"Moorland" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... imperfect narrative of the relief. What the deliverers saw on Thursday morning was a little white town lying in the midst of a wide shallow basin of green moorland; and it reminded one of a town that had been long deserted and in ruins. I am not exaggerating when I say that by far the greater number of houses in the town had been struck by shells, and that very nearly all had been struck either by shells ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... fostered by Wat, the dauntless hero, who taught him to fight with consummate skill; while Hilde herself presided over the education of Gudrun, and made her so charming that many suitors soon came, hoping to find favor in her eyes. These were Siegfried, King of Moorland, a pagan of dark complexion; Hartmut, son of Ludwig, King of Normandy; and, lastly, Herwig of Zealand. Although the latter fancied that he had won some favor in the fair Gudrun's sight, Hettel dismissed him as well as the others, with the answer that his daughter was yet too ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... fire, her Cottage-home; Yet o'er the moorland will she roam In weather rough and bleak; And when against the wind she strains, Oh! might I kiss the mountain rains That sparkle on ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... moorland rills There is a spot that seems to lie Sacred to flowrets of the hills, And sacred to ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... Farquharson, a neighbour and friend, the witness did as he was bid; and when they were without the cottage, the appearance told the witness he was the ghost of Sergeant Davis, and requested him to go and bury his mortal remains, which lay concealed in a place he pointed out in a moorland tract called the Hill of Christie. He desired him to take Farquharson with him as an assistant. Next day the witness went to the place specified, and there found the bones of a human body much decayed. The witness did ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... last lone traveller homeward wends O'er the moorland, drowsily; And the pale bright moon her crescent bends, And silvers the ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... precious books, which he sold in amazing numbers. He sang sweet Psalms beside the sick, and prayed like the voice of God at their dying beds. He went cheerily from farm to farm, from cot to cot; and when he wearied on the moorland roads, he refreshed his soul by reciting aloud one of Ralph Erskine's "Sonnets," or crooning to the birds one of David's Psalms. His happy partner, our beloved mother, died in 1865, and he himself in 1868, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... accomplish whatever she could be called on to accomplish. She looked neither more nor less than her age, which was forty-five. She was not a native of the district, having been culled by her husband from the moorland town of Axe, twelve miles off. Like nearly all women who settle in a strange land upon marriage, at the bottom of her heart she had considered herself just a trifle superior to the strange land and its ways. This feeling, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... home or away from home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes as still living; sometimes as returning from the world of shadows to comfort me; always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, never in association with any approach to fear or distress. It was at a lonely Inn in a wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night. When I had looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a letter. I had always, until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed every night ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... The great heath was all around, solitary as the heaven out of which the solitary moon, with no child to comfort her, was enviously watching them. But she would not stop to rest, save for the briefest breathing space! On and on she went until moorland miles five more, as near as she could judge, were behind her. Then at length she sat down upon a stone, and a timid flutter of safety stirred in her bosom, followed by a gush of love victorious. Her treasure! her ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... has been denominated Hayes Barton, or simply Hayes. Previously it had been called, after successive landlords, Poerhayes or Power's Hayes, and Dukes-hayes. The hollow in which it lies, among low hills, is on the verge of a tract of moorland; and Hayes Wood rises close at hand. Through the oak wood to Budleigh Salterton Bay is two miles ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... unfolded her cloak, and let the princess look out. The firs had ceased; and they were on a lofty height of moorland, stony and bare and dry, with tufts of heather and a few small plants here and there. About the heath, on every side, lay the forest, looking in the moonlight like a cloud; and above the forest, like the shaven crown of a monk, rose the bare moor ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... he journeyed fast, until at last on a wide moorland he came upon a horse-herd feeding his horses; and the horses were wild, and their eyes were ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... that I can get for you. There is Mussainen, for instance, which is to be sold—the wretched moorland on ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... to which it clings, A cavern dark its arms outflings, Moist with the neighboring moorland's dew, Where heaven's bright rays can ne'er pierce through. There dwelt the monster, there he lay, His spoil awaiting, night and day; Like the hell-dragon, thus he kept Watch near the shrine, and never slept; And if a hapless ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... choosing one, as all expected. While they had so talked and he had danced he had made his plan, and his devils had roused themselves and risen. And then he had made his excuses to his party and watched the coaches drive away, and had gone back to seek John Oxon. Now he rode back over the moorland, and the day was awake and he was awake too. He rode swiftly through the gorse and heather, scattering the dewdrops as he went, thousands of dewdrops there were, myriads of pinkish purple heath-bells, and some pure white ones, and yellow ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... commanding officer, having received a pressing invitation to visit a gentleman's family, to whom he had letters of introduction, and who resided more than twenty miles from ——. This town bordered on a very wild, hilly moorland track of country, then, and perhaps now, the refuge of numerous bands of smugglers, and then also a hiding-place for a number of unfortunate people with arms in their hands. The road—if such it could be called—to his friend's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of which offences had a moorland burial, and were never heard of in the courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked,—by two men after his watch,—and at least once, betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mountains. What its present name may be I am unable to say. At the time of which I am speaking, the country-people gave it this appellation from the deep obscurity produced by the shadows of lofty trees, more especially by a crowded growth of firs that covered this region of moorland. Even the brook, which bubbled between the rocks, assumed the same dark hue, and showed nothing of that cheerful aspect which streams are wont to wear that have the ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... personage's glass cabinets. You think genius can find no higher end than to furnish frescoes and panellings for a nobleman's halls and ante-chambers. You mistake very much; the mistake is a general one in your order. But believe me, the kingfisher enjoys his brown moorland stream, and his tufts of green rushes, and his water-swept bough of hawthorn; the eagle enjoys his wild rocks, and his sweep through the air, and his steady gaze at the sun that blinds all human eyes;—and neither ever imagine that the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... scenes are extremely pleasing, and indeed, from this point to Dryburgh, the beautiful and fabled river is at its loveliest. It is possible that a little inn farther up the water, "The Crook," on the border of the moorland, and near Tala Linn, where the Covenanters held a famous assembly, may have suggested the name of the "Cleikum." Lockhart describes the prosperity which soon flowed into Innerleithen, and the St. Ronan's Games, at which the Ettrick Shepherd ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... situate on the edge of the forest belt. Beyond the latter the country stretched away in vast, well-nigh treeless plains. Now a peculiar feature of these plains was the frequent recurrence of abrupt granite kopjes, at first glance not unlike moorland tors. But more than one of them, when arrived at, wore the aspect of a complete Druidical ring—a circle of stones crowning the rise, with a slight depression of ground within the centre. One of these Hazon, who ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... climbed, the sea at first made a blue strip beyond the cliff's edge on his right, then spread into a wide blue floor, three hundred feet below him, and all the width of it twinkling. Ahead and on his left all the moorland twinkled too, with the comings and goings of the birds. The wrens mostly went about their business—whatever that might be—in a sharp, practical way, keeping silence; but the frail note of the titlarks sounded ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and O Loki, I will reveal to you now the deceits I practiced on you both. It was I whom ye met on the moorland on the day before ye came into Utgard. I gave you my name as Skyrmir and I did all I might do to prevent your entering our City, for the Giants dreaded a contest of strength with Asa Thor. Now hear me, O Thor. The wallet I gave for you to take provisions out of was tied ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... rush of the wind over the slopes, and an occasional wail nearer at hand, as it swished round a corner of the rocks behind him. He dare not attempt to climb higher, nor dare he descend. What unexplored expanses of moorland might lie beyond, to lure him farther away from the chance of shelter or rescue? What hidden pitfalls might not lurk below, to trap his inexperienced feet and ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... how, when we were boys at school, and the curfew long rung, we yet knelt at our window and saw the stars come up over the moorland? Thou wert the poet and teller of tales—ah! thy paladins and paynims and ladies enchanted!—while I listened, bewitched as they, but with an ear for the master's tread. It ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... told him where Nevitt was most likely to be found. He followed that direction. At a gate that turned by the river-bank, twenty minutes from the inn, a small boy was seated. He was a Devonshire boy of the poorest moorland type, short, squat, and thick set. As Guy reached the gate, the boy rose and opened it, pulling his forelock twice or thrice, expectant of a ha'penny. "Has anybody gone down here?" Guy asked, in ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... was gladness, but without on the lone moorland there stalked a grim monster, named Grendel, whose dark heart was filled with anger and hate. To him the sound of song and laughter was deep pain, and he was fain to ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... length, reckoning that his arrival would take place about the time the lady had retired to her chamber, he set forth, accompanied by his trusty esquire. The road lay for some distance over a long high tract of moorland, while beautifully did the bright stars appear to shoot up from the black, bleak, level horizon. The moon seemed to smile suspiciously upon them, and even Hodge grew eloquent ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... I not as gay a lady-love As ever clipt in arms a noble knight? Am I not blithe as bird the live-long day? It pleases me to bear what you call pain, Therefore to me 'tis pleasure: joy and grief Are the will's creatures; martyrs kiss the stake— The moorland colt enjoys the thorny furze— The dullest boor will seek a fight, and count His pleasure by his wounds; you must forget, love, Eve's curse lays suffering, as their natural lot, On womankind, till custom makes it light. I know the use of pain: bar not the leech ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... three hundred yards Dick could distinguish the black beard and heavy shoulders of the enemy, who was gazing from his high point, not in the direction of the fugitives, but along the moorland path to "The Coach and Horses"—the path which lay open to his eye for ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... morning sunlights by the river Where in the early fall long grasses wave, Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver And sigh as if ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... You walk there with croquet and roses on the one side, and with floating loons and wild ducks on the other. In remoter places the path grows wilder, and has ramifications striking