"Sere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... memory of grayling fishing up to my colonial interlude is of a wet, muggy November day in Herefordshire. It was late in the month, and as the previous week had been marked by early frost, the sere leaves, having lost their grip, were rattling down on the water with every gust, and, indeed, from the mere weight of the rain. It was pretty practice, dropping the flies so as to avoid these little impediments; but it wasted time and strained the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... fields were bare, the frosts began to pinch, and the young ones longed to see the world; so they must go. The day they started, the whole flock flew to the great house, to say good-by. Some dived and darted round and round it, some hopped to and fro on the sere lawn, some perched on the chimney-tops, and some clung to the window ledges; all ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... bed of withered and sere leaves and as one distraught, wandered through the shadows of the misty, weird night. In the wood and by the waters he wandered, while the night wore on and the moon held its way—still a lustrous ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... waiting here, The chill east wind is sighing, The autumn tints are sere, The summer flowers are dying. The river's sullen way Winds on through vacant meadows, The dying light of day Strives vainly with ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... had not taunted her, and he had not called her Die for many a day before. She put down the decanter and cowered back with a sense of guilt which made her glowing beauty pale, fade, wither, like the sere leaf washed by the heavy tears ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the reason. So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,—then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished. He stood by ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... flickering patches of morning sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss or over the sere pine-spills. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... circles, Names renowned on fields of battle, Honored names in senate chamber. And the sacred pile was cherished, By each absent son and daughter. Many years beyond this period, (Well I ken the oft told story,) On a sunny day in autumn, When the leaves were "sere and yellow," When the woods were melancholy, There were little children clustered In this notable old school-room; There were little children striving, For the prize-book and the medal, Children ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a "hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Saturday afternoon when her father was not with them, did she get Dutch Debby to break through her retired habits and accompany them, and then it was not summer but late autumn. There was an indefinable melancholy about the sere landscape. Russet refuse strewed the paths and the gaunt trees waved fleshless arms in the breeze. The November haze rose from the moist ground and dulled the blue of heaven with smoky clouds amid which the sun, a red sailless boat, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night— It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measure life ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... what wilt thou with me? The year Declined; in the still air the thrush piped clear, The languid sunshine did incurious peer Among the thinned leaves of the forest sere. ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... virginal self-surrender as did those spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with the communicant's ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... now, and the long stretches of pasturage and meadow land outside the walls were blasted and sere when the old mute, whom I had seen twice before, let me out of the big gate. When I returned he was there to open the gate for me and ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... his views; and when he frowned, he did it not through love of frowning, but that he hoped, by gathering a cloud upon his brows, to bring down from those eyes upon which he frowned such showers of repentance as refresh and make green the soul sin-withered and sere from the harsh and hot suns of vice. He was, in truth, a worthy and good man; somewhat narrow of mind and bigoted of creed, it may be, but utterly incapable of committing an ungenerous or dishonorable action. Still, greatly as he loved ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... not only inwardly in its own privy substance,[159] by virtue of the onehead to our Lord that lieth in knowing and loving of God, in light and ghostly brenning of Him, in transforming of the soul in to the Godhead; but also many other comforts, savours, sweetnesses, and wonderful feelings on sere[160] or sundry manners, after that our Lord vouchethsafe to visit His creatures here in earth, and after that the soul profiteth and waxeth in charity. Some soul, by virtue of charity that God giveth it, is so cleansed, that all creatures, and all that he heareth, ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... chill and drear, December's leaf is dun and sere; No longer Autumn's glowing red Upon our forest hills is shed; No more beneath the evening beam The wave reflects their crimson gleam; The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold And wraps him closely from the cold: His dogs no ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... sere And autumn leaves decayed, The mournful forest tells how quickly fade The glories of the year! When in the silent tomb oppressed, Frail man, with weight of days, Sinks to his tranquil rest; Contented nature but obeys Her everlasting law,— The general doom awakes no shuddering awe! But, mortals, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear, Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon? Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere? For your sake, I would go and seek the year, Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune, Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon Streaks with a ghostly finger, and her sneer Pulls at my lengthening shadow. Yes, 'tis that! ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... to dine, and were staying elsewhere. He saw no more of them; and on reflection he was not deeply concerned, for what earthly woman, going off in a freak as Marcia had done, and keeping silence so long, would care for a belated friendship with him now in the sere, even if he were to take the trouble to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... thou art far away, And I'm disconsolate to-day, In sorrow sighing; My pleasant thoughts lie like the leaves, O'er whose cold heads AEolus grieves, Complaining, dying. 'Tis weary, dreary, dreary here, The yellow leaves are falling sere, With mournful rustling, The little bird has hush'd his song, And close the greener boughs among He's coldly nestling. How sad the high wind's sounding dirge, As 'twere old ocean's moaning surge, Around ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... provoking will now be softened down. No doubt by this time they are married. Where have they gone? The continent is unsettled, and they have often already been there. Perhaps they have gone to Scotland? No doubt they have. And perhaps before the leaves are sere we may find them out among the sea lochs of the beautiful Frith of Clyde, or under the shadow ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... These figures—kings, princes, duchesses, queens—all are real to me now, and all are infinitely pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. With what inalienable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded silks, flaunting sere ruffles of point-lace, which at a touch now would be shivered like cobwebs! My heart goes out to them through the glass that divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them company, always. I think they like me. I am afraid they will miss me. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... girls, quench the lights, remove Golden cups and garlands sere, all the feast; away Lutes and lyres and Lalage; close the gates, above Write upon the lintel this; Time is done for play! Thou hast had thy fill of love, eaten, drunk; the show Ends at last, 'twas long ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... alive. One sunny morning, he rose from his rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew, and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent. It was a last look. He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon the bright spot in the rug, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... breast, she dropp'd upon the grave. 'And this was her's,' said I, decoring with a band Of mildest pearls Amelia's milder hand. 'Nay, I will wear it for her sake,' she said: For dear to maidens are their rivals dead. And so, She seated on the black yew's tortured root, I on the carpet of sere shreds below, And nigh the little mound where lay that other, I kiss'd her lips three times without dispute, And, with bold worship suddenly aglow, I lifted to my lips a sandall'd foot, And kiss'd it three times thrice ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... sweet flowers, tho' sere and dead, Can by their fragrance bring Remembrance of the days long fled Again on Memory's wing. So many a kindly smile I'll mourn With deep and fond regret; For though I never may ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... While one sere leaf, that parting Autumn gilds, Trembles upon the thin, and naked spray, November, dragging on his sunless day, Lours, cold and fallen, on the watry fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... a tall and erect cross. The upper fields harmonise with the lower. The Christian painting displays a vigorous and stately tree between two younger palm-trees; the pagan picture has the same symbols; but the middle tree is in the sere and yellow leaf, whilst a Dryad issuing from the roots flourishes an axe to cut it down. The allusion is not to be mistaken. The sun of paganism has set: the axe is already at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... 'mong the fern-stalks green,— Or dreameth of elves 'neath the forest treen: He wrappeth him up when the oak leaves sere And the ripe acorns fall, at the wane o' the year; And he tippleth at Yule, by the log's cheery glow.— Come, jollily trowl The brown round bowl, And pledge the bold swineherd ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... lay sere and brown like a piece of faded tapestry beneath the November sun that, peering through the dust-laden air, seemed old and worn with his efforts to warm the poor ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... expired in fight—the brands still rusted in their bony hands; in plague and famine some. Earth's cities had no sound or tread, and ships were drifting with the dead to shores where all was dumb. Yet, prophet-like, that Lone One stood, with dauntless words and high, that shook the sere leaves from the wood as if a storm passed by, saying—"We are twins in death, proud Sun! thy face is cold, thy race is run, 'tis mercy bids thee go; for thou ten thousand years hast seen the tide ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... is "an inheritance ... that fadeth not away." It shall not be as the garlands offered by men—green to-day and to-morrow sere and yellow. "Its leaf also shall not wither." It shall always retain its freshness, and shall offer me a continually fresh delight. And these are all ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... threads to weave her nest, She seeks and gathers there or here; But spins it from her faithful breast, Renewing still, till leaves are sere. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... mellow October day, when the air was full of an exhilarating freshness which made the spirits rise and the blood dance healthily in the veins. The old orchard wore its holiday attire. Goldenrod and asters fringed the mossy walls. Grasshoppers skipped briskly in the sere grass, and crickets chirped like fairy pipers at a feast. Squirrels were busy with their small harvesting. Birds twittered their adieux from the alders in the lane, and every tree stood ready to send down its shower of red or yellow apples at the first shake. Everybody ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... variety than ours, we come to the wilderness of Coradine, which seems barren and desolate to our sight, accustomed to the deep verdure of woods and valleys, and the blue mists of an abundant moisture. There a stony soil brings forth only thorns, and thistles, and sere tufts of grass; and blustering winds rush over the unsheltered reaches, where the rough-haired goats huddle for warmth; and there is no melody save the many-toned voices of the wind and the plover's wild cry. There dwell the children of Coradine, on the threshold of ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... undoes him, Doth cleave the brisket bone, upon the spoon Of which a little gristle grows—you call it Robin Hood. The raven's bone. Marian. Now o'er head sat a raven On a sere bough, a grown, great bird, and hoarse, Who, all the while the deer was breaking up, So croaked and cried for 't, as all the huntsmen, Especially old Scathlock, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other gods of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. For some six or eight enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity, I was translated into a heaven of adoration which ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... ready to deny on the Gospels, to her and to himself; and yet, at bottom, if we read with the microscope, there are symptoms, and it is not deniable. How should it? Leafy May, hot June, by degrees comes October, sere, yellow; and at last, a quite leafless condition,—not Favonius, but gray Northeast, with its hail-storms (jealousies, barren cankered gusts), your main wind blowing. "EMILIE FAIT DE L'ALGEBRE," sneers he once, in an inadvertent moment, to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall; hedgerows glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the rare one), ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... the corner of the demolished abode, made his way through a press of sere cabbage palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blinding expanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a bright rim over corrugated and pitted rock, where shallow ultramarine pools spread gardens of sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... not come on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in glory, I never saw them fuller of purple bloom. I wanted you to see them at their best; they are just turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write and ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... is bare and lone The stony garden waste and sere With blight of breezes ocean blown To pinch the wakening of the year; My kindly friends with busy cheer My wretchedness could plainly show. They tell me I am lonely here— What do they know? ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of lyrics. In his latest and longest production, Don Juan, he tells us that his 'sere fancy has ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Coulee.—The grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes that were destined to see you! The little birds that come and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind! They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell us of it—the wise men who live or have ever lived ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... one white eye and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in. This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest of the day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed it, for I did not, but because I dreaded ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... and good man were to be so few on earth. He was then about sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to "the sere and yellow leaf" of life. But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early. In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... from the cold and stormy North, With a rush and a roar I hurry forth, I toss from the trees the dead leaves down, The withered leaves all sere and brown, And sway the branches to and fro As on my way I whirling go. At crack and crevice I slip in, And make a lively sounding din. Swift I come and swift away, With you I can no longer stay, For I am wanted elsewhere now, And so ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... low by autumn's wind and rain, Through husks that, dry and sere, Unfolded from their ripened charge, Shone out the yellow ear; Beneath, the turnip lay concealed 5 In many a verdant fold, And glistened in the slanting light ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Pertwood and about Lidyard as good butter is made as any in England, but the cheese is not so good. About Lidyard, in those fatt grounds, in hott weather, the best huswives cannot keep their cheese from heaving. The art to keep it from heaving is to putt in cold water. Sowre wood-sere grounds doe yield the best cheese, and such are Cheshire. Bromefield, in the parish of Yatton, is so - sower and wett - and where I had better cheese made than anywhere in ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... night, quiet and dark but for the periodical fanbeam of an enemy searchlight from the slope of an opposite hill: a mild rain had been falling, falling, ceaselessly, plashingly, over muddy ploughland or sere grass, over the intricacy of trenchwork behind the firing lines and the dreary expanse of no man's land between them: falling over wire entanglements from which dangled rags of uniform and rags of flesh: falling on faces of the unburied dead that it was helping ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... they have confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... skies, sere leaves tossing, sad winds sobbing, and rains that wept for days and nights together, on dead flowers and dying grasses, moaned itself away at last, and December swept into its place with a good rousing ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... needless dead! That great soul whose beautiful body is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside—could it not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain devotion? Would one exception have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the divine, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... been a dark russet colour. Bayard, a derivative of bay, was the name of several famous war-horses. Cf. Blank and Blanchard. The name Soar is from the Old French adjective sor, bright yellow. It is of Germanic origin and cognate with sere. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... a roaring wind, It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails That were so thin and sere. ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... have you flown, bright dreams? Has that rude hand Sufficed to dash to naught your frail creations? Sad thoughts and humors black now fill my soul. So his rough foot hath bruised the dewy grass, And left it sere. Why should his harsh words touch me? The truth of yesterday is false to-day. How could I know, dear God! How might I guess The bitter sweetness, the delicious pain! A new heart fills my breast, as soft and weak And melting as a tear, unto its lord; But kindled with quick courage to endure, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... sere, bare hillside on which neither trees nor brushwood grew. It amounted to a natural clearing, acres in extent. Lockley swept his eyes around. There were many thick-foliaged small trees attempting to advance into the clear space. He grunted ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... April feature, and one that delights me very much, is the perfect emerald of the spring runs while the fields are yet brown and sere,—strips and patches of the most vivid velvet green on the slopes and in the valleys. How the eye grazes there, and is filled and refreshed! I had forgotten what a marked feature this was until I recently ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... when sirris-shaws were sere, An' the nichts were lang and mirk, In braw new breeks, wi' a gowden ring, Oor Jock gaed to ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... you sowing to the flesh, O youth? Have you turned your back upon the truth? Are you scattering seeds of evil From the garner of the devil? Are you thinking of the harvest By and by? Soon will spring and summer pass, Brown and sere will grow the grass; No time then for good seed-sowing: You and I Must gather what we've sown, forsooth. Are you sowing ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... experience together, Richling, is the one great light place in my life; and to me, to-day, sere as I am, the sweet—the sweetest sound—on God's green earth"—the corners of his mouth quivered—"is the name of Alice. Take care of Mary, Richling; she's a priceless treasure. Don't leave the making and sustaining of the home sunshine ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... upper window of the house of Morelos looked out upon a court in which two palm trees grew. They had been tall and flourishing. One might see them from the court-room. But for a year they had been shedding their leaflets and turning sere. Tonight their yellow stems had clashed and whispered until the wind was down, leaving the night sullen, brooding, thick, starless, with dashes of rain and a raw chill on the ground that brought out all the malefic odors of the pavement. The window on the side toward the court was closed ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... dropped upon her lap. The spell of this incomparable sorcerer was upon her imagination; the sluggish, lurid tarn of Usher; the pale, gigantic water lilies, nodding their ghastly, everlasting heads over the dreary Zaire; the shrouding shadow of Helusion; the ashen skies, and sere, crisped leaves in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, hard by the dim lake of Auber—all lay with grim distinctness before her; and from the red bars of the grate the wild, lustrous, appalling eyes of Ligeia ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Shall some one deck thee, over and down, Up and about, with blossoms and leaves? Fix his heart's fruit for thy garland-crown, Cling with his soul as the gourd-vine cleaves, Die on thy boughs and disappear 640 While not a leaf of thine is sere? Or is the other fate in store, And art thou fitted to adore, To give thy wondrous self away, And take a stronger nature's sway? I foresee and could foretell Thy future portion, sure and well: But those ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... ethnological fact. Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... the tienda roof as if they were undergoing a second burning. The black shadow of a chimney on the whitewashed adobe wall was like a door or cavernous opening in the wall itself; the tops of the olive and pear trees seen above it were russet and sere already in the fierce light. Even the moist breath of the sea beyond had quite evaporated before it crossed the plaza, and now rustled the leaves in the Mission garden with ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... hurried fast on during this interview, and their absence at the castle would be subject of remark, if not of alarm. As they arose to leave the fountain which had been witness of their mutual engagement, an arrow whistled through the air, and struck a raven perched on the sere branch of an old oak, near to where they had been seated. The bird fluttered a few yards and dropped at the feet of Lucy, whose dress was stained with ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... house-boats and barges, or gather together at King's, or Hall's, and industriously promulgate small talk and tobacco-smoke. All is gay and bustling. Although the feet of the strollers in the Christ Church meadows rustle through the sere and yellow leaf, yet rich masses of brown and russet foliage still ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... front porch. It was a fine December evening, as mild as autumn; there had been no snow, and the long fields, sloping down from the homestead, were brown and mellow. A weird, dreamy stillness had fallen upon the purple earth, the windless woods, the rain of the valleys, the sere meadows. Nature seemed to have folded satisfied hands to rest, knowing that her long, wintry slumber was coming upon her. Out to sea, a dull, red sunset faded out into somber clouds, and the ceaseless voice of many waters came up ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... palsy, sere and old, Waiting at the gates of gold, Spake he with his dying breath: "Life is done, but what is death?" Then, in answer to the king, Fell a sunbeam on his ring, Showing by a heavenly ray: "Even this shall ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... cannonading ceased and the old man halted in his tracks, his gaze riveted upon the wood. For several minutes he saw no sign of what was transpiring behind that screen of sere and yellow autumn leaves, and then a man came running out, and after ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sought thee in the later year, I sought, but found thee there no more; Only a rigid stalk and sere A withered head in silence bore, Or swung, responsive to the sigh Of the stray wind ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... replying: "Nah![37] I breathe upon the forests, And the leaves fall sere and yellow; Then I shake my locks and snow falls, Covering all the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... I will not, hold me still; My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; 20 Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; Stigmatical in making, ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... my heart was stirred with pity; I took down the Cicero, and lit on a sheet of yellow paper covered with faded manuscript, which, of course, I did not read. I turned to the hearth, tossed on the fire the sere old paper, which blazed at once, and then, hearing the words pax vobiscum, I looked round. But I was alone. After a few minutes, devoted to private ejaculations, I returned to the dining-room; and that is all my story. Your maids need no longer dread ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... sharp reprimand at the way he handled the luggage. The Major clambered in, the oxen started slowly. As soon as they had passed through the ugly village they turned out of the woods into a narrow road through sandy plains, an interminable road it seemed to Felice. Last year's sere leaves rattled on the scrub oaks; the wind-blown juniper bushes made dark spots against the wet brown of the sand and the cart swayed lumberingly through the heavy road. The girl was cold and tired and hungry but she held her head high ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... summer, and the earth was golden and red; and the sky was folded in lawny clouds, which the breeze was lifting, revealing beautiful spaces of blue. All the abundant hedgerows were red with the leaf of the wild cherry, and the oak woods wore masses of sere and russet leafage. Spreading beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood. Sprays trembled on naked ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... after night your horse treads down alone The sere damp fern, night after night you sit Holding the bridle like a man of stone, Dismal, unfriended: what ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... inexorable will, and powder, paint, and crafty clothing can no longer hide his ravages, then the virtuous woman triumphs, probably for the first time in her life. They are both old, she and the courtesan, but she is sometimes beautiful—old, grey, and sere, but venerable, charming—and little children love her, and younger women bring their troubles—ay, and their joys, reverently to her, feeling a benediction in the touch of the pure, withered hand. While the courtesan—alas! a ridiculous garish absurdity, a grim ghost of past merriment, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading trees; which bids us seek Some better shroud, some better warmth to cherish Our limbs benummed, ere this diurnal star Leave cold the night, how we his gathered beams Reflected may with matter sere foment; Or, by collision of two bodies, grind The air attrite to fire; as late the clouds Justling, or pushed with winds, rude in their shock, Tine the slant lightning; whose thwart flame, driven down Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine; And sends ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... hangs the world beside his bier, Our words are sobs, our cry or praise a tear: We are the smitten mortal, we the weak. We see a spirit on earth's loftiest peak Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: See a great Tree of Life that never sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak; Such ending is not death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart,—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... amongst huge boulders; the path disappeared; out of the oaks and alder high cliffs of limestones began to lift themselves. The morning was unusually dark and grey, even for October, and as leaves, brown and sere though they were, still clustered thickly on the trees, Copplestone quickly found himself in a gloom that would have made a nervous person frightened. He also found that his forward progress became increasingly difficult. At the foot of a tall cliff which suddenly rose up before him ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... they were ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crisped and sere, as I sat in the porch chair and regarded our neighbor's patch of woodland; and I thought: The skies may be ashen and sober, and the leaves may be crisped and sere, but in a maple wood we may dispense with the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... which shocked contemporaries, and which, by the way, has the very large first title of Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are told in a style which is the oddest compound ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Wednesday, the 22nd February. During the day large numbers visited the sorrowing house, and gazed for the last time on the features of the revered dead. As was to be expected, the larger number were, like the venerable deceased, far into "the sere and yellow leaf," and many who had known him for a long time could scarce restrain the unbidden tear as a flood of recollections surged up at the sight of the still ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... entering the vestibule, he saw something that he had never seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few steps over ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... front of a great, rambling, old house, set in the midst of a wide lawn, brown and sere now with approaching winter, and surrounded by huge, knotted, gnarled, old oaks, whose dry leaves still clung to the twisted branches and rustled in the crisp air. A fat, sleek, black Tabby lay asleep on the warm porch-rail; a gaunt, ungainly greyhound ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... am I of lovers sad and sere For waiting long drawn out and expectation drear. My patience underneath the loss of friends and folk With pallor's sorry garb hath clad me, comrades dear. Abasement, misery and heart-break after those I suffer who endured before me many a year. All through the day its light and when the night ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... bathed in blood From sunset light in a crimson flood, We wandered under the young teak trees Whose branches whined in the light night breeze; You led me down to the water's brink, "The Spring where the Panthers come to drink At night; there is always water here Be the season never so parched and sere." Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men? I fain would have ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... premised, If thou wilt clasp the military cloak O'er thy right shoulder, and with legs astride Await the onward rush of shielded men: Hie thee to Egypt. Age overtakes us all; Our temples first; then on o'er cheek and chin, Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time. Up and do somewhat, ere thy limbs are sere. ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days! It was so remote as to be ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... too the blow, the unwept scar; Mine too the flames that sere; And on my breast not one proud star That leaves a brother's heaven bare. Life is the search of God For His own unity; I walk stone-bare till all are shod, No ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... thought worthy of inclusion. I can only say that the fact that an artist has created one work of high merit makes him a good composer in my opinion, whether or no he has ever written another, and whether or no he has afterward fallen into the sere and yellow school of trash. So Gray's fame is perennial,—one ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... for sporting, the lusty Tarascon race cherishes one love: ballad-singing. There's no believing what a quantity of ballads is used up in that little region. All the sentimental stuff turning into sere and yellow leaves in the oldest portfolios, are to be found in full pristine lustre in Tarascon. Ay, the entire collection. Every family has its own pet, as is known ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... ask," returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you pretty soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his head was like a baldness ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... opera it was so exciting and so wonderful that everything else was wiped out of her mind. In the front of the box she sat—its sole ornament—against a background of Mrs. Kirkham's contemporaries, withered and sere in contrast with her lily-pure freshness. In the entr'actes the hostess recalled the opera house in its heyday when the Bonanza Kings occupied their boxes with the Bonanza Queens beside them, when everyone was rich, and all the women wore diamonds. The old ladies cackled over their memories, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... rustles by the crisp leaf sere, Sadly wail the lonely night-winds, sweeping sea-ward, chill and drear, Sullen dash the restless waters 'gainst a bleak and rock-bound shore, While the sea-birds' weird voices ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... As nature puts on her autumn tints it becomes autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage. Do you remember my writing to you about a peasant boy shortly after my arrival here? I have just made inquiries about him in Walheim. They say he has been dismissed from his service, and is now avoided by every ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... to the window and stood for some minutes looking out at the plain. Its sere grasses, protruding out of the snow, hissed and bent in the wind. In its cheerless winter colors it was a ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... fifth and sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... it is, To clink happy rhymes, and fling On the canvas scenes of bliss, When we are half famishing!— When your "jersey" rips in spots, And your hat's "forget-me-nots" Have grown tousled, old and sere— It is ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... linger. Lilith, list glad sounds That greet thine ear. Slow cycles will pass on And in the time-to-be-bright years, grow wan; Old planets fade, new stars shall dimly burn, But not to Eden's peace shalt thou return. Oft from thy yearning heart glad hope shall fail. Thy fruit of life lift bloom all sere and pale. Certain, small comfort bides, when joy is gone, In Great or Less. Grim Sorrow waits to lead thee on. Sorrow! Thou hast not seen her pallid face. In thy most troubled dream she had no place"— "Nay, I depart," she said, with lips ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... a poet's page The blest reverse he proved: How sweet to pass life's pilgrimage, From purple youth to sere old age, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... Poe! It is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white walls, and clothe it in a mystic veil of unseen tears. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... body-tints, yet beautiful. There were no maples here, as in the East, to add a glorious crimson to the scene; this was given by shrubs, not by trees. The tints were certainly, in the larger growths, less delicate here than there; the poplar's chrome was darker, the willow's mottled chrome more sere. But there was the exquisite pale canary of the birch, the blood-red and yellow of the wild rose, which glows in both hues, the rich crimson of the red willow, with its foil of ivory berries, and the ruddy copper of the high-bush cranberry. These, with many other of the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... these destructive worms, and I have ordered a barrel of it from the city. I intend to spread a layer of this Paris green over all our flower and vegetable beds; the contrast thus presented to the dull, sere brown of our lawn will be very pleasing to the eye. In fact, I am not sure that it would not be cheaper to color our whole lawn with Paris green than to attempt to revise it with water, which can be used with legal liberality only between the first of ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... female and the male plant. A well-known case is that of the hemp-plant, where the sexes are indistinguishable up to the period of fertility, but when the male plants have shed their pollen, and thus fulfilled their duty of fertilising the female plants, they cease to grow, turn yellow and sere, and if at all crowded wither and die. Many other examples might be cited, but the question is too wide to enter on here. See Lester ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it is; a thing that Nature does not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid Candour, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also in these days declaring itself nought, unable to keep the world ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... its height now. For weeks there had been no rain, and the Pacific side of the Isthmus was growing sere and yellow beneath the ceaseless glare of the sun. The musty dampness of the rainy season had disappeared, the steady trade-winds breathed a dreamy languor, and the days fled past in one long, unending procession of brilliant sameness. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... many here Of the yellow leaf and sere, Who are anxious, aye, and ready To respond unto Your call; Yet You pass them by unheeding, And You set our hearts to bleeding! "O," you mutter, "God, how cruel Do Your ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets, across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big, periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... shining hair across her brow, She went into the garden fading now; Vanity of vanities the Preacher saith— And if one sighed to think that it was sere, She smiled to think that it would bloom next year! She ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... know what you're thinking. You're thinking that forty's just the right age for me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... spring-like as yourself. And for you, aunt, I will arrange an autumn arraying,—a costume soft, yet bright, like the autumn days which the Americans call 'Indian summer,'—something which will almost make one wish to fall into the sere and yellow leaf of life in the hope of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... little home." Then, deep in its quiet mossy bed, Sheltered from sun and shower, The grateful worm spun its winter tomb, In the shadow of the flower. And Clover guarded well its rest, Till Autumn's leaves were sere, Till all her sister flowers were gone, And her winter sleep drew near. Then her withered leaves were softly spread O'er the sleeping worm below, Ere the faithful little flower ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... aware, as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking a somewhat ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... right in saying that charges of any kind were difficult of digestion: Yet, even at that moment, Elizabeth had no more attached subjects in England than sere the burghers of the Netherlands; who were as anxious ever to annex their territory ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... riot, the dominant tone of which was green. It was green, green, green—the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn. There were orange green, gold green, and a copper green. And all these greens were rich green beyond description; and yet the richness and the greenness passed even as we ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... rhymes rudely strung with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds; Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses, Insatiable summer oppresses Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses, And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... like a tree In bulk doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere; A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night,— It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see, And in short measures life ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... stretched out in limitless rolling swells of prairie until they met the blue sky that on every hand bent down to touch them. In spring brightly green, and spangled with wild flowers, by midsummer this prairie had grown sere and yellow. Clumps of dark green cottonwoods marked the courses of the infrequent streams—for most of the year the only note of color in the landscape, except the brilliant sky. On the wide, level river bottoms, sheltered by the ...
— When Buffalo Ran • George Bird Grinnell
... early old, this "child of hate," as Wotan long ago called him, sere and pallid, totally unglad and hating the glad. He is the tool created by Alberich—even as Siegmund was Wotan's tool,—to win back for him the Ring. From his Nibelung father he has more than human powers and knowledge. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... his pouting lips And shook his curly head, "Farewell, old man, the forest calls; I like you not," he said. "Your flesh is dried, your ribs are lean, You are too lank and sere, Your voice is harsh, your words are grim And do not please mine ear. The great god Pan is all I need And all I wish to know, My Father Pan, the shepherd's god, And now, old ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling. These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation. From one of these, who in life had been the famous statesman Peter ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... man can stride four and a-half feet without the smallest effort, he can't be quite in the sere and yellow. That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden walk which he had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone round, and Square-toes had hopped over. There is no mystery about it at all. I am simply applying to ordinary life a few of those precepts of observation and ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... door: a frosty rime Is branching over it, and drifts are deep Against the wall. He knocks, and there is time,— (For none doth open),—time to list the sweep And whistle of the wind along the mere Through beds of stiffened reeds and rushes sere. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... contestant. By one of those wicked dispensations tripping up our early march, the secretary of the navy was selected in Gideon Welles, an estimable gentleman in person, but wofully unsuited to the berth, if from age alone. Patriarchal in appearance, with a long face and longer beard, white and sere, it became proverbial without appearing much of a far-fetched joke that he was the naval constructor to Noah of Ark-aic fame. Unfortunately his "set" were antiques as well. Yet Lincoln clung to him—or he clung to the President like the Old Man of the Sea—under which ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... time is not ripe for larger knowledge. Nature and the Divinity that guides her must protect their new evolving creatures. A too sudden revelation and they might perish from sheer wonder.... Yes, truth must come softened, as a dream, to the man child's brain. Its naked light would sere and blind him forever.... But to me it has been given to see—to hear—and keep sane in the light. Oh, from what planet is the call? From what one of the hundred million spheres? How many centuries has it been sent outward to the deaf, the dumb, ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... knows but one rival—Fear; Who follows ever on his footsteps, sent By jealous Fate who calls great joy a crime. While in far ways 'mong leaves just turning sere, With gaze serene and placid, walks Content. No heart ere held these two ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as the day dawns, my Rose, I will go and look for herbs. I marked some sorrel on the hill yester e'en, albeit something dry and sere." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... sure, are the brown stems of the pasture goldenrod standing stiffly as if to state with grim definiteness that all rainbow hopes are folly and there will be no more blossoming for them. Their leaves are dun and sere where they have not already fallen and their tops that in early September were such soft cumulus clouds of golden yellow are but scrawny clots of brown, draggled by the tears in which the sudden sun has drowned the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... and the windy sycamore and hastened across the sere grass. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose, no matter who spoke, his father would give, forever, no other sign than that oft seen and ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... The leaves are sere, The woods are drear, The breeze that erst so merrily did play, Naught giveth save a melancholy lay; Yet life's great lessons do not fail E'en ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... their tune Rhymed with the bean-flower scent in June. One unforgotten day at Rye They sang a love-song in July; In August, hard by Lewes town, They sang of joy 'twixt sky and down; And in September's golden spell We heard them singing on Scaw Fell. October's leaves were brown and sere, But skylarks sang by Teston Weir; And in November, at Mount's Bay, They ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... so as in former times "reduced gentlemen" took to keeping school or posting books. In former times, men took to politics to give zest to a life already replete with pecuniary indulgences, as those in the "sere and yellow leaf" are wont to take to religion as a solacing comfort against things that are past, and pave the way to a very desirable futurity. But now, politicians are of no peculiar class or condition of citizens; ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... loosed and rioted through the lonely recesses of the craggy ravines and the valley with a wild and eerie blare; the leaves, rustling shrilly, all sere now, so long the weather had held dry, fled in myriads before the gusts. Soon they lay on the ground in dense masses, and in the denudation of the trees the brilliant tints of the little coat, swinging so high in the blast, caught ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... bonds. Indeed, we sedulously conceal them from every eye; we cover up the marks upon our scarred hearts with such jealous care, that none, not even our bosom friends, can ever see them. They hold us where the sweet herbage of life has become dry and sere, where no shelter offers us a grateful retreat. Vanitas can bear away with him his "lengthening chain" to his leafy groves; but Scripsit is confined to the torrid regions of his scanty garret. In vain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... it is, where that fair goddess strays; Then follow, till around thee all be sere. Lose not a vision of her passing face; Nor miss the sound of her soft robes, that here Sweep over the wet ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... ferns in dry places are known as "resurrection" ferns, reviving after their leaves have turned sere and brown. A touch of rain, and lo! they are green ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... so much as if he had used it in less quantity. His eye is jaded and satiated, and the blue and red have life in them no more. He tries to paint them bluer and redder, in vain: all the blue has become grey, and gets greyer the more he adds to it; all his crimson has become brown, and gets more sere and autumnal the more he deepens it. But the great painter is sternly temperate in his work; he loves the vivid color with all his heart; but for a long time he does not allow himself anything like it, nothing but sober browns and dull greys, and colors that have no conceivable ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... infliction of too many "merry cross-counters," and we cannot afford to go about with black eyes, except as an occasional indulgence. Then it is that single-stick comes in. Boxing is the game of youth, and fencing with foils, we have been assured, improves as men fall into the sere and yellow leaf. Single-stick, then, may be looked upon as a gentle exercise, suitable for ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... a stranger magic than this in my Spanish estates. The lawny slopes on which, when a child, I played, in my father's old country place, which was sold when he failed, are all there, and not a flower faded, nor a blade of grass sere. The green leaves have not fallen from the spring woods of half a century ago, and a gorgeous autumn has blazed undimmed for fifty years, among ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... in prospect of a long siege, scanty. But the worst of all, indeed the only weak and therefore miserable fact, was, that the spirit, I do not mean the courage, of the castle was gone; its enthusiasm had grown sere; its inhabitants no longer loved the king as they had loved him, and even stern-faced general Duty cannot bring up his men to a hand-to-hand conflict with the same ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... nor I will not hold me still. My tongue, though not my heart, shall haue his will. He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapelesse euery where: Vicious, vngentle, foolish, blunt, vnkinde, Stigmaticall in making ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Old Bald up came the sun, bannered and glorious; the distant ranges glowed in his splendours; the sere fields about the place were all gilded. The small-paned eastern window of the sick-room let in a flood of morning light. Gone was the bird choir that used to welcome his earliest rays, swept south by the great tide of migration. Those that remained, snowbird, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the grey base of the mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber; the wood, dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun; the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white. No feature in the scene was ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte |
