"Brier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mo. 15th, 1838. I want to give up every thing, every thought, every affection, in short, my whole self, to my offered Saviour. Then would His kingdom come, and His will be done. Instead of the thorn would come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier the myrtle-tree. How precious, how holy, how peaceful, that kingdom! Oh! if I may yet hope; if mercy is left, I beseech Thee, hear and behold me, and bring me "out of the miry clay, and set my ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... and, finding him in such an exalted state, said: "Praised be the God of excellence and glory, that your high fortune has aided you and prosperity been your guide, so that a rose has issued from the brier, and the thorn has been extracted from your foot, and you have arrived at this dignity. Of a truth, joy succeeds sorrow; the bud does sometimes blossom and sometimes wither; the tree is sometimes naked and sometimes clothed." He replied: "O brother, condole with me, for this ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... white geese waddled slowly across the green; some brown speckled hens were feeding under the horse-trough; a goat browsing by the roadside looked up, quite startled, as I passed him, and butted slowly at me in a reflective manner. There was a scent of sweet-brier, of tall perfumy lilies and spicy carnations from the gardens. I looked at the windows of the houses I passed, but the blinds were drawn, and the bees and the flowers were the only waking things there. The village seemed asleep, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of Stamford. Lulu was acutely curious regarding it; she almost smelled it, with that quivering sharp-pointed nose of hers that could tell for hours afterward whether Father had been smoking "those nasty, undignified little cigarettes—why don't you smoke the handsome brier pipe that Harris gave you?" She brightly commented that the letter was from Boston. But Father didn't follow her lead. He defensively tucked the letter in his inside coat pocket and trotted up-stairs to ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... little seaport town in which they resided, for the professed purpose of primrose gathering, but in reality to enjoy the pure air of the first summer-like evening of a season, which had been unusually cold and backward. Their way lay through bowery lanes scented with sweet brier and hawthorn, and every now and then glorious were the views of the beautiful ocean, which lay calmly reposing and smiling beneath the setting sun. "How unlike that stormy, dark, and noisy sea of but a week ago!" so said the friends ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... Rose, she was as fresh and innocent and dewy, in the hot whirl and glitter and glare of New York, as a waving spray of sweet-brier, brought in fresh with all ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... bleak stony deserts, Through dense scrub and tangled brier, They passed with hearts undaunted, And with steps that would not tire; Through morass and flooding waters, Undismayed by toil and fears, At their chief's command, with salient ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... is the wind, for the summer is waning, Who 's for the road? Sun-flecked and soft, where the dead leaves are raining, Who 's for the road? Knapsack and alpenstock press hand and shoulder, Prick of the brier and roll of the boulder; This be your lot till the season grow older; Who 's for ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... this my rural seat,[4] Kept at my charge to keep my garden neat; To train the woodbine and to crop the yew— In th' art of gard'ning equall'd p'rhaps by few. O! could I cultivate my barren soul, As thou this garden canst so well control; Pluck up each brier and thorn, by frequent toil, And clear the mind as thou ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... six hundred miles of barren hills, swampy kevirs, brier-covered wastes, and salty deserts, with here and there some kanot-fed oases. To the south lay the lifeless desert of Luth, the "Persian Sahara," the humidity of which is the lowest yet recorded on the face of the globe, and compared with which "the Gobi of China and the Kizil-Kum ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... of resentment or of injured feelings in his face as he lit the gas in his own room. On the contrary, he grinned cheerfully at his reflection in the glass, and, pulling open his top drawer, took from the remote corner an unmistakably sophisticated brier and a package of Yale Mixture, and proceeded to light up. He grinned again as his teeth clamped on the stem, and jerked it into the corner of his mouth with a practiced twist of his tongue. Then he picked up a small and well-thumbed book lying half hidden ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... forehead, brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook—he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of water covered with poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank deeply, gratefully. Then he drew a whetstone from ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... Apple seed and apple thorn; Wire, brier, limber-lock, Five geese in a flock, Sit and sing by a ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... catch glimpses of its curious roof, full of quaint corners and projections, and the old-fashioned stone mansion said to be modelled after the cocked hat of Peter the Headstrong. Its low stories were full of nooks and angles. There were roses and hollyhocks like rows of sentinels, and sweet brier clambering about. The little girl thought of it many a time afterward, when it had become much more famous, as Sunnyside. Indeed, she was to sit on the old piazza overlooking the river and listen to the pleasant voice that had charmed so many people, ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... a little patch of garden ground with a brier hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, where there are beautiful meadows and tall, flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern-filled ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... the country. My master himself was a capital sportsman, and I was as proud of him as he was of me. When I had become sufficiently perfect to be his companion, we used to range together untired "over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier," he doing his part and I mine, and bringing home between us such quantities of game as no one else could boast. This was my real business, but it was no less my pleasure. I entered into it thoroughly. ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... the West Gallery the first picture that meets the eye is Mr. Watts's Love and Death, a large painting, representing a marble doorway, all overgrown with white-starred jasmine and sweet brier-rose. Death, a giant form, veiled in grey draperies, is passing in with inevitable and mysterious power, breaking through all the flowers. One foot is already on the threshold, and one relentless hand is extended, while Love, a beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow-coloured wings, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... began, with greater zeal than before. He was hungry now; his nose grew keen as a brier for every trail. A faint smell stopped him, so faint that the keenest-nosed dog or fox would have passed without turning, the smell of a brooding partridge on her eggs. There she was, among the roots of a pine, sitting close and blending perfectly ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... They chose The Bonnie Brier Bush, by Mr. Ian Maclaren—a work too popular to excite suspicion; and arranged the method of secret correspondence with great rapidity. Logan then rushed up to Merton's room, hastily communicated the scheme to him, and overcame his objections, nay, awoke in him, by his report of Mr. Macrae's ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... man! Them two don' git along, not the way we-all say it. Mr. Peth an' de cap'n? Huh! Them two git along smooth as a houn' dawg in a brier patch." ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... the moment, threw the blanket around her, and twined some of the berries amongst her own jet black hair. She had scarcely finished this employment, when she heard quick approaching footsteps, and, glancing round, saw De Valette pushing heedlessly through brier and bush, and Hero trotting gravely at his side. A loud bark from the dog next foreboded a discovery; but both he and his master had halted on the summit of the bank, apparently to survey the occupant of the boat. Lucie's curiosity was aroused to know if he would pass on without recognizing ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... Charlotte, busy over a sturdy stock of eglantine. Guy, little changed in these two years,—not much taller, and more agile than robust,—was lopping vigorously with his great pruning-knife, Amabel nursing a bundle of drooping rose branches, Charlotte, her bonnet in a garland of wild sweet-brier, holding the matting and continually getting entangled in ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... loaded muskets and bowie knives, with a determination to kill or capture me and my family. I started to run with my little daughter in my arms, but stumbled and fell down and scratched the arm of little Frances with a brier, so that it bled very much; but the dear child never cried, for she seemed to know the danger to which we ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... brier and weed, Near to the nest of his little dame, Over the mountain side or mead, Robert of Lincoln ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... always thought, of course, that I'm a pauper, and never dreamed of my poor little residuary nest-egg. I'd ordered a box of Okanagan Valley apples, and a gramophone and a dozen opera records, and a brier-wood pipe and two pounds of English "Honey-Dew," and a smoking-jacket, and some new ties and socks and shirts, and a brand new Stetson, for Dinky-Dunk's old hat is almost a rag-bag. And I ordered half a dozen of ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... there, we wander here, We eye the rose upon the brier, Unmindful that the thorn is near, Among the leaves; And tho' the puny wound appear, Short while ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... mad as with store of new wine; Oh, they cheered him, they capped him, they roared as he rode down the line: He that fled us at Worcester, the boy, the green brier-shoot, the son Of the Stuart on whom for his sin the ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... King with smiles Said: "Speak to him, my dear. He tells the truth. Thy parents wandered through a desert land Beneath a cruel sun. Impossible It was to carry thee through brier and brush." Down at his sister's feet the young prince knelt. Then Bidasari clasped him in her arms. The brave young prince to them recounted all The sorrows of his parents. Much he wept, And they wept, too, as he the story told. Then sat they down to dine. And afterward They siri took and ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... upon his horn; His men did make reply, And came all quickly to his call, Through brake and brier ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... were stationed the youngest, the most vigorous, the most fun-loving of the women, and the larger boys, with only a negligible sprinkling of really little children. Every woman and child in the two rows was armed with a savage-looking whip of willow, hickory, or even green brier, and the still more savage intention of using these whips to the utmost extent of their speed ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... give glimmering light; By the dead and drowsy fire, Every elf and fairy sprite, Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty after me, Sing and dance it trippingly. First rehearse this song by rote, To each word a warbling note, Hand in hand, with fairy grace, We will ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... which lay between the mud flat and the mountains. They believed the range might yet show a rift at this end which their wagons could traverse. But the Jayhawkers turned to the north, seeking some outlet through the Panamints at that end of the range. One family followed them. J. W Brier, a minister from a little frontier community in the Middle West, left the other section with his wife and three children in the hope that the young men might find ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... hair. Giving him one frightened glance, she turned and sped like some strange tropic bird upon the wind. Moved by wonder, curiosity, and admiration, the young man gave stealthy chase; but, after following in the wake of her flying feet by bush and brier, and through the tangled thickets of the forest, he had the poor satisfaction of losing sight of her altogether, and then gaining one last glimpse of her, as, from the dense shadowy point where she became invisible, shot out a ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... the dim and mysterious future, mementoes of the walks, the frolics, the joys that have belonged to this staid New England home. From the very parsonage door she has brought away a sprig of a rampant sweet-brier that has grown there this many a year, and its delicate leaflets ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... and his own cigar, and then moved the chairs out of their way, stepping softly that the old man might not hear him. Margret, in the room, watched them as they went, seeing how gentle the rough, burly man was with her father, and how, every time they passed the sweet-brier, he bent the branches aside, that they might not touch his face. Slow, childish tears came into her eyes as she saw it; for the school-master was blind. This had been their regular walk every evening, since it grew ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... softly an armed man, whose muscles stood out like brass, and whose eyes burned like fire. He sprang upon the boy king and stabbed him in the back. The affrighted horse dashed away, dragging the bleeding body by the stirrup,—on, on, on, over rut and rock, bush and brier. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... her aunt, her dinner, her work; then when evening came, budding her roses, or tying her carnations, or weeding, or raking the ground between them (where Philetus could do nothing), or training her multiflora and sweet-brier branches; and then often, after all, walking up to the mill to give Hugh a little earlier a home smile, and make his way down pleasant. No wonder if the energies which owed much of their strength to love's ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... day, Welcome fosterer of tender herbis green, Welcome quickener of flourish'd flowers sheen, Welcome support of every root and vein, Welcome comfort of all kind fruit and grain, Welcome the birdis' bield[35] upon the brier, Welcome master and ruler of the year, Welcome welfare of husbands at the ploughs, Welcome repairer of woods, trees, and boughs, Welcome depainter of the bloomed meads, Welcome the life of every thing that spreads, Welcome storer of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... more: They all lie in wait for blood; They hunt every man his brother with a net. Both hands are put forth for evil, To do it diligently. The prince asketh and the judge is ready for reward, And the great man, he uttereth the evil of his soul; Thus they weave it together. The best of them is as a brier; The most upright is worse than a thorn hedge. A man's enemies are the men of ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... horseman, and now well mounted, he made a handsome figure as he galloped off across the field. As he rode, his eye searched here and there, till it caught sight of the flash of a scarlet jacket beyond a distant screen of high green brier. He put his horse over the rail fence and pulled ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... de turn at de een' er de row, one er de plough-lines got under de mule's hin' leg. Dan retch' down ter git de line out, sorter keerless like, w'en de mule haul' off en kick him clean ober de fence inter a brier-patch on ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the butterfly-weed, like a coal of fire, Blurs orange-red through bush and brier; Where the pennyroyal and mint smell sweet, And ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow; But on the hill the goldenrod, and the aster in the wood, And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood, Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; 205 For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o'er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrops sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, 210 Waved in ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... white stone on the westerly slope of the hill bears the name of "Nicholas Singletary, M. D.," and marks the spot which he selected many years before his death. When I visited it last spring, the air about it was fragrant with the bloom of sweet-brier and blackberry and the balsamic aroma of the sweet-fern; birds were singing in the birch-trees by the wall; and two little, brown-locked, merry-faced girls were making wreaths of the dandelions and grasses which grew upon the old man's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow, And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod, Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak, The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er I went With dark eyes full ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... mandarin temples of the peppergrass—all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth's easter April mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... now. There was an open space to cross on the road to the water, and, after a careful lookout for enemies, the mother gathered the little things under the shadow of her spread fantail and kept off all danger of sunstroke until they reached the brier thicket by ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... moons may go— She sleeps where early blossoms blow: Around her headstone many a seed Shall sow itself; and brier and weed Shall grow to hide it from men's heed, And none ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... He could not remember her going. Of her coming he knew nothing at all. She had appeared and, he supposed, disappeared. Of Winchester's attack upon him, and the subsequent chase, his memory was clearer. How he had escaped, however, at the foot of the brier-clad slope, he could not conceive. He could have sworn that for the last thirty paces the man was not three ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... a bright lily grow Before rude hands have touched it? Have you marked but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath smutched it? Have you felt the wool of beaver? Or swan's down ever? Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier? Or the nard i' the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? Oh, so white! oh, so soft! oh, ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... thick to spice the disaster. When he had succeeded in fishing him out, pulled down the shirts, and pushed up the cap, he began vigorously rubbing the bare young legs with the palm of his hand, spitting upon it, the better, as he said, to draw out the smarting and the stinging of the brier-scratches. Then setting his idol, still howling, upon his own panel of the fence, Burl began looking about him with wide-open eyes, as if in quest of something lost, wondering the while what could have ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... the speed of fire Orlando followed where the enchantress fled, Rending and scattering tree and bush and brier, And leaving wide the vestige of his tread. Nearer he drew, with feet that could not tire, And strong in hope to seise her as she sped. How vain the hope! Her form he seemed to clasp, But soon as seized, she vanished ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... is no ghost; he could not be; Something that hides, forlorn, in frost and brier; Something shut outside in the dark, while we Laugh and forget by the familiar fire; Something whose moan we call the wind, whose tears Sound but as rain-drops ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... heredity, especially, understand all of their subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in that brier-patch, and have really explored it without coming to the end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying. Now I do not propose to rely merely on myself to tell ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... them feeding upon the seeds of various weedy growths in a large market-garden well into town.) "Pressing on, the walk became exhilarating. Followed a little brook, the eastern branch