phyllis and Kate and bonny Nell Come hither, and buffet the goodmen well, An they gather not for hall and hearth, Fair bays ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... harsh and insulting answer: "He would yield no passage through his dominions to the Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a reluctant heart Theodoric gave the signal for ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... in its tail, and perceived that it was a secret warning to beware of treachery. Alarmed, scenting a trap, and fain to possess his desire in greater safety, he caught up the woman in his arms and dragged her off to a distant and impenetrable fen. Moreover, when they had lain together, he conjured her earnestly to disclose the matter to none, and the promise of silence was accorded as heartily as it was asked. For both of them had been under the same fostering in their childhood; and this early rearing in common had brought Amleth ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... which the flock may be filled; God's breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath—the word which he calls spiritual,—is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition. This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last, and fatalest sign of it is that "puffing ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the fen lands—the Campagna that so greatly needs the magic and glamour of the Roman sunshine, the vault of the blue sky above, and the sound of larks singing to adorn it. It seemed a desolate and dreary waste, wind-swept, and shivering under the lash of the rain on ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... a Tadpole and I was a Fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide, We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen— My heart was rife with the joy of life, For ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... the water, and survey its swaying reeds and poising fish. The house was near the centre of the town; yet from its back windows it overlooked a long green stretch of rough pasture-land, now a common, and once a fen, which came like a long green finger straight into the very heart of the town. There was a great sluice a few yards away, through which the river poured into a wide reach of stream, so that the air was always musical with the sound of falling water, the murmur ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... connected with this ancient fabric, receiving education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... dead,—the men Who perished in fever swamp and fen, The slowly-starved of the prison-pen; And, marching beside the others, Came the dusky martyrs of Pillow's fight, With limbs enfranchised and bearing bright; I thought—perhaps 'twas the pale moonlight— They looked as white as ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... earth we live And weigh the various qualities of men, Seeing how most are fugitive Or fitful gifts at best, of now and then— Wind-favored corpse-lights, daughters of the fen— The more we feel the high, stern-featured beauty Of plain devotedness to duty, Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, But finding amplest recompense For life's ungarlanded expense In work done ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... experience—such respectively make up the substance of the monologues of Caponsacchi, of Pompilia, and of the Pope. For the valuation, however, of this loftier testimony we require a sense of the level ground, even if it be the fen-country. A perception of the heights must be given by exhibiting the plain. If we were carried up in the air and heard these voices how should we know for certain that we had not become inhabitants of some Cloudcuckootown? And the plain is where we ordinarily live ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice- President and others will take effective means to protect the Republic. LI ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... hec'tic dit'ty clum'sy can'ter helm'et gid'dy dul'cet mar'ry fen'nel fil'ly fun'nel ral'ly ken'nel sil'ly gul'ly nap'kin bel'fry liv'id buck'et hap'py ed'dy lim'it gus'set pan'try en'try lim'ber sul'len ram'mer en'vy riv'et sum'mon mam'mon test'y lin'en ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... dark", he is "far from home", he trusts to the light shining through the darkness to keep his feet from stumbling; he does not trouble himself about what lies far before him, he attends only to his footsteps one by one. He feels he can pass safely over the "moor", the "fen", the "crag", and the "torrent", by trusting to the guidance of the light. With the dawning of the day will come the reunion with his loved ones from ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... synonym for starvation? If we accuse the Eremites of old of wasting their lives in unprofitable wildernesses, what shall we say to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the rogue, sharply, "a pullet in the pen is worth a hundred in the fen. Come, we will deal kindly with thee: give us fifty, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... proceeding Macbeth, more suo, continued to mutter like a man in a troubled dream, now humming a bar of the tune, now drawling out a phrase from the words, "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone"—this, I believe, he repeated several times, lighting his pipe in the intervals and spitting out of the door. Then he went on more articulately: "Rum go, ain't it—me singing that hymn ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... precipitous sides rising to a height of 300 or even 400 feet, must have assumed its present proportions principally during the glacial period when it formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... pretty mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I don't know ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... the spot very lately, but, according to the best of my recollection, it has not now any feature in keeping with the mythological character of the fiend of the moor and fen. The neighbouring district of down and common land would not be an inappropriate habitat for such a personage. It has few trees of any pretension to age, and is still covered in great part with a dark and scanty ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... partner: so he wed. From swamps, and ponds, and marshy bogs, Up rose the wailings of the frogs. "What shall we do, should he have progeny?" Said they to Destiny; 'One sun we scarcely can endure, And half-a-dozen, we are sure, Will dry the very sea. Adieu to marsh and fen! Our race will perish then, Or be obliged to fix Their dwelling in the Styx!' For such an humble animal, The frog, I take it, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... into Po he falls. Not far his course hath run, when a wide flat It finds, which overstretchmg as a marsh It covers, pestilent in summer oft. Hence journeying, the savage maiden saw 'Midst of the fen a territory waste And naked of inhabitants. To shun All human converse, here she with her slaves Plying her arts remain'd, and liv'd, and left Her body tenantless. Thenceforth the tribes, Who round were scatter'd, gath'ring ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... with the general statements in the book. They occur with reference only to my own idiosyncrasy. I was much surprised when I found first how individual it was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece of unwholesome reedy fen to ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... goes to {con}s and tends to hang out with other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly 'fen', but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the stuff occasionally but ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our o'er-hoary ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the road from London, and having two drives of about a mile each leading up to the abbey. The dukes are liberal patrons of agriculture, and their annual "sheep-shearing" used to be one of the great festivals of this part of England. They have also aided in the work of draining the Fen country, which extends into Bedfordshire, and which has reclaimed a vast domain of the best farm-land, stretching northward ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last. But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Tiberius sitting at his meat, In a farm-house they call Spelunca, sited By the sea-side, among the Fundane hills, Within a natural cave; part of the grot, About the entry, fen, and overwhelm'd Some of the waiters; others ran away: Only Sejanus with his knees, hands, face, O'erhanging Caesar, did oppose himself To the remaining ruins, and was found In that so labouring posture by the soldiers That came to succour him. With which adventure, He ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... once, from lowly fen, Soared up in stately flight; But, striking 'gainst the gilded vane, He fell in sorry plight: And as, with wounded wing, he lay Down in the marsh below, He thus addressed the glittering thing, The cause of ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... a flower in garden fair, Her beauty charms the sicht o' men; And I 'm a weed upon the wolde, For nane reck how I fare or fen'. She blooms in beild o' castle wa', I bide the blast o' povertie; My covert looks are treasures stown— Sae how culd my ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and gazed after them. The goblins and the satyrs peeped out from beneath the hills, and flitted to and fro in the fields, waving blue, red, and green torches, like the glowing sparks in burning paper. Over woodland and heath, flood and fen, they