boldly across the peninsula through rough moorland and among great ledges of rock, where you may ramble for hours, out of sight of all but some sportsman with his gun, or some truant-boy with dripping water-lilies. There is always a charm to me in the inexplicable windings ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... melody of harps filled it with fierce hatred. From its wallow in the marshes, where the pestilent grey fog hung round its dwelling, the monster, known to all men as the Grendel, came forth, to kill and to devour. Through the dark night, across the lonely moorland, it made its way, and the birds of the moor flew screaming in terror before it, and the wild creatures of the desolate country over which it padded clapped down in their coverts and trembled as it passed. It came at length to ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... his way across a vast desert moorland, and came, after three days, into the barren hill country and among the rugged mountains of the South. There an earthquake had split the rocks asunder, and opened dark and bottomless gorges, and hollowed out many a low-walled cavern, where the light of day was never seen. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas of to-day stand out in English words like telegraph posts in a Connemara moorland. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... amusement or to ask, in any way, for alms. He had taken a lodging in the cottage of one of the fishermen, and on fine days he would wander out with his boy, a child some five years old, and, lying down on the moorland, would play soft tunes to himself. So he lived for three weeks; and then the end came suddenly. The child ran out one morning from his room crying and saying that daddy was asleep and he could not wake him, and on the fisherman going in he saw that life had been extinct for ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... Cumberland they passed the field of battle where Edward had lost sight of Fergus. Many bodies still lay upon the face of the moorland, but that of Vich Ian Vohr was not among them, and Edward passed on with some hope that in spite of the Bodach Glas, Fergus might have escaped his doom. They found Callum Beg, however, his tough skull cloven at last ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... feather-silent snow Thickens the air with strange delight, and lays A fairy carpet on the barren lea. No sun, yet all around that inward light Which is in purity,—a soft moonshine, The silvery dimness of a happy dream. How beautiful! afar on moorland ways, Bosomed by mountains, darkened by huge glens, (Where the lone altar raised by Druid hands Stands like a mournful phantom,) hidden clouds Let fall soft beauty, till each green fir branch Is ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... Susie, loving all the living creatures about her moorland home, and loved by them. The birds knew better than to come within reach of Tom, but they hardly paused in their busy nest-building as Susie passed by; only singing a little more gayly than before, which was their way of welcoming her, so ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... On a moorland slope where sheep and goats were dispersed among the rocks, there lay a young lad on his back, in a stout canvas cassock over his leathern coat, and stout leathern leggings over wooden shoes. Twilight was fast coming on; only a gleam ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as the weather was very mild and open, I was lying on the rough grass field that I have spoken of which borders a flat stretch of moorland. On this moorland in summer grew tall ferns, but now these had died and been broken down by the wind. Suddenly I woke up from my sleep to see a number of men walking and riding ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... my guide throughout the forenoon, lived from year's end to year's end with his son and half-a-dozen dogs for company. The level beams of the glowing August sun bathed in a golden glow the miles of purple moorland lying round us; air and scenery were good to breathe and to look on; and now, as the three of us sat on a turf seat outside the cottage door enjoying the soft sleepy inaction of the afternoon, a question of mine concerning the folk-lore of the district, after which, hardened ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... and ardent when ruin fell upon Cuckoo Valley. Its head rested on the slope of a high and sombre moorland, scattered with granite and china-clay; and by the small town of Ponteglos, where it widened out into arable and grey pasture-land, the Cuckoo river grew deep enough to float up vessels of small tonnage from the coast at the spring tides. I have seen there the boom of a trading schooner brush ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to shine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A village lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted. Beyond the still, shell-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and a half away, on a ridge that stood ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... moor, first the high ground above Miraumont, and beyond that the high ground of the Loupart Wood, and away to the east the bulk that makes the left bank of the Ancre River. What trees there are in this moorland were not then all blasted. Even in Beaumont Hamel some of the trees were green. The trees in the Ancre River Valley made all that marshy meadow like a forest. Looking out on all this, the first thought of the soldier was ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... they. For that very night, when all the guests had departed, and the evening mists had settled down over the river, a soldier, in the camp on the hillside, was awakened by a strange pattering of little feet on the dry bent[20] of the moorland. ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... bay into which the White Water runs, and they could trace the yellow glimmer of the river stretching into the island through a level valley of bog and morass. Far away towards the east lay the bulk of the island,—dark green undulations of moorland and pasture; and there, in the darkness, the gable of one white house had caught the clear light of the sky, and was gleaming ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... dear moorland, West-wind, in thy glory and pride! Oh! call me from valley and lowland, To walk by the ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... John who foresaw the decline in agriculture, and turned his father's attention from wheat-growing to mining. He opened up the granite and china-clay on the moorland beyond the town, and a railway line to bring these and other minerals down to the coast. He built ships, and in times of depression he bought them up, and made them pay good interest on their low prices. He bought up the ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wine, The fighter's strength, the echoing strife The high tumultuous lists of life— May I ne'er lag, nor hapless fall, Nor weary at the battle-call!... But when the even brings surcease, Grant me the happy moorland peace; That in my heart's depth ever lie That ancient land of heath and sky, Where the old rhymes and stories fall In kindly, soothing pastoral. There in the hills grave silence lies, And Death himself wears ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... before the sun rising; in the England that lay west of the Severn, none might carry bow and arrow or pointed knife. In this wild border district the checks which prevailed elsewhere against violent crime were unknown. The outlaw or stranger who fled to forest or moorland for hiding, might lawfully be slain by any man who met him. No "murder-fine" was known there. The king, not daring perhaps to interfere with the "liberties" of the west, may have sought to check crime by this order against arms; but such a law was practically ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... change in the atmosphere! If a fresh moorland breeze had swept through the little sitting-room at the White Cottage it could not have effected a ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... my comrade on that Christmas Eve long ago. It had been a bitter winter in the Isle of Man, and the ground was covered with snow. But the church bells rang merrily over the dark moorland, for Oiel Verree was peculiarly the people's service, and the ringers were ringing in the one service of the year at which the parishioners supplanted the Vicar, and appropriated the old parish church. In spite of the weather, the church was crowded with a motley throng, chiefly of young folks, ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had, a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense shame to his family. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... golden moorland side By holt and heath saw Balen ride And Launceor after, pricked with pride And stung with spurring envy: wide And far he had ridden athwart strange lands And sought amiss the man he found And cried on, till the stormy sound Rang ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... valley primroses, and I cannot describe the exquisite clear rose of apple-blossom, above the gnarled and twisted grey trunk, seen against this background of sombre brown and dun, and the penetrating blue of moorland sky. ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the singular variations of soil and occupation to be found in Staffordshire. From the densely-populated iron districts, and the model agriculture of disciples of the same school as Lord Hatherton, we can turn our faces to a vast moorland, forty miles square, stretching from where it is first seen on the banks of the railway to the banks of the Trent, as wild as any part of Wales or Scotland, intersected by steep hills, by deep valleys, covered with gorse and broom, dotted with peat marshes, tenanted by wild ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... who write am Stephen Douglas, of the moorland stock of the northern Douglases—kin to Douglaswater, and on the wrong side of the blanket to Drumdarroch himself. It has been the custom that one of the Douglases should in every generation be sent to the college to rear ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... round Takai is quite pretty—almost like Scots moorland. Yesterday we went for a picnic to a river at the opening of a pass—a most interesting place where not very long ago a native boy had been eaten by a tiger. You see, picnics in the jungle are not ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... wildest. Above the tiny stone-built village of Wastrel-dale the Muir Pike nods its massive head. Westward, the desolate Mere Marches, from which the Sylvesters' great estate derives its name, reach away in mile on mile of sheep infested, wind-swept moorland. On the far side of the Marches is that twin dale where flows the gentle Silver Lea. And it is there in the paddocks at the back of the Dalesman's Daughter, that, in the late summer months, the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... for a trumpet, of 'Horse! horse!' and 'Mount the prisoner!' resounded through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... six—four men, a woman, and a girl. In the road close by stood the motor-car which had brought them to the churchyard in the wake of the hearse, glistening incongruously in the grey Cornish setting of moorland ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... vast plain, like a bleak moorland in winter, only with little hillocks of ice here and there called hummocks, for the flat pieces of ice were all frozen hard together, and Ara wondered where "Greenland's icy mountains" ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... from the hills," she said, "which will be just the thing for the children. There's good fishing in the stream for yourself, captain, and you can't get a quieter and cheaper place in all England. I ought to know, for I was born upon the moorland but six miles away from it, and should have been there now if I hadn't followed ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... her voice. In these bygone days he had pleased himself with the fancy that the girl was somehow the product of all the beautiful aspects of Nature around her. It was the sea that was in her eyes, it was the fair sunlight that shone in her face, the breath of her life was the breath of the moorland winds. He had written verses about this fancy of hers; and he had conveyed them secretly to her, sure that she, at least, would find no defects in them. And many a time, far away from Loch Roag and from Sheila, lines of this conceit would wander through ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... busy a time as had been since the war began. The private telephone and telegraph wires between Whernside House and Settle and the aerograph apparatus at the observatory were working almost incessantly till dawn, sending and receiving messages between this remote moorland district and London and the seat of war, as ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... pupil, so was his brother, the great bishop Ceadda (Chad), who succeeded him in his abbacy. At Lindisfarne was wrought by Eadfrith (d. 721) the beautiful manuscript of the Gospels now preserved in the British Museum, and a little later the fine cover for it. Lastingham, founded on