of the Tiber, lined with bushes and a rank growth of green-brier. Sparrows started out here and there, and flew across the little bends and points. Among some pines just beyond the boundary, saw a number of American goldfinches, in their gray winter dress, pecking the pinecones. A golden-crowned kinglet was there also, a little tuft of gray feathers, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers, in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... his brier-root pipe from his mouth, glanced sidewise from the magazine he was reading, and jerked his ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... the slow flakes, as they fall On bank and brier and broken wall; Over the orchard, waste and brown, All noiselessly they settle down, Tipping the apple-boughs, and each Light quivering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... more than once of going to find the cows at nightfall in the autumn evenings, and being glad to warm his bare feet in the places where the sleepy beasts had lain, before he followed their slow steps homeward through bush and brier. The Honorable Mr. Laneway had a touch of true sentiment which added much to his really stirring and effective campaign speeches. He had often been called the "king of the platform" in his adopted ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... is given, In mystic fold do they entwine, So bound in one that, were they riven, Apart my soul would life resign. Thou art my song and I the lyre; Thou art the breeze and I the brier; The altar I, and thou the fire; Mine the deep love, the beauty thine! As fleets away the rapid hour While weeping—may My sorrowing lay Touch ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Orient flows through its marble streets. You are there one day when the sea has receded: the plain is a pestilent marsh; the temples, the theatres, the lofty gates have sunken and crumbled, and the wild-brier runs over them; and, as you grow pensive in the most desolate place in the world, a bandit lounges out of a tomb, and offers to relieve you of all that which creates artificial distinctions in society. The higher the civilization ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... said, "for the next carriage will not only stop, but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with "Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of the ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... of the whole paratime belt I was working in." Verkan Vall handed it over for inspection. "The bowl's natural brier-root; the stem's a sort of plastic made from the sap of certain tropical trees. The little white dot is the maker's trademark; it's made of ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... the thoughts of the collop uppermost. But I never counted upon being beaten so thoroughly as I was; for knowing me now to be off my guard, the young hussy stopped at the farmyard gate, as if with a brier entangling her, and while I was stooping to take it away, she looked me full in the face by the moonlight, and jerked out ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... same hot evening the sergeant in charge of the little signal-party at the Picacho came strolling forth from his tent puffing at a battered brier-root pipe. Southward and a few hundred feet below his perch the Yuma road came twisting through the pass, and then disappeared in the gathering darkness across the desert plain that stretched between them and the distant Santa Maria. Over to the east the loftiest crags of the Christobal ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... family altar. The chapter has been read, and we are singing a favorite hymn of the one who reads and prays. It is spring time, and the fresh air comes in through the opened window, perfumed with the rose and the sweet-brier. But we ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... flowery plume, The birch's pale-green scarf, And break the web of brier and bloom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... what anguish while my shame I tell! What fix'd despair, what rage my bosom swell! Here was no goddess, here no heavenly charms, A rugged mountain fill'd my eager arms, Whose rocky top, o'erhung with matted brier, Received the kisses of my am'rous fire. Wak'd from my dream, cold horror freez'd my blood; Fix'd as a rock, before the rock I stood; 'O fairest goddess of the ocean train, Behold the triumph of thy proud disdain; Yet why,' I cried, 'with all I wish'd ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... leaves, its grave young moon, and lighted campion flowers, was but a part of her; the scents, the witchery and shadows, the quaint field noises, the yokels' whistling, and the splash of water-fowl, each seemed to him enchanted. The flighting bats, the forms of the dim hayricks, and sweet-brier perfume-she summed them all up in herself. The fingermarks had deepened underneath her eyes, a languor came upon her; it made her the more sweet and youthful. Her shoulders seemed to bear on them the very image of our land—grave and aspiring, eager yet contained—before ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod, Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er I went With dark eyes full of love's content. The birds are ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... lost opportunities lifting to me their wistful faces, and dumbly pleading with me to accept them and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. I see the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbidden fields, and only regained my path after weary wandering, brier-torn, and none the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might have gladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have made happier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring its wasted treasure. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... gateposts that marked the entrance to the mansion. A chain was stretched across the entrance and we crawled under. The driveway was partly overgrown with grass, and the place seemed to be taking care of itself. Half a dozen long-horned Bonnie Brier Bush cows were grazing on the lawn, their calves with them; and evidently these cows and calves were the only mowing-machines employed. On this wide-stretching meadow were various old trees; one elm I saw had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... cultivation presented themselves; plots of ground raised on beds, each a few feet wide, with intervening trenches to carry off the boggy water, where potatoes had grown, and small fields where grew more ragwort than grass, enclosed by banks cast up and tipped here and there with a brier or a stone. It was the husbandry of misery and indigence. The ground had already been freshly manured by sea-weeds, but the village, where was it? Blotches of burnt-ground, scorched heaps of rubbish, and fragments of blackened walls, alone were visible. Garden plots were trodden ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... contempt. Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine: Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine, Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state, Makes me with thy strength to communicate: 175 If aught possess thee from me, it is dross, Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss; Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion Infect thy sap, and live ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... de Fox off one side, he did, an' he say, 'Le's give 'im his chice, wheder he'd er ruther be tho'd in de fire or de brier-patch; an' ef he say de fire, den we'll fling 'im in de briers; an' ef he say de briers, den we'll fling 'im in de fire.' So dey went back ter de Rabbit, an' ax 'im wheder he'd er ruther be tho'd in ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... most unexpected and aggravating manner. But after the third day out, he found his sea-legs and learned how to "lean." From two till five his time was his own, and a very good deal of this time he devoted to Henley and Morris and Walt Whitman, an ancient brier between his teeth and a canister of excellent tobacco at his elbow. Odd, isn't it, that an Englishman without his pipe is as incomplete as a Manx cat, which, as doubtless you know, has no tail. After all, does a Manx cat know ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... and there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last year's brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized upon Mary by the skirts and legs, so that it was a matter of five minutes and piercing screams of merriment to cast her loose again. But soon we drew out of the hot sunshine into the old orchard with its paltry display of deformed, green, runt apples, ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... that inspection, I apologized for making him blush. And as that only added to his embarrassment, I artlessly asked him what a blush really was. That, of course, was throwing the rabbit straight back into the brier-patch, as far as Gershom was concerned. For he promptly and meticulously informed me that a blush was a miniature epilepsy, a vasomotor impulse leading to the dilation or constriction of the facial blood-vessels, some psychologists even claiming the ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... in the glen's bosom Summer slept in the fire Of the odorous gorse-blossom And the hot scent of the brier. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moony sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... wefts, has got into my head; not "bee-bonneted," but bird-bonneted, I go. Yes, this day shall be given to the king, as our country-folk say, when they go a-pleasuring. I am off with the little wool-gatherers, to see what thorn and brier and fern-stalk and willow-catkin will give ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... with days and superb in the sun? What are they singing of? Hush! ... There's a ringing of Delicate chimes; And the blush Of a veiled bride morning Beats in the rhymes. Listen! Out of the merriment, Clear as the glisten Of dew on the brier, A silver warning! Sudden, a dare— Lyric experiment— Up like a lark in the air, Higher and higher and higher, The song shoots out of our blunder Of thought to the blue sky of wonder, And broken strains only fall down Like pearls on the roofs of ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... poor-house bacon is slyly licking the oozing fat. Of the taste of red-cheeked apples and chewing-gum he is guiltless; popcorn, bananas, and the succulent peanut are alike alien. This pee-mee or oil of bacon is delicious morsel enough for his red palate. We trade a brier pipe with young McDonald, a full-blood, for his beautiful hat-band of porcupine quills, and in the French of the North he confides to us, "I have two boys. The mother can have the younger one to ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... they never failed to taste deliciously after a long day's ride. They were washed down by a tincupful of coffee strong enough to tan leather, then came a brier-wood pipeful of fragrant kinnikinnic, and a seat by the ruddy, sparkling fire of aromatic cedar logs, that diffused at once warmth, and spicy, pleasing incense. A chat over the events of the day, and the prospect of the morrow, the wonderful merits of each man's ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... your tender, wounded arm Bends back the brier that edges life's long way, That no hurt comes to heart, to soul no harm, I do not feel the thorns so ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... cutery corn, Apple seed and apple thorn, Wire, brier, limber lock, Three geese in a flock; Along came Tod, With his long rod, And scared them all to Migly-wod. One flew east, one flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.— Make your ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... music growing nearer that quickened her breathing, or only the closeness of the night, shut in between the wild grape-vine curtains, swung from one dark cedar column to another? She caught the sweet-brier breath as she hurried by, and now, a loop in the leafy curtain revealed the pond lying black in a hollow of the hills, with a whole heaven of stars reflected in it. Old John stumbled along over the stones, cropping the grass as he went. Dorothy tugged at his halter ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... art me dear, Oh why have men hanged thee here? Thy head is closed with a brier, O why have ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... by the mill, long since deserted and now a thing of ruin and decay. A man in knickerbockers stood leaning against the rail, idly gazing down at the trickling stream below. The brier pipe that formed the circuit between hand and lips sent up soft blue coils to float away on ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Mr. Thomas Cadge was darkened with disapproval, he shifted his stubby brier pipe to the other corner of his mouth, edged a little from his seat on the sunny front stoop and, craning his neck around the corner of his house, revealed an unwashed area extending from collarbone to ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... and putting the magazines in their places, sorting the new books into their shelf, putting the standard pirated editions of English authors in their proper place and squaring up the long rows of "The Bonnie Brier Bush" and "A Hazard of New Fortunes" where they would catch the buyers' eyes upon the counter, in freshly jostled ranks, even and inviting, after the day's havoc in Harvey's literary circles. But always Fenn's face ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the foot of the slope that crowds up against Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and south it is fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and untenable. Eastward it butts on orchard closes and the village gardens, brimming over into them by wild brier and creeping grass. The village street, with its double row of unlike houses, breaks off abruptly at the edge of the field in a footpath that goes up the streamside, beyond it, to the source ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... to pursue the subject of woods beyond the few kinds mentioned. Woods such as ebony, sandalwood, cherry, brier, box, pear-tree, lancewood, and many others, are all good for the carver, but are better fitted for special purposes and small work. As this book is concerned more with the art of carving than its application, it will save confusion if we accept yellow pine as our ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Charlemagne, albeit he created the Paladins, wist not how to make them in such numbers as to form an army of them alone. It must needs be that in the multitude of things there be found diversities of quality. No field was ever so well tilled but that here and there nettle, or thistle, or brier would be found in it amid the goodlier growths. Whereto I may add that, having to address me to young and unlearned ladies, as you for the most part are, I should have done foolishly, had I gone about searching and swinking to find matters very exquisite, and been sedulous to speak ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way; Each envious brier his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay: For misery is trodden on by many, And being low never relieved ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... by his garden, and saw the wild brier The thorn and the thistle grow broader and higher; The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags; And his money still wastes till he starves or ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the horses found in the morning in their pasture ground with tangled manes and tails, and bodies covered with mud, had been during the night used by Spirits, who rushed them through mire and brier, and that consequently they presented the appearance of animals who had followed the hounds in a long chase through a ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... a rose or a brier? Will it come with a blessing or curse? Will its bonnets be lower or higher? Will its morals be better ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... condescending nod, and putting away the cigar, took out a brier pipe and began to fill it from his tobacco-pouch. "The Captain is a man of few words and extremely modest about himself," Clay continued, lightly; "so I must tell you who he is myself. He is a promoter of revolutions. That is his business,—a professional promoter of revolutions, and ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... has gane down o'er the lofty Benlomond, And left the red clouds to preside o'er the scene, While lanely I stray in the calm simmer gloamin' To muse on sweet Jessie, the flower o' Dumblane. How sweet is the brier, wi' its saft faulding blossom, And sweet is the birk, wi' its mantle o' green; Yet sweeter and fairer, and dear to this bosom, Is lovely young ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fur tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it stall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... and Miss Sally grew to be quite close comrades. After supper was over, and everything cleaned up, you would generally find them together, Miss Sally smoking his brier-root pipe, and the Marquis plaiting a quirt or scraping rawhide for a new ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... complains of Brer Rabbit that he is too stuck up. In the sequel Brer Rabbits begs Brer Fox that he may "drown me as deep ez you please, skin me, scratch out my eyeballs, t'ar out my years by the roots, en cut off my legs, but do don't fling me in dat brier patch;" which, of course, Brer Fox does, only to be informed by the cunning Brer Rabbit that he had been "bred en bawn in a brier patch." The story is a favourite one with the negroes: it occurs in Col. Jones' Negro Myths of the Georgia Coast (Uncle Remus is from S. Carolina), also among those ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... piece of brush or brier sticks to the dress, name it. If it drops, the lover is false; if it sticks, he is ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... Beauty" is, by all odds, the finest one. Its perfect economy in the use of story materials has always been admired. Perrault's version drags in an unnecessary ogre and spoils a good story by not knowing when to stop. The Grimm title is "Dornroeschen," and the more literal translation, "Brier Rose," is the one generally used as the English title, rather than the one given by Taylor, whose translation follows. Tennyson has a very beautiful poetic rendering of this story ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... evil spells of an enemy. He frequently pretends to suck out such an object by the application of the lips alone, without any scarification whatever. Scratching is a painful process and is performed with a brier, a flint arrowhead, a rattlesnake's tooth, or even with a piece of glass, according to the nature of the ailment, while in preparing the young men for the ball play the shaman uses an instrument somewhat resembling a comb, having seven teeth made from the sharpened splinters ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... evidence was taken: it was declared that Tom was too unwell from the effects of the assault to attend in person, and Mr. Chanticleer was fined five pounds. For this amount he immediately wrote an order on his bankers,—Brier, Primrose, and Whitethorn; and then, greatly to old Leverett's chagrin, the prisoner was discharged, and all parties left ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... wild and romantic glen in the Highlands of Scotland, there is a cave opening beneath the brow of a huge overhanging cliff, and half concealed by wreathed roots and wild festoons of brier and woodbine. Several indistinct traditions remain of this cave's having been, in former days, the abode of more than one holy hermit and gifted seer. From these it derived the name which it commonly received, Coir-nan-Taischatrin, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... reply, Ford might have lost courage to speak again had he not caught the eye of the Englishman's wife as she leaned forward and peeped at him across her husband's brier-root. There was something in her starry glance—an invitation, or an incitement—that impelled ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... Interrupt me nae mair with exclamations and groans and accusations, but hear my tale to an end! And thenif ye be indeed sic a Lord of Glenallan as I hae heard of in my daymake your merrymen gather the thorn, and the brier, and the green hollin, till they heap them as high as the house-riggin', and burn! burn! burn! the auld witch Elspeth, and a' that can put ye in mind that sic a creature ever crawled upon ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... firmament. There, at a single glance, the eye surveys majestic palms, humid