flew on, till they reached the wild moor, over which they hovered in broad circles. The Christian priest held the cross aloft, and it glittered like gold, while from his lips sounded pious prayers. Beautiful Helga's voice joined with ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... anchor, and buildings along the flat shore, marked Port of Spain, destined hereafter to stand, not on the seaside, but, like Lynn in Norfolk, and other fen-land towns, in the midst of some of the richest reclaimed alluvial ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... entries of useless woods, and woods without pannage, which to some extent were considered identical. In some of the woods there were patches of cultivated ground, as the entries show, where the tenant had cleared the dense undergrowth and had his corn land and his meadows. Even the fen lands were of value, for their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... kudu and eland unhunted recline By the skirts of gray forest o'erhung with wild vine; Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild ass ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... smell is rather sickly to most tastes—is now found on the Thames near Dorchester, and between Kingston and Teddington among other places, though it was once thought only to flourish on the Norfolk and Fen rivers. It is not a sedge at all, but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the little finger, represents the "lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the burr reed, among the prettiest of all the upright ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... herbage with facility. I can't find anything clear about its country, except that it 'occasionally visits' Sweden in summer, and Smyrna in winter, and that it has been found in Corfu, Sicily, Crete,—Whittlesea Mere,—and Yarley Fen;—in marshes always, wherever it is; (nothing said of its behavior on ice,) and not generally found farther north than Cumberland. Its food is rather nasty—water-slugs and the like,—but it is itself as fat as an ortolan, "almost melts in the hand." (Gould.) ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... brazen-throated clarion blows Across the Pathan's reedy fen, And the high steeps of Indian snows Shake to the tread of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... he replied promptly, referring to his documents. "Set down as cook—I'm told most of those coasting steamers in that part of the world carry Chinamen as cooks. Chuh Fen—that's the name. And why it's significant to me, when all the rest aren't, is this—during the course of my inquiries at Lloyds, I learnt that about three years ago a certain Chinaman, calling himself Chuh Fen, dropped in at Lloyds and was very anxious to know if the steamer Elizabeth ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... groun' vor grass to teaeke The pleaece that bore the bremble breaeke, An' drain'd the fen, where water spread, A-lyen dead, a beaene to men; An' built the mill, where still the wheel Do grind our meal, below the hill; An' turn'd the bridge, wi' arch a-spread, Below a road, vor us ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... scatter fire, Like Jason, when he sought the fleece of gold, Or change from man to beast three years entire, As King Nebuchadnezzar did of old; Or else have times as shameful and as bad As Trojan folk for ravished Helen had; Or gulfed with Proserpine and Tantalus Let hell's deep fen devour him dolorous, With worse to bear than Job's worst sufferance, Bound in his prison-maze with Daedalus, Who could wish evil to the state ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... guidance. Does our preaching answer these instinctive expectations, these deep longings, these inborn hopes in those to whom we are sent? Do we truly put before them that high life their spirits yearn to live? Do we show them the path "o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent," to the heights that ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... what is called "civilisation" than some of the secluded valleys lying between the Radnorshire hills. Here Nature still holds her own, and spreads her pure and simple charms before us. Large tracts of moor and rushy fen are interspersed with craggy hills, rising one behind another in lovely shades of purple and blue; and far from the haunts of men, or at all events of town men, many acres of uncultivated land are ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... dreams are dreams. It matters little to him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... through long ages by birds that have had to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus gradually equipped for food-getting through long ages of practice. But of course no particular bird is thus modified by circumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the characteristics of the heron; it would simply die for lack of food. It is rather that certain minute variations take place, for unknown reasons, in every species; and the bird which happened to be hatched out in a fenland ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance. His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaint ill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye And blister you ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... stream in front of him were perhaps fen feet high and sloped sharply to the water's edge, fairly free from tangle. Presently, McTavish localized the sound of bells as coming from the opposite bank, and expected to watch the equipage, preceded or ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... of which county it forms the northern portion, with a jurisdiction partially separate; within its bounds there are, besides the city of Ely, several towns and villages, as Wisbech, March, Chatteris, &c. and the former great waste of marsh and fen has become, by means of drainage, a fertile corn-growing district of great importance. Ely is believed to have taken its name from Elig in the Saxon tongue, signifying a willow; or from Elge in the Latin of Bede the historian, from the abundance of eels produced in the surrounding waters. ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... though be, 'twas borne on me that land had lived of old, And men had crept and slain and slept where now they toiled for gold; Through jungles dim the mammoth grim had sought the oozy fen, And on his track, all bent of back, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... valley, as far as the eye could see, even to the faint blue distance, in the haze of which the glaciers and clouds and mountain tops seemed to commingle, troops of armed men could be seen pouring down from gorge and glen, through wood and furze and fen. On the fiord, too, the same activity and concentration prevailed, though not quite to the same extent. Constantly there swept round the promontories to the north and south, boat after boat, and ship after ship, until the bay close below Ulfstede was crowded with war-craft of every size—their ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... shaking fen Fix'd me, in dark tempestuous night; There never trod the foot of men, There flock'd the fowl in wint'ry flight; There danced the moor's deceitful light Above the pool where sedges grow; And when the morning-sun shone bright, It shone upon ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... ago I found myself beside the lower waters of the Cam, in flat pastures, full of ancient thorn-trees just bursting into bloom. I gained the towing-path, which led me out gradually into the heart of the fen; the river ran, or rather moved, a sapphire streak, between its high green flood-banks; the wide spaces between the embanked path and the stream were full of juicy herbage, great tracts of white cow-parsley, with here and ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... its poison on the ground Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool, But brought no taint and threatened ill to none. Far off adown the mountain's craggy side From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding Like sport of giant children, and the rocks Whereon it smote re-echoed innocently. Then in a pause of silence Lucifer Struck ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at St. James's the other day more people were invited than there was room for, and some half-dozen were forced to sit at a side table. He said to Lord Brownlow, 'Well, when you are flooded (he thinks Lincolnshire is all fen) you will come to us at Windsor.' To the Freemasons he was rather good. The Duke of Sussex wanted him to receive their address in a solemn audience, which he refused, and when they did come he said, 'Gentlemen, if my love for you equalled my ignorance of everything concerning you, it would ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... zu schwefliger Sure[4] verbrannt (SO{2}SO{2}) oder es[5] werden in geeigneten Rostfen natrlich vorkommende Metallsulfide, z. B. Schwefelkies (FeS{2}), Zinkblende (ZnS), Bleiglanz (PbS) in der Glhhitze bei Luftzutritt oxydiert, wobei sich der Schwefel der Sulfide ganz oder teilweise in schwefligsaures ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... unknown name. A Winkelried it was, Who slew the dragon in the fen at Weiler, And lost his life ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... past Helorus' marish speeds the bark, Where fat and fruitful shines the meadowy lea. We graze the cliffs and jutting rocks, that mark Pachynus. Camarina's fen we see, Fixt there for ever by the fates' decree; Then Gela's town (the river gave the name) And Gela's plains, far-stretching from the sea, And distant towers and lofty walls proclaim Steep Acragas, once known for generous ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... from his cloak Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... authorities declare to have no beauty and little interest for the traveller to-day. For St Wilfrid's sake, I put aside these admonishments, and one morning set out upon the lonely road to Pagham, across a country as flat as a fen, of old, as they say, a forest, the forest of Mainwood, and still in spite of drainage and cultivation very bleak and lonely with marshes here and there which are still the haunt ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... was not born; and the Monks of Ely had not yet (by about a hundred years) begun that singing, (Without note or comment, in the old, BOOK OF ELY date before the Conquest) is preserved this stave;—giving picture, if we consider it, of the Fen Country all a lake (as it was for half the year, till drained, six centuries after), with Ely Monastery rising like an island in the distance; and the music of its nones or vespers sounding soft and far over the solitude, eight hundred ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... appear an angel peering out of Heaven at our mortal antics. Indeed, there was always something more than human in her loveliness, though, to be frank, it savored less of chilling paradisial perfection than of a vision of some great-eyed queen of faery, such as those whose feet glide unwetted over our fen-waters when they roam o' nights in search of unwary travellers. Lady Adeliza was a fair beauty; that is, her eyes were of the color of opals, and her complexion as the first rose of spring, blushing at her haste to snare men's hearts with beauty; and her loosened hair rippled in such ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... battle gave; Came Susiskanes, warrior wild, And Pegastagon, Egypt's child: Thee, brave Arsames! from afar Did holy Memphis launch to war; And Ariomardus, high in fame, From Thebes the immemorial came, And oarsmen skilled from Nilus' fen, A countless crowd of warlike men: And next, the dainty Lydians went— Soft rulers of a continent— Mitragathes and Arcteus bold In twin command their ranks controlled, And Sardis town, that teems with gold, Sent forth its squadrons ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... the argument of 'Beowulf' is as follows:—Hrothgar, King of the Gar-Danes, has built a splendid hall, called Heorot. This is the scene of royal festivity until a monster from the fen, Grendel, breaks into it by night and devours thirty of the king's thanes. From that time the hall is desolate, for no one can cope with Grendel, and Hrothgar is in despair. Beowulf, the noble hero of the Geats, in Sweden, hears of the terrible calamity, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten of rain, ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... was his face set homeward this same hour, Why lingers he? Ill news, 't is said, flies fast, And good news creeps; then his must needs be good That lets the tortoise pass him on the road. Ride, Dawkins, ride! by flashing tarn and fen And haunted hollow! Look not where in chains On Hounslow heath the malefactor hangs, A lasting terror! Give thy roan jade spur, And spare her not! All Devon waits for thee, Thou, for the moment, most important man! A sevennight later, when the rider sent To Town drew ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man never ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... notwithstanding the illfame of Batavia. Even there, the inhabitants have at length learned to prefer fields to swamps, and fresh air to the vapour of ditches; for the greater portion have either gone into the interior, or live in suburbs extending to considerable distances. In fact, the original fen-loving Hollander has passed away, and another generation has sprung up, which prefers health and long life even to dollars and dyspepsia. Yet, what is Java, to the islands almost within her view? To Sumatra, with her one hundred and sixty thousand square miles, and Borneo, with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... she drops down, she lies flat at your feet— Take her then!" Well, I knew it—what fools are men! Take the bee by her horns, will your honey prove sweet? Sweet is grass—will you pasture your cows in a fen? Oh, if ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was becoming lighter; the sky grew faintly luminous and the mist from the stagnant fen curled up ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... a considerable amount of ground, but the work was not heavy. The church was one of the fine edifices for which the fen country is so famous, and the vicarage was a comfortable house, with large and very beautiful gardens and paddock, and with outlying fields. The people were farmers and laborers, with a sprinkling of shopkeepers; the only "society" was that of the neighboring clergy, Tory and prim ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... long thy pow'r has blessed me, sure it still Will lead me on; O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... Fulvia," he replied, "I am but a sorry epicure, and I love the boar better in his reedy fen, or his wild thicket on the Umbrian hills, with his eye glaring red in rage, and his tusks white with foam, than girt with condiments and spices upon a ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... down the garden walk. The path sloped gently from the back of the house to the water side, from which it was parted by a low wooden fence. After pacing backward and forward slowly for some little time, he stopped at the lower extremity of the garden, and, leaning on the fen ce, looked down listlessly at the smooth flow of ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... filed down on one side, and greased with hog's lard to repel the wet." These rough-and-ready bone skates were the kind first adopted by the English; for Fitzstephen, in his description of the amusements of the Londoners in his day (time of Henry the Second), tells us that "when that great fen that washes Moorfields at the north wall of the city is frozen over, great companies of young men go to sport upon the ice. Some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; some, better practiced ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... me speak, for 'tis to him I owe That here I stand, and breath the common air, And 'tis my pride to tell it to the world. One luckless day as in the eager chace My Courser wildly bore me from the rest, A monst'rous Leopard from a bosky fen Rush'd forth, and foaming lash'd the ground, And fiercely ey'd me as his destin'd quarry. My jav'lin swift I threw, but o'er his head It erring pass'd, and harmless in the air Spent all its force; my falchin then I seiz'd, Advancing to attack my ireful foe, When furiously the savage ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... England. All his early poetry is suffused with tints, sombre or bright, and breathes of sounds that recall the landscape of the Lincolnshire in whose sunniest spot he was born, but in near neighborhood to "the level waste, the rounding gray" of "the dark fen," and within sight and sound of the "sandy tracts" and "the ocean roaring into cataracts." Later, we find in some of the poems that have made for themselves a place in the heart of all English-speaking people, vivid pictures in words or phrases, recalling ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... as theirs for the shedding, In the veins of Cavaliers was its heading. You have no such stately men In your abolition den, To march through foe and fen, nothing dreading. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... brother-men, in the weird of the fen, With God's creatures I bide, 'mid the birds that I ken; Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea Brings a message of peace from the ocean ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... remembered clear When matters both more mighty and more near, Are waxing dim to us. I, who have seen So many lands, and midst such marvels been, Clearer than these abodes of outland men, Can see above the green and unburnt fen The little houses of an English town, Cross-timbered, thatched with fen-reeds coarse and brown, And high o'er these, three gables, great and fair, That slender rods of columns do upbear Over the minster doors, and ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... move. So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life, till one began to fashion evils, that field of hell. Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever {1e} mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Ill fared his feud, {1f} and far ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... I found by thee unawed, On that thrice hallow'd eve abroad. When goblins haunt from flood and fen, The steps of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead of the night's ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... heir of Linne O'er hill and holt and moor and fen, Untill he came to the lonesome lodge, That stud so lowe in a ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... their ditches, swining it stark in their styes; Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams; Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams; Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen, Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men. Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands; Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands. Master, I've done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west, And the long, ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... and weirs, and all the lands that thereabout lye, that are of my kingdom, freely, so that no man have there any ingress, but the abbot and the monks. This is the gift. From Medhamsted to Northborough; and so to the place that is called Foleys; and so all the fen, right to Ashdike; and from Ashdike to the place called Fethermouth; and so in a right line ten miles long to Ugdike; and so to Ragwell; and from Ragwell five miles to the main river that goeth to Elm and to Wisbeach; and so about three miles to Trokenholt; and from Trokenholt ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... particular reason. Many voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did not understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if it existed, was merely ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... day in the river Nene, near Ely Minster, by the sweet and solemn music of the monastery choir that floated out to them over the tranquil water. The monks of Ely, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of King Canute, tell us that he had a strong affection for the fen country and for their church, and gave the following story in that connection. It is ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... there, as in a dream, Which holds some boding fear of wrong, By fog-bound fen and sluggard stream I dragged my leaden steps along. My blood ran ice; I turned and spied A shrouded figure ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the Sheriff's men And drived them down bydene. ROBIN started to that Knight, And cut a two his bond; And took him in his hand a bow, And bade him by him stand. "Leave thy horse thee behind, And learn for to run! Thou shalt with me to green wood Through mire, moss, and fen! Thou shalt with me to green wood Without any leasing, Till that I have got us grace ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... having died, as before truthfully stated, first prophesying that his son would grow up a ne'er-do-well, this son took his new-found wife up to the Fen Country to live with his mother and sister. That he would be Lord Protector of the Farm seems quite the proper thing to say, but that he was dutiful, modest, teachable, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. 797 MILTON: Comus, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... ce sont mlle diables dchains.—Ah! Madame de Blacy, je crains bien que le Fils de l'Homme ne soit la porte; que la venue d'Elie ne soit proche, et que nous ne touchions au rgne de l'Anti-christ. Tous les jours, quand je me lve, je regarde par ma fentre, si la grande prostitue de Babylone ne se promne point dj dans les rues avec sa grande coupe la main et s'il ne se fait aucun des signes prdits ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... were there with their tenants; the Bishop of Winchester, Harold's uncle, not only brought the tenants of the church lands, but he himself with twelve of his monks had put on armour under their monkish robes. The Abbot of Peterborough headed a contingent from the Fen Country; the men of London under the sheriff of the Mid Saxons were there, and prepared to die in defence of the royal standard, which it was the special privilege of London to guard. In the Abbey of Westminster, where Harold had received ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... Falerii Rushed on the Roman Three; And Lausulus of Urgo, The rover of the sea; And Aruns of Volsinium, Who slew the great wild boar, The great wild boar that had his den Amidst the reeds of Cosa's fen, And wasted fields and slaughtered men Along ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... dart your blinding flames Into her scornfull eyes: Infect her Beauty, You Fen-suck'd Fogges, drawne by the powrfull Sunne, To ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Esens. Was it connected with Bensersiel too, or the country between? I searched the ordnance map again, standing up to get a better light and less jolting. There was the road northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through dots and chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter fields, so the reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught my eye, and that was a stream running to Bensersiel. I knew it at once for the muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, issuing through the sluice or siel from which Bensersiel ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Feign sxajnigi. Feint sxajxnigo. Felicity felicxeco. Fell faligi. Fellow, a good karulo. Fellow-citizen samurbano. Felly (felloe) radrondo. Felon krimulo. Felt felto. Female virino, ino. Feminine virinseksa, ina. Feminism feminismo, inismo. Fen marcxejo. Fence skermi. Fencing skermo. Fence palisaro. Fend defendi. Fender fajrgardo. Fennel fenkolo. Ferment fermenti. Ferment (disturbance) tumulto. Fern filiko. Ferocious kruelega. Ferocity kruelego, kruelegeco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Axholme, in the midst of a long stretch of fen country bounded by four rivers, and for a great part under water, Epworth was at that epoch dreariness itself. The Rev. Samuel's spirits must have sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... edge of the Fen Country, where the Conqueror found the toughest opposition to his completed sovereignty in England, the patch of raised ground just outside modern Cambridge was a suitable spot for the erection of a castle, and from ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... regiment was headed by a column of fen men from the dreary marches which stretch round Athelney. These men, in their sad and sordid dwellings, had retained the same free and bold spirit which had made them in past days the last resource of the good King Alfred and the protectors of the Western shires from the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their master's confidence or not is not certain, but just before midnight they plunged into a narrow, miry road that traversed wastes and low coppices; the plash of the horses' feet showed the tract to be marshy and full of pools. Her ladyship looked out across the dreary fen and exclaimed,— ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... joined heartily in the festivities of Christmastide, and atoned for his father's ravages by costly gifts to the religious houses. And his love for monks broke out in the song which he composed as he listened to their chant at Ely: "Merrily sang the monks in Ely when Cnut King rowed by" across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their Abbey. "Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear we ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Captain of the Yeoman of the Guard, at which time he was also made vice Chamberlain. But Mary's death in 1558 closed his public career, and he retired to Oxburgh, which, hemmed in on the south side by miles of fen country, was in those days for all practical purposes entirely cut off from the world. It was probably during a temporary absence, and when he was purposing to entertain guests in his beautiful Norfolk home, that ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... foot by all kinds of men; Gracing the mountain or hid in the fen; Never adorning the brow of the fair; Seldom deemed worthy some corner to share In the bouquets that are cast in the way Princely feet tread on reception's proud day; The glory of roses do not attain; Beautiful mosses, ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... dew as e'er my mother brush'd With raven's feather from unwholesome fen, Drop on you both: a south-west blow on ye, And blister ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... of these enclosures, which began to change the England of open fields into the country we know of hedgerows and winding roads, great part of the land was in a wild and uncultivated state of fen, heath, and wood, the latter sometimes growing right up to the walls of the towns.[197] An unbroken series of woods and fens stretched right across England from Lincoln to the Mersey, and northwards from the Mersey to the Solway and the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... from a big brown jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco, "I'll tell it to you if you like: you are going to live in the house, and you may as well know it. I am sure, Captain Niel, that it will go no further. You see I was born in England, yes, and well-born too. I come from Cambridgeshire—from the fat fen-land down round Ely. My father was a clergyman. Well, he wasn't rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape; and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in the old colony and this country ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... as men who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And what ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song— O you envy the blessed dead that ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... in the forest, And never a snake in the fen, Or ravening bird, starvation stirred, Has hunted its prey like men. For hunger, and fear, and passion Alone drive beasts to slay, But wonderful man, the crown of the plan, Tortures, ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... conversation I got up, and thanking the kind woman departed. I soon left the moors behind me and continued walking till I came to a few houses on the margin of a meadow or fen in a valley through which the way trended to the east. They were almost overshadowed by an enormous mountain which rose beyond the fen on the south. Seeing a house which bore a sign, and at the door of ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... from Trajan to Valens, are found everywhere below ground, while above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms, like