the desolate moorland of North Yorkshire, "among steep and distant mountains, which looked more like lurking-places for robbers and dens of wild beasts, than dwellings of men," upheld the traditions of the Columban houses for piety, asceticism, and studious ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... pines between them. An overgrowth of brambles and briony ran riot over all. Prosper rode up a dry river-bed, keeping steadily west, so far as it would serve him; found himself quagged ere a dozen painful miles, floundered out as best he might, and by evening was making good pace over a rolling bit of moorland through which ran a sandy road. It was the highway from Wanmouth to Market Basing and the north, if he had known. Ahead of him a solitary wayfarer, a brown bunch of a friar, from whose hood rose a thin neck and a shag of black hair round ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... Mudsplosh Camp is—or is going to be—a nobly planned and admirably equipped military centre. At present it consists of some three hundred wooden huts, in all stages of construction, covering about twenty acres of high moorland. The huts are heated with stoves, and will be delightfully warm when we get some coal. They are lit by—or rather wired for—electric light. Meanwhile a candle-end does well enough for a room only a hundred feet long. There are numerous other adjuncts to our comfort—wash-houses, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... played once more Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin', and while the strings wailed beneath his bow I shivered as of old, stirred by the winds of the past "roaring o'er Moorland craggy." Deep in my brain the sob of the song sank, filling my inner vision with flitting shadows of vanished faces, brows untouched of care, and sweet kind eyes lit by the firelight of a secure abundant hearth. I was lying once more before the fire in David's little cabin in the deep ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Tressilian cast a gloomy shade on all the objects with which he was surrounded. He compared the magnificent scenes which he here traversed with the deep woodland and wild moorland which surrounded Lidcote Hall, and the image of Amy Robsart glided like a phantom through every landscape which his imagination summoned up. Nothing is perhaps more dangerous to the future happiness of men of deep thought and retired habits than the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... of the climate did not give husbandry the same chances. In a propitious season, they would set fire to a stretch of moorland bristling with gorse and send the swing plow across the ground enriched with the cinders of the blaze. This yielded a few acres of rye, oats and potatoes. The best corners were kept for hemp, which furnished the distaffs and spindles ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... chief and his sons bore the woman in the litter to the mountains. They saw that the country was all like moorland. Then the chieftainess entered the house. There was a room there with a golden netting, like a mosquito-net. The three men were placed inside it. The chieftainess fed them herself. In the day-time numbers of women came in. They sat beside the golden mosquito-net, looking at the men. At nightfall ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... dreams about the life before her, that the disappointment was very bitter. The thought of seeing Lettice driving away in the carriage with Miss Carr and Mr Rayner brought with it a keen stab of pain, and the life at home seemed to stretch before her, still and uneventful, like a stretch of dreary moorland. Her pride forbade her showing her disappointment, since no one had expressed any satisfaction in retaining her company. Stay! there was one exception. Mr Rayner had said a few simple words of regret which had been as balm to the girl's sore heart. He, at least, was sorry ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the place, and all around it, [1] as of old, the curlews call, Dreary gleams [2] about the moorland ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... quail, and feel uneasy in his presence; and the female, who was above the middle age, and of a masculine appearance, had a harshness of voice and manner, that was disagreeable, even to the rustic wife of the moorland farmer. The young and beautiful female they attended—apparently not above eighteen, pale and dejected, her eyes red and swollen with weeping—had not, as yet, uttered a single word; but, apparently fearful of her attendants, especially the female, who sat close ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sorrow, and I, restrained by feelings of courtesy from quitting her side. I observed, however, that she 'kept time' with her hand—all unconsciously, no doubt—against the bench where we sat, while her thoughts were wandering about the moorland Cairn, which had that very morning received her husband's remains. I pitied her from my very heart. But, behold, just as I was addressing to her one of my most sympathizing looks, up came a brisk Highlander, whose step and figure in the dance ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... bend in the winding road, and the grey turrets of Gleneesh came in sight, high up on the other side of the glen, the moor stretching away behind and above it. As they wound up the valley to the moorland road which would bring them round to the house, the doctor could see, in the clear morning light, the broad lawn and terrace of Gleneesh, with its gay flower-beds, smooth gravelled walks, and broad stone parapet, from which was a drop almost ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... other angles. Its long doubled side faces Gaul and Germany. Its greatest breadth is said to be over two thousand three hundred and ten stadia, and its length not more than seven thousand one hundred and thirty-two stadia. In some parts 12 it is moorland, in others there are wooded plains, and sometimes it rises into mountain peaks. The island is surrounded by a sluggish sea, which neither gives readily to the stroke of the oar nor runs high under the blasts of the wind. I suppose this is because other lands ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... red moorland Rode on a summer's day; And the bees hummed, and the curlews Cried beside the way. The king rode, and was angry, Black was his brow and pale, To rule in a land of heather ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There choked by moorland ridges, Black with the growth of peat, Beneath the quaking surface The fetid floods would meet; Till rising, spreading ever Above the chalice green Of that fair Well, they covered The place where it had been. Then, near the careless convent, Within the hill's deep shade, ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... sides of the river, the wing on the right bank being protected from attack by the river Lippe, which falls into the Rhine at Wesel, and by a range of moorland hills called the Testerburg. The Dutch cavalry saw that the slopes of this hill were occupied by the Spaniards, but believed that their force consisted only of a few troops of horse. Young Count Philip of Nassau proposed ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... mountain brows, the rocks, the peaks are sleeping, Uplands and gorges hush! The thousand moorland things are silence keeping, The beasts under each bush Crouch, and the hived bees Rest in their honeyed ease; In the purple sea fish lie as they were dead, And each bird folds his wing over ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... by exclamations of sorrow for this misfortune. The search was fruitless: five sheep, pertaining to the flock which he conducted to pasture, were found drowned in one of the deep eddies; but the river was still too brown, from the soil of its moorland sources, to enable them to see what its deep shelves, its pools, and its overhanging and hazelly banks concealed. They remitted further search till the stream should become pure; and old man taking old man aside, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... of the settlement, except the hotel and the goods warehouse on the bank above the wharf. These appear to have been shot down into the middle of a moorland wilderness. But now, as the coach surmounts some rising ground, several homesteads come into view, scattered about within a distance of one or two miles. Beyond the paddocks surrounding these, all of the country ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... would spend the hours between breakfast and dinner ascending the bank of a hill-stream, dammed by the snow, swollen by the thaw, and now rushing with a roar to the valley; or fighting their way through wind and sleet to the top of some wild expanse of hill-moorland, houseless for miles and miles—waste bog, and dry stony soil, as far as eye could reach, with here and there a solitary stock or bush, bending low to the ground in the steady bitter wind—a hopeless region, save that it made the hope in their hearts ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... heavy-mullioned pile of grey granite dating from the Restoration, presented a long, low front to the moorland, a front beautified by a pillared porch with the Ruan arms sculptured above it, and at the back it was built round a square court, from which an arch, hollowed through the house itself, led into the farmyard. The windows were low-browed and deep-set, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... who 'watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground'. To see them at their best we must turn to the Wakefield (or Towneley) Miracle Play and read the pastoral scene (or, rather, two scenes) there. Here we come face to face with rustics pure and simple, downright moorland shepherds, homely, grumbling, coarsely clad, warm-hearted, abashed by a woman's tongue, rough in their sports. The real old Yorkshire stock of nearly six hundred years ago rises into life as ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... comic press gives itself up to senseless parrot-talk with each recurrence of the May month, no matter how warm and beautiful that month may be, was a "thing foregone and clean forgotten,"—and under the mild and beneficial influences of the mingled sea and moorland air, Helmsley gained a temporary rush of strength, and felt so much better, that he was able to walk down to the shore and back again once or twice a a day, without any assistance, scarcely needing even the aid of his stick to lean upon. The shore ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... snowdrift, at an altitude of twelve thousand feet, I one day gathered in a small area one hundred and forty-two varieties of plants. Areas of "eternal snows," though numerous, are small, and with few exceptions, above twelve thousand feet. Here and there above timber-line are many small areas of moorland, which, both in appearance and in vegetation, seem to belong in the ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... with elastic tread, the singer, a lad of about sixteen, walked swiftly over the elevated moorland, now descending into a hollow, now climbing a stiff slope, at whose top he could look over the sea, which spread away to north and west, one dazzling plain of damasked silver, dotted with red-sailed boats. Then down another slope facing the south, where for a ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... behind Keighley, the road Up to the heart of the moors Between heath-clad showery hills Runs, and colliers' carts Poach the deep ways coming down, And a rough, grimed race have their homes— There on its slope is built The moorland town. But the church Stands on the crest of the hill, Lonely and bleak;—at its side The parsonage-house and ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... him back the letter without a word. In dead silence we moved on, took a turning which led to a little narrow gate, and passed out of the grounds to the wild moorland country beyond. ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... sizes, bruisers of tender toes and trippers- up of wavering feet. When these impediments were passed, heather and slough followed. Here the steepness of the ascent was slightly mitigated; and here the exploring party of three turned round to look at the view below them. The scene of the moorland and the fields was like a feeble water-colour drawing half sponged out. The mist was darkening, the rain was thickening, the trees were dotted about like spots of faint shadow, the division-lines which mapped out the fields were all getting blurred together, ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... distances almost on the floor of the ravine. But though there are steep gradients to be climbed, and the engine labours heavily, there is scarcely sufficient time to get any idea of the astonishing scenery from the windows of the train, and you can see nothing of the huge expanses of moorland stretching away from the precipices on either side. So that we, who would learn something of this region, must make the journey on foot; for a bicycle would be an encumbrance when crossing the heather, and there are many places where a horse would be a source of danger. The sides of the valley ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... children in country places is a slate tied to a bit of string: this, being