forests of bambusa, and the varied species of Musaceae, while above these forms of tropical vegetation appear oaks, medlars, the sweet-brier, and umbelliferous plants, as in our European homes. There as the traveler turns his eyes to the vault of heaven, a single glance embraces the constellation of the Southern Cross, the Magellanic clouds, and the guiding stars of the constellation of the Bear, as they circle round ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... glossy black, The priest his lips began to smack, Full fain to pluck the fruit; But, woe the while! the trunk was tall, And many a brier and thorn did crawl Around that ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... first is borne With heedless slight, or smiles of scorn; Teased into wrath, what patience bears The noisy fool who perseveres? The morning wakes, the huntsman sounds, At once rush forth the joyful hounds. They seek the wood with eager pace, Through bush, through brier, explore the chase. Now scattered wide, they try the plain, And snuff the dewy turf in vain. 10 What care, what industry, what pains! What universal silence reigns. Ringwood, a dog of little fame, Young, pert, and ignorant of game, At once displays his babbling throat; The pack, regardless ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... betide the frush saugh wand! And wae betide the bush of brier! That bent and brake into his hand, When strength of ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... substantial ball of dead leaves will be noticed, swung amid a tangle of brier. No accident lodged these, nor did any insect have aught to do with their position. Examine carefully the mass of leaves and you will find a replica of the gray squirrel's nest, only, of course, much smaller. This handiwork of the white-footed or deer mouse can be found ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. And instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and man shall nowhere crush man on all the holy earth. Tomorrow's sun shall rise," said the stranger, "and it shall flood these dark kopjes with light, and the rocks shall glint in it. Not more certain is that rising than the coming of that day. ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... hill, over dale, Through bush, through brier, Over park, over pale, Through flood, through fire, Farewell, thou wit of spirits, I'll be gone; Our queen and all ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... they went, through brier and through thicket, Into the darksome wood; Again he dropped his clues along the pathway Behind him when ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... whose plant God gave growth should be the owner of the farm. This advice was accepted; for God, both thought, was a safer arbiter than man. One of the brothers, Arne, chose a fern (Ormgrass), and the other, Ulf, a sweet-brier. A week later, they went with the wise man and two other neighbors to the remote pasture at the edge of the glacier where, by common consent, they had made their appeal to the judgment of heaven. Arne's fern ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... thorn or brier Make me a fire Close by whose living coal I sit, And glow like it. Lord, I confess too, when I dine, The pulse is thine, And all those other bits that be There ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... sham. Look at it." Obedient, he looked hard at it, and the cactus and rocks thrust through the watery image of the lake like two photographs on the same plate. He shouted with strangling triumph, and continued shouting until brier-roses along a brook and a farm-house unrolled to his left, and he ran half-way there, calling his mother's name. "Why, you fool, she's dead!" He looked slowly at his cut hands, for he had fallen among stones. "Dead, back in Kentucky, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... piece of marshy ground with an abundance of skunk cabbage and a fairly dense growth of saplings, and near by a tangle of green brier and blackberry, and you will be pretty sure to have it tenanted by a pair of yellowthroats," says Dr. Abbott, who found several of their nests in skunk-cabbage plants, which he says are favorite cradles. No animal cares to touch this plant if it can be avoided; ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... pathos of this last remark was added to by the sincere vehemence with which it was uttered, and the mute eloquence with which he lifted up a ragged flap in the rear of his person that some envious rail or brier had torn from its position of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... you walk, sir?" She turned into a narrow path in the shadow of arches, clothed by a great Austrian brier, on which here and there a yellow flame still glowed. "Mr. Boyce—when I meet you in company you shrink and cower detestably; when I meet you alone, you fence with me impudently enough and shrewdly; and always you avoid me while you can. I ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... charming wild roses, not natives, but naturalized immigrants from foreign lands, that have escaped from gardens, is Shakespeare's CANKER-BLOOM, the lovely DOG ROSE or WILD BRIER (R. canina), that spreads its long, straggling branches along the roadsides and banks, covering the waste lands with its smooth, beautiful foliage, and in June and July with pink or white roses. Because it lacks the fragrance of sweetbrier, which it otherwise ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... artillery, I made up my mind to one matter. "She must have clothes!" thought I, "and that's flat!" Perhaps not such as befitted her, but something immediate, and not in tatters—something stout that threatened not to part and leave her naked. For the brier-torn rags she wore scarce seemed to hold together; and her small, shy feet peeped through her gaping shoon ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... walls assembling neighbours meet, And tread departed friends beneath their feet; And new-brier'd graves, that prompt the secret sigh, Shew each the spot where he himself must lie. Midst timely greetings village news goes round, Of crops late shorn, or crops that deck the ground; Experienc'd ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Puck, My Liege Ile neuer lin, But I will thorough thicke and thinne, Vntill at length I bring her in, My dearest Lord nere doubt it: Thorough Brake, thorough Brier, Thorough Muck, thorough Mier, 310 Thorough Water, thorough Fier, And thus ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... steamer to sail for home, Bok visited "Ian Maclaren," whose Bonnie Brier Bush stories were then in great vogue, and not only contracted for Doctor Watson's stories of the immediate future, but arranged with him for a series of articles which, for two years thereafter, was published ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... mother sat very close together as they drove through the familiar village streets. When they did speak, it was incoherently. There was an odor of brier roses in the air and the sun was setting in a "bed of daffodil sky." Kate felt waves of beauty and tenderness breaking over her and wanted to cry. Her mother wanted to and did. Neither trusted herself to speak, but when they were in ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... stayed a while at the old seat under the rowan-tree. We could only just reach it, the burn is so full. And look at all the flowers I found in the cottage-garden—heart's-ease, and daisies, and sweet-brier, and thyme. It seemed a pity to leave them, with nobody to see them. Give me something to put them in, Mrs Stirling, and I'll leave some of them for you. We will have time enough for that, ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... deep cut of the glen there was very little snow, only a few veins and patches here and there, threading and seaming the steep, as if a white-footed hare had been coursing about. Little stubby brier shoots, and clumps of russet bracken, and dead heather, ruffling like a brown dog's back, broke the dull surface of withered herbage, thistle stumps, teasels, rugged banks, and naked brush. Down in the bottom the noisy brook was scurrying over its pebbles brightly, or plunging into ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... weather vane and spire. Then, in the brightness of the morning, the drawbridge fell across the moat with a rattle and clank of chains, the gate of the castle swung slowly open, and a goodly array of steel-clad men-at-arms, with a knight all clothed in chain mail, as white as frost on brier and thorn of a winter morning, came flashing out from the castle courtyard. In his hand the Knight held a great spear, from the point of which fluttered a blood-red pennant as broad as the palm of one's hand. So this troop came forth from the castle, and in the midst of them ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... window dim and dark Was hung with ivy, brier, and yew; No shimmering sun here ever shone; No wholesome ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown
... How about the Brier's Sweet crab? I grafted some last year and had a larger percentage of the scions live on ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... that she almost lost her balance, she gave him a cut with the switch that sent him flying back over the road he had come, at the top of his speed. Now every bush and every tree and every brier-tangled fence corner seemed to hold some nameless terror for her, and even her lips were ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... comprehensiveness, and a curious instinct in the selection of words. In this latter respect, though not in the moulding of sentences, the reader may perhaps be reminded of the choice and fragrant vocabulary of Washington Irving, whose words alone often leave an exquisite odor like the perfume of sweet-brier and arbutus."—GEORGE RIPLEY, in ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the voice of the sluggard; I hear him complain, You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again. I passed by his garden, I saw the wild brier, The thorn, and the thistle, grow broader and higher; The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags; And his money he wastes, till he starves ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... score through tangled cover, their merry peal ringing from brake and brier, clashing against the rocks, moaning musically away through ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... thread and wove into cloth for our shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush. Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new flax-made shirt! No one sees these ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... the fire, close over it, as he had done in the backwoods many a night, smoking the old brier pipe that had cheered him in his hours of solitary watching, and thinking with a grim bitterness that it would have been better for him if he had been knocked on the head the night of the raid at Salisbury Plain. To be married to one woman, while he loved another with all his heart and ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... with enormous strides, Rebellious mutterings and oaths besides, O'er clover-field and fallow, bank and brier, Pursu'd the nearest cut, and fann'd the fire That burnt within him.—Soon the Hall he spied, And the grey willows by the water side; Nature cried "halt!" nor could he well refuse; Stop, Gilbert, breathe awhile, and ask ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... of nothing else in the way of precaution, Loring?" he presently asked, as he threw himself down beside him, puffing at his little brier-root. ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... green sap tint along its gray branches, I seemed to see my poor little blue-ginghamed, pigtailed self crouched at Judge Crittenden's feet on the front steps, sobbing my lonely heart away while he smoked his sorrow down with a long brier pipe, and the Byrd chirped his little three-year-old protest in concert with us both. Most eighteen-year-old men would have resented having a motherless little brother and a long-legged girl neighbor eternally at their heels, but Sam never had; or, if he ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... imitations of works of art. Here, in their season, flourished abundantly all those productions of Nature which are now banished from our once delighted senses; huge bushes of honey-suckle, and bowers of sweet-pea and sweet-brier, and jessamine clustering over the walls, and gillyflowers scenting with their sweet breath the ancient bricks from which they seemed to spring. There were banks of violets which the southern breeze always stirred, and mignonette filled every vacant nook. As they entered ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... brier rose, That scents the simmer wind, An fine I'd keep the wee bit hoose, 'Gin I'd a ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... to counsel ye about that," said the schoolmaster. "She's as keen as a brier—the fox! She says, 'Keep away. Don't alarm him, or he'll bundle us off to Europe for ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... distracts my spirit and disturbs my peace; when I get caught in the tumult and the bustle and the rush—then I like to throw myself back in my chair for a moment and close my eyes. I am back once more in the dear old lane among the haws and the filberts. I catch once more the smell of the brier. I see again the squirrel up there in the oak and the rabbit under the hedge. I listen as of old to the chirp of the grasshopper in the stubble, to the hum of the bees among the foxgloves, to the song of the blackbird on the hawthorn, and, best ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... felt the wool of the beaver? Or swan's down ever? Or have smelt the bud o' the brier? Or the nard in the fire? Or ha' tasted the bag o' the bee? Oh so white, oh so soft, oh ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various |