crows, upon the fertile ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... ask you.... Isn't the reason, Fen ... isn't the reason she will not come here to pour ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... by, Upon the plow hanging. His coat was of a clout That cary[8] was called; His hood was full of holes, And his hair out; With his knopped[9] shoon Clouted full thick; His toes totedun[10] out As he the land treaded; His hosen overhung his hockshins On every side, All beslomered in fen[11] As he the plow followed. Two mittens as meter Made all of clouts, The fingers were for-werd[12] And full of fen hanged. This wight wallowed in the fen Almost to the ankle. Four rotheren[13] him before That feeble were worthy, Men might reckon each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... the river as far as the edge of the sea to get mussels and lobsters to sell. And out there on the cold lonely marshes we would see wild geese flying, and curlews and redshanks and many other kinds of seabirds that live among the samfire and the long grass of the great salt fen. And as we crept up the river in the evening, when the tide had turned, we would see the lights on Kingsbridge twinkle in the dusk, reminding us of tea-time ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... Most of them have very fair hair, often gold, and fair rosy cheeks. They seem a very Saxon type. I have been wondering whether they are descendents of the Danes and Saxons, who took refuge in the fens in Norman times, a memory of Hereward the Wake. The fen men have always been a separate race; they must have very little Norman blood in their veins. They have the Saxon stolidity also. I am very glad I am not in a town battalion like the Northumberlands and such regiments. They are not nearly so easy to control or so well disciplined, and I am pleased ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... bear, The tiger with velvet feet, The lion, crept to the light Whining for bullock meat. We fed them and stroked their necks . . . They took their way to the fen Where they hunted or hid all night; No enemies, they, ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as sunshine, winter's ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... recommend," he said, "that you break up into parties of fifteens and twenties, and scatter widely over the Fen country, and yet be near enough to each other to hear the sound of the horn. Each party must learn every foot of the ground and water in the neighbourhood round them. In that way you will be able to assemble when you hear the signal announcing the ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... lightnings, dart your blinding flames Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, You fen-suck'd fogs, drawn by the powerful sun, To fall and ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the porter, and there had been no response. If they did not stop at Effry there would be no halt for forty minutes. Now was his time. He waited a little till they had got up the speed. The line here ran through miles and miles of fen country, more or less drained by dykes and rivers, but still wild and desolate enough. Over this great flat the storm was sweeping furiously—even drowning in its turmoil the noise ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... nothing but beer, and smoke disgusting short pipes; and when we established the Coverley Club in Trinity, they set up an opposition, and called themselves the Navvies. And they used to make piratical expeditions down to Lynn in eight oars, to attack bargemen, and fen girls, and shoot ducks, and sleep under turf-stacks, and come home when they had drank all the public-house taps dry. I remember the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... were four in number, close bordering the water, embracing about an acre each, and situated in a low fen, draining several valleys. The excavated soil was thrown up in dykes, made tight by being beaten all over, while in a soft state, with the heavy, flat ends of Palm stalks. Lving side by side, by three connecting trenches, these ponds could ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... seen Caernarvon's towers, And well he knew the spire of Sarum; And he had been where Lincoln bell Flings o'er the fen that ponderous knell— ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... a crystal stream Musing I stray'd, As 'neath the summer beam Lightly it play'd, Winding by field and fen, Mountain and meadow, then Stealing through wood and glen, Soft'ning ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a deeper calm Descends upon thee, quiet Mere, and then There is a sound of bells, a far off psalm From gray church towers, that swims across the fen; And the light sigh where grass and waters meet, Is thy meek welcome to ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... moor, and quaking fen, Or depth of labyrinthine glen; Or into trackless forest set With trees, whose lofty umbrage met; World-wearied Men withdrew of yore; (Penance their trust, and prayer their store;) And in the wilderness were bound To such apartments as they found; Or with a new ambition raised; That God might ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... many of the people, belonging to the said parish, being no less than six or seven miles distant from their own kirk; for which and other reasons the heritors and others procured a disjunction, and called the new parish Fen wick or new Kilmarnock. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... unequal tasks to run, Thus Nature disciplines her son: Meeter, she says, for me to stray, And waste the solitary day, In plucking from yon fen the reed, And watch it floating down the Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Marking its cadence rise and fail, As from the field, beneath her pail, She trips it down the uneven dale: Meeter for me, by yonder cairn, The ancient shepherd's tale ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... a lion, rushing from his den, Amidst the plain of some wide-water'd fen, (Where numerous oxen, as at ease they feed, At large expatiate o'er the ranker mead) Leaps on the herds before the herdsman's eyes; The trembling herdsman far to distance flies; Some lordly bull (the rest dispersed and fled) He singles out; ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... state. The arable land and pasture land were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. [62] The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but heath, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden and his Flemings were not allowed to accomplish their work of reclamation without incurring ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... dizhmal shwamp he spheeds— His path is rugged and sore Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds And many a fen where the serpent feeds, And birrud niver flew before— And niver will ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... bequeath my farm of West Woldland to my eldest nephew, Grimes Goodenough; my farm of Holland Fen to my dear nephew, John Wright, and my farm of Clover-hill to my youngest ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Hamilton's men Were hungry for the fray, And it was a son of the bog and fen Would guide ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... the Wisbech parliamentary division of Cambridgeshire, England, 25-1/2 m. N. by W. of Cambridge by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 4711. It lies in the midst of the flat Fen country. The church of St Peter is principally Decorated; and there are fragments of a Benedictine convent founded in the 10th century and rebuilt after fire in the first half of the 14th. The town has breweries, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... is foolish who comes here alone in the dark shade of night: fire is flickering, howes are opening, field and fen are aflame," and flees into the woods, but Hervoer is dauntless and goes on alone. She reaches the howes, and calls on the sons ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... Benacus then no more They call the name, but Mincius, till at last Reaching Governo into Po he falls. Not far his course hath run, when a wide flat It finds, which overstretchmg as a marsh It covers, pestilent in summer oft. Hence journeying, the savage maiden saw 'Midst of the fen a territory waste And naked of inhabitants. To shun All human converse, here she with her slaves Plying her arts remain'd, and liv'd, and left Her body tenantless. Thenceforth the tribes, Who round were scatter'd, gath'ring to that ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Master Pearson? Do you think you could arouse the people in the fen-country? You might raise and drill an army in those wilds without the Government knowing any thing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... constitutes the City of London. The London of the Britons before the Romans landed, is supposed to have been little other than 'a collection of huts set down on a dry spot in the midst of the marshes;' a forest nearly bounded this spot, at no great distance from the Thames; and a lake or fen existed, outside London, at or near the site now occupied by Finsbury Square. The area of London, at this early period, is supposed to have been bounded by—to use their modern designation—Tower Hill on the east, Dowgate Hill on the west, Lombard and Fenchurch ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... journey, I find that my choice lies between well-printed books which I have no wish to read, and well-written books which I could not read without permanent injury to my eyesight. The keeper of the bookstall, seeing me gaze vaguely along his shelves, suggests that I should take 'Fen Country Fanny' or else 'The Track of Blood' and have done with it. Not wishing to hurt his feelings, I refuse these works on the plea that I have read them. Whereon he, divining despite me that I am a superior ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... years found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot too, as well as the turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up to London in droves from the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from the fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as also from all the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet droves with a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove. They begin to drive them generally in August, by which time the ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... board of a privateer which was employed by the Jacobites as a regular packet boat between France and England. This vessel conveyed him to a desolate spot in Romney Marsh. About half a mile from the landing place a smuggler named Hunt lived on a dreary and unwholesome fen where he had no neighbours but a few rude shepherds. His dwelling was singularly well situated for a contraband traffic in French wares. Cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty packhorses ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour, League after grassy league from Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen. Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men, Like a tall ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... be, 'twas borne on me that land had lived of old, And men had crept and slain and slept where now they toiled for gold; Through jungles dim the mammoth grim had sought the oozy fen, And on his track, all bent of back, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... "Moor and fen." While these words seem new and unusual to us, we must remember that in England they are as common as the terms marsh ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... work were in many respects a remarkable class. The "railway navvies," as they are called, were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of hard work. Some of the best came from the fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment. These old practitioners formed a nucleus of skilled manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense undertakings of the period. Their expertness ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... with Bensersiel too, or the country between? I searched the ordnance map again, standing up to get a better light and less jolting. There was the road northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through dots and chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter fields, so the reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught my eye, and that was a stream running to Bensersiel. I knew it at once for the muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... in the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... the fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen. We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth our while Spinning our ropes of sand; And laugh, and cry, and live, and die At the waft ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... when a deeper calm Descends upon thee, quiet Mere, and then There is a sound of bells, a far off psalm From gray church towers, that swims across the fen; And the light sigh where grass and waters meet, Is thy meek welcome to the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like companies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... thee joy, or bid thee blind Thine eyes with tears,—that thou hast not resign'd The passionate fire and freshness of thy youth: For as the current of thy life shall flow, Gilded by shine of sun or shadow-stain'd, Through flow'ry valley or unwholesome fen, Thrice blessed in thy joy, or in thy woe Thrice cursed of thy race,—thou art ordain'd To share beyond the lot ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the interior, too, how many hundreds of miles of roads now intersect regions not long ago deemed impracticable!—firm on the fen, in safety flung across the chasm—and winding smoothly amidst shatterings of rocks, round the huge mountain bases, and down the glens once felt as if interminable, now travelled almost with the speed of the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... horse was loose he 'gan to race Unto the wild mares wandering in the fen, With WEHEE! WHINNY! right through thick and thin! This Miller then returned; no word he said, But doth his work, and with these clerks he played, Till that their corn was well and fairly ground. And when the meal is sacked and safely bound John goeth out, and found ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore; Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... moon's wan crescent scarcely gleams, Ghost-like she fades in morning beams; Hie hence each peevish imp and fay, That scare the pilgrim on his way:— Quench, kelpy! quench, in bog and fen, Thy torch that cheats benighted men; Thy dance is o'er, thy reign is done, For Benyieglo ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... hearths of their cabins, The fields of their corn, Unwarned and unweaponed, The victims were torn,— By the whirlwind of murder Swooped up and swept on To the low, reedy fen-lands, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... emptying the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence always in view—for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen—wellnigh two hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it—one might be the pioneer of progress. What could ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... Mahkahdaeneneh, n. a black man Mahkahdaequa, n. a black woman Mawezhah, adv. anciently, long ago Metegwob, n. a bow Moskin, n. full Mahdwawa, n. a sound Menoodahchin, adv. enough Menekaun, n. seed Menequang, v. to drink Mahskoosen, n. a marsh, a bog, a fen Mamangwah, n. a butterfly Mahskeeg, n. a swamp Mahmahjenoowin, n. miracle Mahnahtaneseweneneh, n. a shepherd Mahskahwezewin, strength Mahjetong, v. to begin Mahkuk, n. a pail, or box Mahkahkoosug, n. a barrel Megahzooweneneh, n. a soldier, a man of war, or a fighting man Mahmahkahdezing, ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... Fen District in 1815, which the 'Westminster Gazette' calls 'a powerful drama of human passion'; and the 'National Observer' ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... two ago I found myself beside the lower waters of the Cam, in flat pastures, full of ancient thorn-trees just bursting into bloom. I gained the towing-path, which led me out gradually into the heart of the fen; the river ran, or rather moved, a sapphire streak, between its high green flood-banks; the wide spaces between the embanked path and the stream were full of juicy herbage, great tracts of white cow-parsley, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... English riddles borrow themes from native folk-songs and saga; in their hands inanimate objects become endowed with life and personality; the powers of nature become objects of worship such as they were in olden times; they describe the scenery of their own country, the fen, the river, and the sea, the horror of the untrodden forest, sun and moon engaged in perpetual pursuit of each other, the nightingale and the swan, the plow guided by the 'gray-haired enemy of the wood,' the bull breaking up clods left unturned by the plow, the falcon, the arm-companion of ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... 1. Today Inspector General Chang Hsun entered the city with his troops and actually restored the monarchy. He stopped traffic and sent Liang Ting-fen and others to my place to persuade me. Yuan-hung refused in firm language and swore that he would not recognize such a step. It is his hope that the Vice- President and others will take effective means to protect the Republic. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of an ancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. One hears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little blue sphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu." ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... what an ugly place Plaistow is. The land isn't actual fen now, but it was once. And it's quite flat. And there is a great dike, twenty feet wide, oozing through it just oozing, you know; and lots of little dikes, at right angles with the big one. And the fields are all square. And there ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... of the swain drowned in a fen, and the grief of his widow, possessing every charm which simplicity and tenderness can bestow, and give to that Ode claims to admiration which, if admitted, have been hitherto ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... that wast prophetess and bride, When truth and thou trod under time and chance? What latter light of what new hope shall guide Out of the snares of hell thy feet, O France? What heel shall bruise these heads that hiss and glide, What wind blow out these fen-born fires that dance Before thee to thy death? No light, no life, no breath, From thy dead eyes and lips shall take the trance, Till on that deadliest crime Reddening the feet of time Who treads through blood and passes, time shall glance Pardon, and Italy ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... who through a fen Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer, Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us, And ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake; Thou know'st it well,—nor fen, nor sedge, Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge; Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink At once upon the level brink; And just a trace of silver sand Marks where the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song— O you envy the blessed dead that can ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... service for homely characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in the pages of Scott for a more charming ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... as beauteous, Nature, is thy face,' Exclaim'd Orlando: 'all that grows has grace: All are appropriate—bog, and marsh, and fen, Are only poor to undiscerning men; Here may the nice and curious eye explore How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor, Here the rare moss in secret shade is found, Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground; Beauties are these that from the view retire, But well ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms, like crows, upon the fertile ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian seaboard. Once it serpentined as far ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... small subsidiary tells round about it, the sites of small isolated buildings or villages connected with the central settlement. Originally the settlements were built upon natural rises of the ground which stood up as islands in the fen-country. ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... the Tanais, which has its source in the northern parts of the Riphean mountains[5], which are near the Sarmatic[6] ocean; and this river then runs directly south, on the west side of Alexander's temples, to the nation of the Russians[7], where it runs into the fen called Maeotis, and thence it issues eastwards with a great stream, near the town called Theodosia, into the Euxine. Then becoming narrow for a considerable track, it passes by Constantinople, and thence into the Wendel sea, or Mediterranean. The south-west end of Europe is in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Winchester, Harold's uncle, not only brought the tenants of the church lands, but he himself with twelve of his monks had put on armour under their monkish robes. The Abbot of Peterborough headed a contingent from the Fen Country; the men of London under the sheriff of the Mid Saxons were there, and prepared to die in defence of the royal standard, which it was the special privilege of London to guard. In the Abbey of Westminster, where ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... in hidden glens From the secret heart of the mountains, Where the red fox hath its dens And the gods their crystal fountains; Up runnel and leaping cataract, Boulder and ledge, I climbed and tracked, Till I came to the top of the world and the fen That drinks up the clouds and cisterns the rain, And down through the floors of the deep morass The procreant woodland essences drain— The thunder's home, where the eagles scream And the centaurs pass; But, where it was born, I lost ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... I dipp'd in the romantic, A hundred thousand have run frantic— There's not a hideous highland spot, (Long fallowed to the core by Scott)— No rill, through rack and thistle dribbling, But has its deadlier crop of scribbling. Each fen, and flat, and flood, and fell, Gives birth to verses by the ell— There Wordsworth, for his muse's sallies, Claims all the ponds, the lanes, and alleys— There Coleridge swears none else shall tune ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World SciFi ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... over the stile I passed round the village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows I heard now and then a sharp, swift rustling in the sedges as some water-rat or otter, disturbed by my presence, slipped away into hiding. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... starfish lying on a flat shore at low tide. Southward, westward, and northward from the head or centre of the clump (which is where the Cathedral stands) it throws out arms every way, and these arms have each short tentacles of their own. In between the spurs runs the even fen like a calm sea, and on the crest of the spurs, radiating also from Ely, run the roads. Long ago there was but one road of these that linked up the Isle with the rest of England. It was the road from the south, and there the Romans had ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... which is low down in the fen country, he found a sullen girl. She met him at the bridge of the Galland fen and her grey eyes flashed fire. She was a tall maid, very fair to look upon, and the blue tunic which she wore over her russet gown was cunningly embroidered. Embroidered too with ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... the relationship of Sussex to this great event. All the chapters in Mr. Freeman's great history do not impress the imagination so strongly as this one fact, that William the Conqueror has always been Duke William to the Sussex folk. He was Duke William to the fen folk, too. They fought for their belief and were compelled to accept his kingship. The Sussex folk fought, too, and they handed down their conception of the great fight ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... on this earth we live And weigh the various Qualities of men, Seeing how most are fugitive, Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then, Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty Of plain devotedness to duty, 290 Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, But finding amplest recompense For life's ungarlanded expense In work done squarely and unwasted days. For this we honor him, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... protruded, his forehead receded obliquely; his ears formed one solid piece with head and neck—a horrible man. The other, Manteca, was so much human refuse; his eyes were almost hidden, his look sullen; his wiry straight hair fen over his ears, forehead and neck; his scrofulous lips hung eternally agape. Once more, Luis ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... otherwise have ascribed to the influence of mountain scenery. Such causes, however, affect the lowland as much as the highland religious character in all districts far from cities; but they do not produce the same effects. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life, or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr's passion. Among the fair ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... coarse-cut Boer tobacco, "I'll tell it to you if you like: you are going to live in the house, and you may as well know it. I am sure, Captain Niel, that it will go no further. You see I was born in England, yes, and well-born too. I come from Cambridgeshire—from the fat fen-land down round Ely. My father was a clergyman. Well, he wasn't rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape; and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... his cloak Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast into the cruel flame. Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the black ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... mountains? I should answer, I should tell you, 10 "From the forests and the prairies, From the great lakes of the Northland, From the land of the Ojibways, From the land of the Dacotahs, From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands, 15 Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, Feeds among the reeds and rushes. I repeat them as I heard them From the lips of Nawadaha, The musician, the sweet singer." 20 Should you ask where Nawadaha Found these songs so wild and wayward, Found these legends ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... mess!" said Osbert. "There's Orme of the Fen run off, because I gave him a scolding for his impudence: and it is his turn to watch to-night. I have not a minute to go after him; I don't ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... west wind off the prairie; Ho, north wind off the pine; Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped, Like cups of living wine; Ho, mighty river rolling; Ho, fallow, field and fen; By a thousand voices nature calls, To fire the hearts ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... in each blade of grass, Each towering peak and mountain pass; Each forest, river, lake and fen Reveals the God of worlds and men; His works of wisdom prove to me, A wise, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... with a jurisdiction partially separate; within its bounds there are, besides the city of Ely, several towns and villages, as Wisbech, March, Chatteris, &c. and the former great waste of marsh and fen has become, by means of drainage, a fertile corn-growing district of great importance. Ely is believed to have taken its name from Elig in the Saxon tongue, signifying a willow; or from Elge in the Latin of Bede the historian, from ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... fancied she waved her hand to him; but being in no humour to join the cavalcade, he remained seated, and the riders soon passed out of sight. As he sat there sombre thoughts came to him, stealing up like exhalations from the fen. He saw his life stretched out before him, full of broken purposes and ineffectual effort. Public affairs were in so perplexed a case that consistent action seemed impossible to either party, and their chief efforts were bent toward directing the choice of a regent. It was this, rather than ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds, And man never ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and full of memories, what can be said of this vast ruined forest of stone pines with its mystery of mere and fen, its coolness and shadow, its astonishing silence? Only this I think, that if once you find it, nothing else in Ravenna will seem half so precious as this green wood. You will love it always and for its own sake more than anything else ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... sons. Keen sportsmen these, who dearly love to walk for hours in pursuit of game in the autumn, on the chance of bagging an occasional brace of partridges or a wild pheasant (for everything here is wild), or, in winter, when lake and fen are frostbound, by the river and its withybeds after snipe and wildfowl—for the Cotswold stream has ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut was softened by ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen, From grey tombstones are gathered the bones that once were women and men, And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon, For cockcrow limits our holiday - the dead ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... farther conversation I got up, and thanking the kind woman departed. I soon left the moors behind me and continued walking till I came to a few houses on the margin of a meadow or fen in a valley through which the way trended to the east. They were almost overshadowed by an enormous mountain which rose beyond the fen on the south. Seeing a house which bore a sign, and at the door of which a horse ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... and snakes. You may see these serpents basking on the surface among thickets of the flowering rush, or coiled about the lily leaves and flowers—lithe monsters, slippery and speckled, the tyrants of the fen. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... blood as theirs for the shedding, In the veins of Cavaliers was its heading. You have no such stately men In your abolition den, To march through foe and fen, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... see the good woman's eyes fill with tears: but she wiped them away, and took advantage of the additional persuasion they gave to her natural whine to say, "If, Sir, you know of any young gentleman who likes fen-shooting, and wants a nice, pretty, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... went Panther and the Raven, Searched the forest and the marshes, Searched for leagues along the lake-shore, But they found no trace or tidings, Found no track in marsh or meadow, Found no trail in fen or forest, On the shore-sand found no footprints. Many days they sought and found not. Then to Panther spoke the Raven: "She is in the Land of Spirits— Surely in the Land of Spirits. High at midnight ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... the price of laud, Why should we seek, since Byfield is at hand; For works on draining either bog or fen, In Marsh and Moore we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... roots, and instead of drinking with eager delight the beauties of Virgil have been culling and drying his phrases for future use."—"I fear my good genius, who was wont to visit me with nightly visions in woods and brakes and by the river's marge, is now dying of a fen ague, and I shall thus probably emerge from my retreat not a hair-brained son of imagination, but a sedate black-lettered book worm, with a head like ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... and on till she came to a fen, and there she gathered a lot of rushes and made them into a kind of a sort of a cloak with a hood, to cover her from head to foot, and to hide her fine clothes. And then she went on and on till she came ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to run, Thus Nature disciplines her son: Meeter, she says, for me to stray, And waste the solitary day, In plucking from yon fen the reed, And watch it floating down the Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Marking its cadence rise and fail, As from the field, beneath her pail, She trips it down the uneven dale: Meeter for me, by yonder cairn, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... argument of 'Beowulf' is as follows:—Hrothgar, King of the Gar-Danes, has built a splendid hall, called Heorot. This is the scene of royal festivity until a monster from the fen, Grendel, breaks into it by night and devours thirty of the king's thanes. From that time the hall is desolate, for no one can cope with Grendel, and Hrothgar is in despair. Beowulf, the noble hero of the Geats, in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... called "civilisation" than some of the secluded valleys lying between the Radnorshire hills. Here Nature still holds her own, and spreads her pure and simple charms before us. Large tracts of moor and rushy fen are interspersed with craggy hills, rising one behind another in lovely shades of purple and blue; and far from the haunts of men, or at all events of town men, many acres of uncultivated land are still tenanted by the wild mountain pony and the picturesque gipsy. On the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... being accidentally included with the sawdust in which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens at Cambridge, whence it spread rapidly through the congenial dykes and sluices of the fen country, and so into the entire navigable network of the Midland counties. But there are other aliens of older settlement amongst us, aliens of American origin which nevertheless arrived in Britain, in all probability, long before Columbus ever set foot ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and yell'd the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... (105) Brought thee a loss as life precious, as heavenly breath. Loss of a bridegroom dear; such whirling passion in eddies Suck'd thee adown, so drew sheer to a sudden abyss, 110 Deep as Graian abyss near Pheneos o'er Cyllene, Strainer of ooze impure milk'd from a watery fen; (110) Hewn, so stories avouch, in a mountain's kernel; an hero Hew'd it, falsely declar'd Amphytrionian, he, When those monster birds near grim Stymphalus his arrow 115 Smote to the death; such task bade him a dastardly lord. So that another God might ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... The villages of Spain that Borrow visited could even at that time compare favourably morally and educationally, with the villages of his own county of Norfolk at the same period. The morals of the agricultural labourers of the English fen country eighty years ago were a scandal, and the peasantry read nothing; more than half of them could not read. They had not, moreover, the humanising passion for song and dance that Andalusia knew. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has condescended to tell the tale of their doughty deeds, is a question not ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... I went, when the ice passed out of the fjord, in Jarl Agard's ships. I was made drink-boy and sword-bearer to him, and in lieu of other name was called Ragnar Lodbrog. Agard's country was neighbour to the Frisians, and a sad, flat country of fog and fen it was. I was with him for three years, to his death, always at his back, whether hunting swamp wolves or drinking in the great hall where Elgiva, his young wife, often sat among her women. I was with Agard in south foray with his ships ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... is presumed, knows where Shelford Fen is, and that it is famous for rearing geese. A luckless wight, who had the misfortune to be plucked at his examination for the degree of B.A., when the Rev. T. Shelford was his examiner, made the following ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... characteristics have been evolved through long ages by birds that have had to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus gradually equipped for food-getting through long ages of practice. But of course no particular bird is thus modified by circumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the characteristics of the heron; it would simply die for lack of food. It is rather that certain minute variations take place, for unknown reasons, in every species; and the bird which happened to be hatched out in a fenland with a rather sharper ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... wades through the fen when it goes in search of prey, and why shouldst thou not stoop to pick up gold out of the dust? I know how thou couldst speak with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... star Coils and shatters at her heels; Peals the horn exulting, peals Plaintive, is it near or far. Huntress, arrowy to pursue, In and out of woody glen, Under cliffs that tear the blue, Over torrent, over fen, She and forest, where she skims Feathery, darken and relume: Those are her white-lightning limbs Cleaving loads of leafy gloom. Mountains hear her and call back, Shrewd with night: a frosty wail Distant: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by pining Fancy view'd, Dissolve. Above the sparkling flood When Phoebus rears his awful brow, From lengthening lawn and valley low The troops of fen-born mists retire. Along the plain The joyous swain Eyes the gay villages again, And gold-illumined spire; While, on the billowy ether borne, Floats the loose lay's jovial measure; And light along the fairy Pleasure, Her green robes glittering ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... Alfred, the king had the remains of Harold exhumed and thrown into a fen. This a-fensive act showed what a great big broad nature Hardicanute had,—also the kind of timber used in making ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
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