drawn along the road, constitutes a cart; and you may find it attended by the admiration of the entire young population of three or four cottages standing in the moorland ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... be racing him for a prize, leaping and thundering level with its banks; before he had time to wonder whether the bridge still stood he was up with it, over it and on the edge of the brae. Up the moorland road he went, carried rather than running, and where it loses itself in the first enclosure, being hard up against the wall, over he vaulted, across the field and over the further wall. Out then upon the open fell, where the heather makes ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... narrow track until, on an open space in the moorland, they came to one of the old lead-mine shafts, the mouth of which had been fenced in by a roughly built wall of stone gathered from its immediate surroundings. In this wall, extending from its parapet to the ground, was a wide gap: the ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... fair-haired Norse farmer came striding along, singing some old old song, as he carried a heavy log on his shoulder, past a seater or mountain meadow where the girls were pasturing their cows, much like Lucy's friends in the Tirol, out upon the grey moorland, where there was an odd little cluster of tents covered with skins, and droll little, short, stumpy people running ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... our journey been less sad, I should certainly have enjoyed it very much. The railway ran through some beautiful scenery, but it was the long coach journey at the end which won my admiration for the Rector's native county. I had never seen anything like these noble hills, these grand slopes of moorland stretching away on each side of us as we drove through a valley to which the river running with us gave its name. Not a quiet, sluggish river, keeping flat pastures green, reflecting straight lines of pollard willows, and constantly ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... beloved spire, thinking of Sister Avice ministering to her poor, and with a very definite fear of her own reception in the world and dread of her welcome at home. Yet there was a joy in being on horseback once more, for her who had ridden moorland ponies as soon as she ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deep rest, At the many star-isles That enjewel its breast— Where wild flowers, creeping, Have mingled their shade, On its margin is sleeping Full many a maid— Some have left the cool glade, and * Have slept with the bee— Arouse them my maiden, On moorland and lea— Go! breathe on their slumber, All softly in ear, The musical number They slumber'd to hear— For what can awaken ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Fifth at Agincourt without being discerned from among his knights; I can take my tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds; my garden gate opens on the latch to the public road, by day and night, without fear of any foot entering but my own, and my girl-guests may wander by road, or moorland, or through every bosky dell of this wild wood, free as the heather bees ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he dominated the wild glen that broke the wall of the Grampians above Drumtochty—where the snow-drifts were twelve feet deep in winter, and the only way of passage at times was the channel of the river—and the moorland district westward till he came to the Dunleith sphere of influence, where there were four doctors and a hydropathic. Drumtochty in its length, which was eight miles, and its breadth, which was four, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... away, and while, as yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the Surrey Hills. And this he did in no vainglorious spirit, with purpose of exalting himself above the county gentlemen, his neighbours, and showing how far better ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... stole him from the haunted dell, Who never more was seen of man. Now far from heaven, and safe from hell, Unknown of earth, he wanders free. Would that he might return and tell Of his mysterious Company! For we have tired the Folk of Peace; No more they tax our corn and oil; Their dances on the moorland cease, The Brownie stints his wonted toil. No more shall any shepherd meet The ladies of the fairy clan, Nor are their deathly kisses sweet On lips of any earthly man. And half I envy him who now, Clothed in her Court's enchanted green, By moonlit loch or ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... tower I wait, Or o'er the blustering moorland go; 10 I buy no praise at cheaper rate, Or what faint hearts may fancy so; For me, no joy in lady's bower, Or hall, or tourney, will I sing, Till the slow stars wheel round the hour That crowns my hero ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to my chamber under the gable, And the moon will lift her light In at my lattice from over the moorland Hollow and ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... That she must be a lady, Dudley was convinced. He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland at midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How had it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed: Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But still this lady was of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I said, in the architecture of the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may find,—next to this ocean-cottage ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... and I had a little secret shopping to do. And in the midst of it I caught the familiar tawny look which occasionally comes into my man-child's eyes. It's the look of dreaming, the look of brooding wildness where some unknown Celtic great-great-grandfather of a great-great-grandfather stirs in his moorland grave like a collie-dog in his afternoon sleep. And it all arose out of nothing more than a blind beggar sitting on an upturned nail-keg at the edge of the sidewalk and rather miraculously playing a mouth-organ and a guitar at one and the same time. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... little lonely stations they arrived at Trehenna. The guard opened the door and they stepped out on to the snow-covered platform. An oil lamp hung from the tiny pent-house roof that, structurally, was Trehenna Station. They looked around at the silent gloom of white undulating moorland, and it seemed a place where no man lived and only ghosts could have a bleak and unsheltered being. A porter came up and helped the guard with the luggage. Then they realized that the station was built on a small embankment, ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... square-headed unconnected posts, along the heads of which Cilla three times hopped backwards and forwards for the mere drollery of the thing, with vigour unabated by the long walk over the dreary moorland fields ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the scatter-brained crew, the one who made the most sensible suggestions, and to whom—though they teased her a little and called her "Grannie"—they all turned in the end for help and advice. Jess was slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all these things. Peachy once described her as a living incarnation ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... over the moors and up into the forest—who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer. Thus was made the road through the great Almenning—the common ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... tract of road, marked only by the bare space trodden by feet of man and horse, and yet, in truth, the highway between Berwick and Edinburgh, which descended from a heathery moorland into a somewhat spacious valley, with copsewood clothing one side, in the midst of which rose a high mound or knoll, probably once the site of a camp, for it still bore lines of circumvallation, although it was entirely deserted, except by the wandering shepherds of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remarkable. Nor could anything be better than Miss Mulholland's treatment of external nature. She never shrieks over scenery like a tourist, nor wearies us with sunsets like the Scotch school; but all through her book there is a subtle atmosphere of purple hills and silent moorland; she makes us live with nature and not merely look ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of a description of the town itself. I have said that the country for miles all around was moorland; high above the level of the sea towered the purple crags, whose summits were crowned with greensward that stole down the sides of the scaur a little way in grassy veins. Here and there a brook forced its way from the heights down to the sea, making its channel into a valley more ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fishing, shipbuilding, and seafaring on the coast. The manufacture of silk, woollen, and linen goods, now occupying so many millions of folk in the North and the Midlands, was then carried on mainly in the small towns and villages, or even in the lonely wayside or moorland cottage. The great manufacturing towns, such as Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield are now, were nowhere to be found in the England of Queen Anne; but their day was coming. London was the great ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... feet above the fertile valley of the Youle, stretched a waste of moorland. Here all the trees were gnarled and dwarfed above the patches of rust-coloured bracken; save only the delicate silver birch, which swayed ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... bleak slopes of Starcross Moor. There was a hollow in the hillside where a few pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two beneath them seemed utterly alone in the moorland solitude. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... price of sheep. It was clear that he was liked and respected. Sometimes he turned aside to examine tottering gates and blocked ditches, and commented to Foster upon the economics of farming and the burden of taxes. The latter soon gathered that there was not much profit to be derived from a small moorland estate and his host was far from rich. It looked as if it had cost him, and perhaps his family, some self-denial to send the money that had once or twice enabled Lawrence, and Foster with ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... the merry daffodils, Fling golden music to the hills! And how the hills send echoing down, Through wind-swept turf and moorland brown, The murmurs of a thousand rills That mock the song-birds' liquid trills! The hedge released from Winter's frown Shews jewelled branch and willow crown; While all the earth with pleasure trills, ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... the sun His chariot drove o'er Marston wold: A rippling sea of amber wheat That floods the moorland vale with gold. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... merry merry Christmas eve, I went sighing past the church across the moorland dreary— 'Oh! never sin and want and woe this earth will leave, And the bells but mock the wailing round, they sing so cheery. How long, O Lord! how long before Thou come again? Still in cellar, and in garret, and on moorland dreary The orphans moan, and widows weep, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... isle, reposing there as the monstrous birth of a dreary and degraded superstition, the enemy of mental cultivation, and destined to keep the human understanding in the same dark unproductive state as the moorland waste that lay outstretched around. I was soon joined by my guide and by two men carrying oars, with whom I descended from the ridge on which I was perched, towards the shores of the lake, where there was a sort of boat, ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... evidently leading out of the town. It had grown darker, but the moon had risen, and by her light at some little distance the children saw the same silvery thread that they had noticed winding along below them from the high moorland some ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... Clyst St Laurence, Honiton Clyst, and so on. At Clyst St George a small estate used to be held on the curious tenure of 'the annual tender of an ivory bow.' About two miles east of the river the land begins to slope upwards to the moorland of Woodbury Common, and on one part of the heath are the remains of an ancient entrenchment called Woodbury Castle. 'No castle at all, built with little cost,' says Westcote, 'without either lime or hewn stone: only a hasty fortification made of mother-earth for the present ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... the earth, his birth-ties, and her claims on his allegiance. This gives a rare savor to his handling of what with most novelists is often mere background. Egdon Heath was mentioned; the setting in "The Return of the Native" is not background in the usual sense; that mighty stretch of moorland is almost like the central actor of the drama, so potent is its influence upon the fate of the other characters. So with "The Woodlanders" and still other stories. Take away this subtle and vital relation ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton |
